My 50th year in seven days: part 5

The funny thing was that although the message to move on was loud and clear and I was hearing it at last, it didn't say what to move on to!  How was I supposed to restart my life at almost 50?  I was a highly skilled senior project manager and programme director with many years of experience working in the public sector designing, developing and coordinating the delivery of multi £million complex projects.  How did I translate this into what I needed to do next? 

 After a bit of soul-searching I decided that I wanted to be my own boss.  I'd had enough of the politicians and the re organisations.  If I was my own boss, I could choose when, where and how I wish to work.  Great!  What was I going to boss myself about with?

I decided to go and find out about business models and business strategies and how to develop the thing I knew I love doing – helping others.  The thing I had loved most about my job was the deep connection, the one on one communication you could establish with another person through mentoring and coaching. 

As a senior manager my work was getting others to operate at their best so that the projects we worked on would achieve their targets.  This meant I was constantly coaching, mentoring and supporting others and I loved it. I discovered halfway through my career that the key to getting things done was to treat people like they matter.  Really matter - in other words treat the like you believe the best of them and trust that given the right information, skills and tools, they would be more than happy to do their best. 

In addition to my management experience, I was already an NLP Practitioner, an interfaith minister and spiritual counsellor, so I also decided to further augment my people skills by retraining as a personal development coach.

Now I had two pieces of the puzzle:  A desire to be independent and a desire to help other people achieve their best.  But how was this going to make a difference? In addition the other question that needed answering and that was becoming more important was: how was it going to make me any money at all, let alone replace my previous salary?

To be continued...

Read the penultimate part of my journey here tomorrow.

My 50th year in seven days: part 4

My frustration at constantly being denied the time to make a bigger impact was growing. As I looked back over my career I realise that I could have moved-on on a number of occasions.  Instead I had opted for promotion within the organisation as a way to satisfy my frustration. 

Perhaps subconsciously I substituted making a personal difference in my own life for making a big difference in the world. The money was good and I could provide my family with a comfortable lifestyle so it was a distraction that was easy to justify.  However there was a hunger, something was missing.  If all I wanted was security, I would have chosen a very different career path.  The fact that I had remained in local government for so long was testament to my beliefs that helping others is key to which I am.  As the years rolled by it was clear that my rising up the career ladder was not the fulfilment I sought.

I wanted to make it bigger difference and throwing the baby out with the bathwater every two years was not the way to do it. Throughout my career this happened several times.  Each time I had to pick up the pieces of my career and rebuild in a new area.  I started as a town planner, I moved to economic development, project management then to regeneration and finally to re-housing.  

When I found it happening again to my highly successful re-housing process that had been recognised nationally as being able to deliver results, I was mortified.  The program was too expensive to be replicated and new people and new systems were required.  This was my hurricane.  The universe finally had my attention.  This is not the work you are meant to do. This isn't the difference you are here to make move on.  So I moved on.

"Tune in" tomorrow for part 5

My 50th year in seven days: part 3

Throughout my career in local government, apart from the politics another thing that caused periodic anxiety was constantly being re organised. One result of a fast moving political environment is that those in charge quickly become impatient for results.   The thought process appears to be: if the results/improvements are not instant then there must be something wrong and therefore it needs fixing.   This invariably meant that we needed a team of consultants to tell us how we could do it better. The net result was I was never more than 24 months away from being reorganised and having to restart in a whole new area.   

I moved from planning to economic development to project management to regeneration.  I'm not complaining it was great experience and contributed to my very wide and varied portfolio of skills.  However every step was like giving birth.  I constantly had to fight for recognition and restart anew.

When you love something, it is hard to let it go.  I loved working in the public sector, being able to help individuals, however small the impact.  I thought this was how I was supposed to be making a difference.  However the universe had other ideas.   

You know how when you refuse to pay attention to the gentle rain drops smashing against your window of life that universe sends you a shower; and if you still don't listen it turns into torrential rain; and if you still aren't listening, suddenly hurricane Mary Ann, or Kevin (apparently they now alternate the names between men and women because calling all  hurricanes after women was deemed to be sexist) comes along and blows your home and community away from under you so you sit up and take note.  You've been there?  Yes or yes!  Well throughout my working career, I think the universe was sending me hints.  This is not your purpose move on.  

The next instalment in my story continues here tomorrow.

My 50th year in seven days: part 2

The story so far...I was working in the public sector and starting to question whether the work I was doing was making any difference and if this was what I was meant to be doing with my life... and now for the next instalment:

Being constantly unappreciated is possibly the biggest issue with working in the public sector. You are unappreciated big-time, both by your political masters and the people you serve. Near enough everything you do is viewed through the spectacles of discontentment. If what you do can be clearly identified by the stakeholders (jargon in the public sector meaning those interested enough in what you are doing to complain about it) as meeting a need, then there is never enough provision to satisfy the demand.

On the other hand if what you are doing meets the needs of someone other than the vocal minority, then you are wasting public money. Worst still, if you do manage to get it right the politicians take all the credit, however if anything goes wrong is always your fault, whether it's your fault or not it's your fault. I used to say to my team; the sooner you accept that it will always be our fault the faster you can move on and get on with doing the job we are here to do.

The final project I worked on involved emptying a large inner city housing estate consisting of over 1500 homes. Over the years approximately half of the residents had moved out and the remaining 600+ families were the most vulnerable and excluded members of the community. My job was to create a system to move these people without resulting in any major reputational damage to my employers. Two previous large-scale estate re-housing programs had ended in high-profile tragedies; the senseless murder of a young boy and a woman being shot dead at a christening party. Naturally my employers were desperate for this not to be repeated.

The scheme I designed and implemented put the people at the core because it's the people that matter. If you take care of the people, ensure that their needs and issues are being met, everything else follows. The scheme was highly successful. We moved over 600 families within two years, something previously unheard of in re-housing and we only had to use our repossession powers a handful of times, i.e. force people to move using legal powers.

It worked, putting people at the heart of the issue worked. The residents were happy, my staff were happy and the politicians – they have moved on. They wanted bigger, flashier, sound bites and the election was coming. Suddenly everything was our fault again. Nothing bad has happened nothing had gone wrong, it's just that we didn't fit the profile anymore. We weren’t sexy enough.

To be continued tomorrow

My 50th year in seven days: part 1

Seven days to go to my 50th birthday.  This time next week I will be 50 and  I'm not a millionaire yet.  Well not in monetary terms, so if that was one of my life goals by 50, unless I win the lottery, it looks like I will have to re-profile this target.  To be honest, aspiring to be a millionaire wasn't something I ever gave any serious thought to until I left the public sector.  Whatever goals I did have, I  re-evaluated when I decided to change my income strategy from employee to entrepreneur at age 49.  

Over the last 43 days, I've attempted to give you an insight into who I am, what I think and my life. This morning I decided to check my Twitter analytics to see how many people are actually reading my blog.  I suspected that the number was going to be low as I've only had four comments in all this time.   

However, I kidded myself into believing that I had readers and not comment leavers.  The cold harsh reality is that in total only eight people have clicked the links to my blog page in the last 43 days.  Crushing I know.  

I feel like an astronaut sucked into a wormhole and marooned light years away from Earth on a distant planet  who is writing their memoirs.  Each day making an entry knowing that they will never be read but still hoping that one day a ship containing humans will venture this far out into space and stumble across them.  (Sob sob the futility is soul destroying ...) Anyway I've decided to use my final seven days in my challenge to tell the remainder of my story.  Not the birth to present-day story, but the story that has made the 50th year of my life the most pivotal year to date.

So in the best deep voice of the guy who does the trailers for blockbuster movies...

"It was a time of change, a time to chuck out everything that had gone before ...” Not really but you get the picture.

My story in seven parts – enjoy:

Part 1

I worked in local government for all of my working life since graduating university (this excludes holiday jobs and a short foray into banking before deciding to further my education and get a degree).

There's a lot said about the public sector, and much of it bad; however there are many people working in the public sector who all want to contribute, to give something back to help, that forego the opportunity to work in the private sector (where they would earn considerably more money) just so they can help.

Despite a number of different job titles, my work focused on regeneration, changing places, trying to restart communities, trying to make a difference.   

We were about improvement.  It's laughable that currently so much is being said about working directly with people when 13 years ago we developed what we called a community advocacy program to do just that.  It cost £2 million of public money and put an army of people into the community as well as training community members to be peer advocates. 

Their task: to work with people to remove the barriers that prevented them living a full productive life and making their contribution to the community.  It was based on the premise that it is difficult, if  not impossible to sort your life out if you are worried about other things that aren't right in your world like: your children getting into trouble at school for bad behaviour or your partner hasn't worked in years and so they are either drunk and abusing you or worrying  you so much that you can't even think.

 

Our programs were designed to make a difference and to be quite honest they would have.  However it takes time to rebuild broken lives and the people in power wanted election timetabled results, so they scrapped it and moved on to funding a new and better scheme which they were able to promote just in time for the voters to think they had created new hope and new solutions.  

Year after year, project after project the pattern was repeated, I was getting more and more frustrated.  My staff were getting more and more frustrated, I was putting in long hours and I could not see the results of my efforts.  Many times I thought there must be a better way to have more of a lasting impact than this and being constantly unappreciated. 

To be continued tomorrow 

Take pity on me and leave a comment please...

8 days to go: doing it yourself

Day 42: today is definitely day 42 because I spent about an hour checking and re labelling my posts with the correct days.  Somewhere between day 8 and day 34 I got lost (several times), which was a shame because I missed having a big fanfare for day 40.  I was going to blog about how proud I was that I had stuck to my commitment and posted every single day without fail for the last 40 days.  However as I initially thought yesterday was day 39 and it turns out that today is day 42; I guess I missed my chance.  Instead I can start the countdown: today there are eight days to go to my 50th birthday.  

I looked up what percentage of the world’s population has a life expectancy less than 50 years.  Although I couldn't find a figure, I did find a list of countries where life expectancy is under 50.

No prizes for identifying the obvious links; poverty, ex-colonial nations, previous or current war zones and areas with high instances of HIV infection.  So whilst many may feel that the loss of their youth is a cause for lament, I truly believe that growing old is a real privilege; which is the reason why I am having a party.

Despite the fact that my party is only eight days away, I have only just began to mobilise myself with regards to sorting out my party arrangements.  Happily the most important thing is done. I have decided on the design for my birthday cake.  My birthday cake has to be gluten-free and dairy free as I don't eat wheat and a lot of my family are lactose intolerant.   Google provided me with a list of baker's specialising in supplying cakes for people with allergies.  Do you know you can have a wheat free, dairy free, egg free and sugar free cake?  What I'm curious to know is how it can still be classified as a cake given that it doesn't contain any of the basic cake ingredients.  I suspect it's just a cardboard cut out of a cake with those dried “free from everything” crackers that taste of nothing, inside.  Anyway, niche marketing may offer you the ability to have exactly what you want, but it comes at a premium.  The quote for my cake was £600!  Yes £600!  No I didn’t request a 20 tier cake rich in fruits, nuts, alcohol and other expensive to source ingredients.  Actually my spec is for a Victorian sponge, 14 in.², with a smaller, 7 in.  X 9 in. cake on top of it.  Admittedly, it was a bespoke design, but £600… I don't think so!

My solution is to do what I always do when I think "I can do that myself at a fraction of the cost"; so I am baking my own cake.  You have to wait to see the results but I promise I will post the pictures on my blog along with others of me and my guests enjoying ourselves at the party. (And the one of me holding a spider in a cup – I’ve not forgotten the spider).

My tendency to do everything myself because I think it's too expensive is both a blessing and a curse.  It's a blessing because it has resulted in me becoming a highly efficient problem solver who is nearly always able to find an alternative way of doing something.  On the other hand it's a curse because, whilst I can normally turn my hand to anything, it does take time and if you recall, I'm the world's busiest person.  Therefore, adding more things to my already overloaded schedule because I don't think paying for it is value for money can be a problem in itself. 

I'm not sure if it's because I mean, thrifty or simply projecting the “strapped for cash” mentality that I internalised during my childhood.  Like many children of first-generation immigrant families from the ex-British colonies; I grew up poor.  This didn't mean we were lacking anything necessary for a relatively comfortable life.  On the contrary, I remember always feeling that I had what I needed.  It did mean however, that our parents were skilled at making the money stretch and substituting low-cost versions of expensive item or making them in order that we didn’t go without.

My mother could sew; therefore she made most of my clothes.  She had, and still has, an amazing talent of being able to copy any item of clothing and so I was never short of the latest high fashion garments.  Strangely enough, “back- in- the- day”, mass-produce close from Hong Kong were rated more highly than personalised handmade clothes.  Consequently my couture wardrobe did not improve my “cool” rating at school.

It is difficult to shake the patterns of a lifetime, however, I recognise that this belief, i.e. I can do it better myself, or save money is sometimes a false economy.  The reason I did not commission a birthday cake for £600 is because I can't afford the tariff, its way outside my budget.  Perhaps if I had that sort of money to spend on a cake, I wouldn’t give it a second thought.  I could have opted for a cheaper more affordable cake; however it wouldn't have been the cake I wanted.  Luckily for me, in this instance I found a way to have my cake and eat it (please excuse the pun).   Total cost of cake: £50.  By the way I can bake in my sleep, some making it should be a piece of cake (sorry couldn’t resist that one).

It's important to know whether it is more advantageous for you to do something yourself or pay out for somebody else to do it on your behalf, especially if like me you work for yourself. Time is money and so if I’m not crystal clear about what the true costs to me are, I could be losing more than I gain through missed opportunities to earn money. Here is my decision strategy:

1.  In absolute terms, can I afford it?  I.e. do I have the money? 

2.  If I have the money what is the opportunity cost of spending it in this way, i.e. what if anything do I have to forego if I spend my money on this?

3.  How much time will it take me?

4.  What is the opportunity cost of me spending my time this way?  I.e. what will not get done, and what is the impact?

5.  If I do it, can I do it in a fast and efficient way and get the results I want?

6.  Can I source the same thing or something similar at the price I can afford?

My thinking process starts with a straight forward yes or no:  If I can afford it and I think its value for money I will pay for someone to do it. If I can afford it and/or I’m not immediately convinced I am getting value for money, I decide based on the balance of benefits. The diagram illustrates my thinking.

How do you decide whether or not to pay someone else to do something you could do yourself? Would you have paid £600 for your birthday cake? I am keen to read your thought so please leave a comment.