Wise Wednesdays

What’s your 5-year plan? That’s a question I’m glad not to hear much these days. As I sit in a sense of something brewing without any clear direction, I remember how it felt 5 years ago or perhaps 7 when I had no idea what I was supposed to do next in my career. The big vision I had worked towards seemed to be coming to a close. It’s 5 years since I took a career leap and started again more or less from scratch (although it really was a continuation of a desire to help but in a different form). It’s the longest I’ve been in the same “job” working day-to-day on the same thing, within the same “job description”, and in the same location. But if you’d asked me 7 years ago what my 5-year plan was, it would have been completely different! Influencing global health policy and working in an organisation, probably. I was on that track for 20 years. That’s what happens at junctures. It’s an inflection point in the graph of your career. It’s not linear. So you can’t just extrapolate from your pa...

“I don’t feel like a leader.” Often when people say this to me, I ask them a few questions to explore the feeling.   It often turns out that: 1) They think they need an official title or a team to be a ‘leader’ 2) They equate leadership with a sort of authoritarian or forceful model that they don’t see themselves in or perhaps even dislike… 3) They underestimate the impact of their presence in influencing outcomes In effect, they’re measuring themselves against a particular form of leadership. But why limit yourself to a single form of leadership? Many years ago while studying medical anthropology, I was struck by the idea of culture-bound syndromes. They’re illnesses that are specific to a particular society. For example, you may have heard the expression ‘running Amok’ which comes from Malaysia, for someone who’s suffering from loss or shame; or being struck by the ‘Evil Eye’ in the Mediterranean. My favourite is ‘man flu’ in the UK although not officially a syndrome… What ...