Inside Job

Our milestone episode number 50 is full of excitement! First, we announce the launch of the Inside Hive. The Hive is an extension of the podcast – we are creating a community for people who want to experience coaching, access exclusive content, and engage with us (and with each other) to better improve the way we all experience the intersection of work and life. More details will be forthcoming! T...

Who hasn't put something off? It's so easy to be frustrated by the things that we find ourselves procrastinating.  We usually start by blaming ourselves or our organizations for overstuffing our calendars.  (We acknowledge that this can be a reality for many of us). Or we get on our own case for being too lazy to get things done. As always, we offer that finding ourselves in patterns of procrastin...

How much is enough?  Is ambition always about more, bigger and higher? Ambition is a concept most of us have been trained to understand in a very particular way, and many of us design our lives in search of a career that meets our narrow understanding of the word.  Many of the organizations carry that same limited view of what ambition can look like, so the messages are reinforced over and over ag...

Any chance you're feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work you're trying to get done in a day?  Routinely finding yourself working 14-hour days with no end in sight? Skipping meals, delaying sleep because there's simply too much to do? We hear you.  Nayla and Eric start by saying: pause. The panic cycle of overwhelm will only grow and grow if we don't step away from the real and perceived churn t...

In a prior episode, Eric and Nayla dove into the distinctions between our professional identities, brands and reputation, acknowledging we all have all three! This week, we talk about what happens when we learn that the professional reputation we have isn't totally aligned with what we want it to be.  We might learn this through a 360 review, from a feedback-oriented manager, or from a passing com...

This week, Eric and Nayla enter the arena to tackle a topic that comes up nearly every week – our clients' concerns about their professional reputation. While the conversation is free form (and likely to take a few episodes to reconcile), we start by distinguishing between three terms:  our identity (how we see and understand ourselves), our professional brand (what we choose to show the world) an...

In this episode we talk about FOMO one MO time! In a previous episode on the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) we talked more about the "Fear Of" than the "Missing Out". Yet sometimes we do actually miss out – when we make choices we have to deal with trade-offs and sacrifices. Saying "yes" to one thing does lead to "no" for other things. So how do we deal with the aftermath -- the feelings of remorse an...

In this episode we tackle the question, "What do I do with the sense I have that I was promised a specific outcome at work as a result of a certain amount of time and energy on my behalf?" In what will likely be disorienting to many workers, neither of us believe that companies can make promises. Which means that addressing the question at hand requires a meta-analysis of not only each individual...

"Comparison is the thief of joy." In this episode we tackle a topic suggested by one of our listeners – how to handle professional FOMO (the Fear Of Missing Out). FOMO arises when we look around at our colleagues, friends, and even our families and see that they have things that we want. They may be getting promoted faster, paid more, recognized more publicly, or taking on assignments we desire. F...

"How should I start thinking about what I want from the coming year?" We have been getting this question a lot lately, as we do around this time every year. In this episode we offer our thoughts on the principles we use to guide our clients forward in their thinking and planning. The principles we offer are: Notice what your energy is calling you to do, and go after the things that really matter....

As the year comes to a close, we're taking a deliberate moment to declare victory and celebrate the wins of 2020.  Yes, the year has been difficult, "unprecedented" and full of hardship, and yet, we know that each of us can find at least one thing to celebrate, no matter how small. It's so easy to overlook, minimize or simply forget the wins we create.   Most of us lack good habits around celebrat...

Call it the internal saboteur, the gremlins, the inner critic, or as the great Anne Lamott calls it – KFKD, all of us have heard the internal voice of doubt, fear and discouragement that stops us from the pursuit of the thing we want.  This voice keeps us small and still, and often tricks us because it proports to tell us the truth and keep us safe. As always, we start with the inside job of notic...

If we're human, we're going to have the experience of things not going as we'd planned.  We did the preparation, we put in the effort, practiced and still… disappointment. Eric and Nayla share their own disappointments in an unproductive day of recording this very podcast, and how they noticed the spiral of normal reactions immediately afterwards. A natural instinct might be to catastrophize and p...

Most of our clients come to us asking: Can you help me figure out what I want? Our position: we can help YOU explore and express what you want – the answer to that question resides in you. Yet, we have a ton of empathy for all the reasons this question is so common:  we have all internalized messages about what we can or can't have because of the other commitments in our lives, have ideas of what...

What's really going to change on January 1, 2021?  The hype around the fresh start of a new year can have the side effect of letting us wait to take action until the calendar turns over – we think there's a better way. If you're looking for a better outcome in any domain in your life, don't wait for an outside marker of a new start (new year, birthday, new semester). We suggest you start with smal...

In this episode, we take on the expert advice around time management and the sacredness of daily routines. Admittedly, this is an area where we are drowning in knowledge but short on wisdom. We know that this time of year store aisles are filled with yearly planners, organizers, habit trackers, and the like. For those of us feeling a little disorganized and overwhelmed it can be tempting to believ...

How many of us have been told to "tone it down" at work? How many of us have bought into the old cliché that, "the consummate professional is cool, measured, calm, and reserved." We call B.S. At the Inside Job Podcast we believe that emotions are important signals and that we can be trusted to learn to use them well.  Emotions can lead individuals, and their organizations, to be more human and mor...

Have you received the gift of feedback?  Eric and Nayla are big believers in the power of feedback to help us understand how we're perceived by others, what we're doing well, and what we can do differently at work.  This week, in line with our November theme,  we're exploring how we get better at trusting ourselves to make sense of feedback that comes our way. First, we offer that we must trust ou...

November's podcast theme is how we learn to trust ourselves more than the "experts". In this week's episode we introduce the topic of "expert" advice and talk about why we are so drawn to their voices – often unreasonably so. We talk about why we listen to what they have to say, and why it's hard to make sense of all of the external voices. Nayla asks us to remember that it is the full time job of...

Welcome to the collective exhaustion.   The biggest cliché of our time is how hard 2020 has been. And yet, that cliché turns out to be true. How many times have we said: all things considered, we're fine!!  This week, Nayla and Eric are done pretending it's all fine. Sometimes, we just need to vent. Let it out.  (We sure do, for nearly ten minutes). Then, we start to explore some ideas to move our...

We cover three things we think of truths when it comes to workplace relationships in pain: Some workplace conflict is inevitable Sometimes we work with people who act like jerks Sometimes we act like jerks The workplace is full of decisions, tradeoffs, pressures and high stakes, and many of these are associated with strong emotions, and sometimes, conflict. When conflict happens, many of us feel h...

We can agree that having friends at work helps us stay engaged, productive and satisfied with what we do all day.  It's so important that the most commonly used employee engagement survey asks respondents to weigh in on having a best friend at work.  We discover new opportunities, get valuable – often unfiltered feedback – and grow because of our true connections on the job. Friendships at work bu...

In this episode we talk about the concept of a Personal Board of Directors (or a personal committee) –  the group of influential teachers, managers, friends and colleagues (even heroes) who offer us a new way of exploring, managing and shaping the decisions we make as leaders and humans.  We also offer the ideas that our Boards are comprised of people we know, and also people we've never met, as w...

In this episode – the second of two parts on the topic of lies humans tell ourselves – both Eric and Nayla share a lie/story that frequently show up in our clients. Eric talks about the lessons from a client who believes he is being unfairly passed over for promotion. We explore the myth that great work will be rewarded simply because it's so good (as we define it) and the roles that both performa...

Some of the hardest obstacles we have to overcome as leaders of ourselves are the lies that we tell ourselves. These lies are deeply woven into our belief systems, serve as both detractors and motivators, and are often the cause of many of our blind spots. The lies we tell ourselves are typically born when we are young, and feature prominently in our origin stories. To understand these lies requir...