Working from home

There are probably some practical steps you could take to separate [work and life], where maybe you go to a different physical location of, for example, these days, your house, to do your work. And you spend the rest of your life outside of work, in different rooms, with your family or your friends. That’s one step you could take. Or deciding which hours of your day you're going to dedicate to work or not.

I do feel like you can take those kinds of steps. Most of it probably has more to do with mindset and your willingness to shut off and your willingness to be fully present when you are with somebody personally, or to be fully present when you are working.

In the last two years, we've changed the working dynamic so much that what was embarrassing two years ago, like my son coming onto a conference call two years ago, I'd have been like, "Very sorry," and shooing him out the room. And now I'm just like, "Yep, my daughter's here because my taco's gone pop. Here she is. She's on my lap. And my daughter and I are now going to give you a presentation on the next three months," because I have to do this. I'm being honest. I'm like, "It's either this or nothing." So I'd rather give them the duo, that is my daughter and I giving a quarterly update, than not doing that update to my team. So yeah, definitely honesty. I’m not afraid to just show them who you are at home as such, and who you are, not have a facade.

The pandemic was a unique opportunity for me, because I'd always fancied working remotely, not the fact that I was working remotely, but challenging my leadership skills. And I'd done face to face management for 15 years prior, I thought, how could I challenge myself even more? How could I intensify? Get the moment, brighten the challenge. And I thought, "Well, I could work remotely." But I'd never had the courage to do that. And the pandemic forced the situation onto us, all of us, which I thought, "If I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it." And so I applied for a remote-only role and became the manager of a large software team. And since then I've been enjoying working remotely and really getting that bright feeling.

It just kept going bad to worse in my first job. And my reviews were getting bad to worse as well. And when COVID hit as well, oh my God, it was the boiling point, I think, because I was working from home and I was the most distracted person in the world. That's the thing, my mentality was, I need supervision in order for myself to be focused.

You need to really understand your values. You need to start working from you. Why do you want this? Why do you want to work for a company as such, not a specific company? Okay, let's say to earn money, but why do you need money? Oh, to make my family safe. And so, these days, I realised that I'm working to support my family and also live a life, have time for studies and so on, which means that ideally, my job should be remote.