Work Life by Design

Preparing ourselves for the future of work can be a daunting task. Faced with the rapid transformation of technology, the adoption of automation and AI into our workplaces and let's not forget to throw in there a dose of global pandemic, who could blame you for thinking that the outlook was challenging. But as you'll hear from today's guest, it is also filled with possibility. Andrea Clarke, is an...

"Being responsible for our own lives... our behaviour is a function of our decisions, not our conditions". – Steven Covey Often, we resign ourselves to the fact that we live in a world where so much is out of our control like global pandemics and external circumstances and the limitations they place on our actions. The world can begin to feel heavy. However, when we bring our attention back to foc...

Talking about Money is often a taboo subject, however if we want to be empowered to take control of our own financial literacy it's a subject that we really need to get comfortable with. Today's Guest Mel Browne an ex-accountant, ex-financial advisor & ex-working till she drops. These days she's a best-selling author, financial educator, business strategist & mentor and entrepreneur who is particu...

What does your dream life look like? This season is all about designing a work life you love and big part of that is making sure it fits with the life that you want to live. To do this you first need to define your own version of success, not what others or society consider to be a successful life. This is a trap we fall into often, and it's important to take a step back and re-evaluate as life an...

Creating a work life that you love doesn't mean that you need to head out and set up your own business. Often we hear of people who have climbed the corporate ladder, only to hit burn out and decide that the only way forward is to take their skills and go it on their own. Well today's guest is here to share with us, how if being an entrepreneur is not the path that you desire, there is another way...

One of the foundations to designing a life and career that you love is understanding your values. That means understanding your own sense of right and wrong, good and bad, what's important and what is not important to YOU, not what you've been intrinsically taught, or to those around you. Values serve as the guide rails to our lives. They keep us moving forward in the right direction, stop us from...

One of the things that I have noticed as I have grown is that the experiences that we have are not unique to us and that if we look around often many of us are challenged by the paths that our lives have taken. While we may not be openly and outwardly shouting it from the roof tops or even whispering it to our closest of friends, there is for many of us a period of breakdown which leads to break t...

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how" Friedrich Nietzsche Ask yourself this; What is it that you hope to achieve while you're here on this earth? And what is the impact that you want to make? Why do you do what you do? Why is it important? What is the impact that that is going to have on the people around you? Knowing why you do what you do is just as important, if not more important...

In this week's chat, I am incredibly excited to bring you our guest; the beautiful Samantha Wills. For those of you who are not familiar with Samantha, she is the creative powerhouse behind the Samantha Wills jewellery brand. Starting this business in 2004, as a fresh face 21-year-old from her dining room table, she grew it into a successful global business. She lived in New York for 10 years, had...

I'll let you in on a little secret. Balance is BS. There is no work/life balance. You can't have a work persona and a life persona. It's all about integration . In today's episode, I'm going to be discussing The Balance Wheel – the most useful tool I've found in examining and evaluating all the different segments of our lives and identifying where our time and energy needs to be spent. I'll go thr...

One person that I believe optimises the idea of creating a work life they love is Tina Tower. Tina is a self-confessed professional development junkie and lover of work, but has also learned the hard way that continuing to push through is not always the best way. Tina has lived a vast and varied life to date, starting her first business at 20, she went on to found and grow her tutoring business in...

You're probably thinking, 'Mel, don't be ridiculous, I know who I am'. But do you really, truly know who you are? How you work, what makes you tick? What values you stand for or stand against? Could you tell me these things if I asked you? And the reason I asked this question is because until we truly know who we are, I believe that we are just really reacting to the expectations and requests of o...

Do you trust your gut instinct? Maybe you only trust it in certain aspects of your life like work or relationships? Sometimes our gut feeling is our best indicator of which direction to take, but learning to tune in to it can be a journey. Today I am joined by Tory Archbold the Founder and Director of Powerful Steps.  Prior to 2019 Tory was running the Global PR agency Torstar, launching big brand...

Welcome to Season 3!   Work life by Design has just celebrated its 1st birthday so a BIG thank you for tuning in and listening in; I appreciate the support and love.   This season I want to dive deep into what this podcast says on the tin; designing a work life that you truly LOVE.   Today, I'm going to tell you a bit about my story; how I ended up here, including the parts where I blew up my life...

Is the office dead? Does productivity come at the expense of wellbeing? How do you manage Zoom fatigue? How do you maintain connection in a remote workplace?! It's been a huge season of Work Life By Design as we've explored all the big questions around what the future of work looks like after the impact of COVID. We've had some incredible guests from a wide range of backgrounds and industries all...

It may be beautiful but it just doesn't work.... There many reasons why your workplace doesn't work; layout, lack of understanding, doing what you've always done. Often clients underestimate the impact of interrogating their brief. It's common for them to approach a designer or a builder with a wish list, layout and design in mind and the builder complies. But there is so much more to it. This wee...

Take a moment and think back to the beginning of 2020.  How has your interaction and use of technology changed?     I would hazard a guess that at the start of 2020, you rarely worked from home, you may have done the occasional Zoom call [if you even knew what zoom was] and there was no way you would have entertained presenting to a client on it.  All your team meetings were done in person.   Life...

More productivity = less innovation? Communication with our immediate teams has increased with the move to remote working styles, however interactions outside our team or with distant networks has significantly diminished. We've been able to increase our productivity, but our hybrid communication structures, water cooler conversations, impromptu brainstorming sessions and incidental interactions h...

The ability to transition from one event to another has a significant impact on how we show up in those spaces. The mindset and mental state that we approach each task, activity, conversation or moment with ultimately defines how that situation turns out. As more of us are continuing to work from home or engage in a hybrid work style, the conscious awareness that we know need to bring to these mom...

Feeling overwhelmed and exhausted.  It's the big conversation at the moment.  I'm seeing it in the people I'm coaching, the people I'm connecting with and I'm hearing it from colleagues in the industry.  It seems that many of us that are feeling this way - and turns out there is a LOT of data that explains why.  Research shows we've been working longer hours during COVID, but to me, this doesn't s...

Today I'm joined by Dr Meg Hooper, Organisational Psychologist and change specialist. Meg is a  registered psychologist with a PhD in  organisational  psychology and she  brings an  academic thought process to a very similar world that I tend to work in.   Meg looks at work and our work lives from a very different angle, but with the same intentionality around what the outcome should be. Today, we...

"People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel" Maya Angelou In today's episode, I delve into the relationship between clients and designers and why a fundamental connection is essential for success. This is a topic I'm incredibly passionate about and one of our core values at COMUNiTI is "it's all about the Chemistry". Essential...

As Australians we have been relatively insulated from the impact of COVID unlike the rest of the world, so as part of this season and understand the future of work, I was keen to understand what "work life" looks like on the other side of the globe.  In today's episode I chat with Kursty Groves a workplace strategist and innovation consultant based in the UK.  Kursty helps workplace leaders reinve...

When we talk about persona profiling, we usually think of psychometric testing and other sorts of personality profiling tests. In the workplace, we generally use these in the context of recruitment and understanding a candidate's personality before we hire them to understand if they are a cultural fit for our organisation. What you may not have thought of is personality profiling is incredibly use...

Work is an incredibly important aspect to the lives of many of us and finding a workplace that enables us to thrive and to contribute forms a large part of our personal feeling of purpose and of belonging.  Rhonda Brighton-Hall is CEO of mwah. Making Work Absolutely Human, Chair of the AHRI Institute, National D&I Advisory Panel, a Patron for ASPECT (Autism Australia) and recognised as a game chan...