Episode 300 – Stories of Reimagining Success

In this week’s episode, we’re celebrating the milestone of reaching 300 episodes on the podcasts by reflecting on the inspiring stories of reimagining success from a selection of our guests: Chloe Temple, Elodie Ferchaud, Chris Ducker, Verity Baldry, and Sarah Weiler, each of whom brings a unique perspective to redefining success and finding balance.

Join us as Chloe Temple opens up about her struggle with depression and anxiety, realising that true success lies in fulfilment and living in line with one’s purpose. Elodie Ferchaud shares her transformative sabbatical leading to the launch of her company, re beauty, and finding her ikigai through remote work and travel. Chris Ducker shares his evolution from a money-focused view of success to prioritising personal freedom and work-life balance highlights the importance of hustling in seasons. Verity Baldry discusses her journey of self-discovery, from feeling unsustainable in her startup role to balancing her creative passions with her career. And Sarah Weiler introduces the concept of the carousel, a flexible approach to prioritising various interests.

We thank you, our dedicated listeners, whose support has been invaluable.

Tune in for a celebration of success reimagined, and let’s look forward to an inspiring journey together in the next 300 episodes!

00:00 Celebrating 300 episodes and introducing our guests

09:16 Chloe Temple and overcoming addiction to work

15:38 Elodie Ferchaud and prioritising family memories

23:01 Chris Ducker and the hustle season

29:35 Verity Baldry and fractional work

36:31 Sarah Weiler and the carousel concept

Stories of Reimagining Success

Anna Lundberg [00:00:00]:
So it’s a very strange thing for me to say that this is the 300th episode of the reimagining success podcast. I can still remember the days well, first of all, when I didn’t even know what a podcast was, and then secondly, when I sort of decided, committed to launching one, but of course got very caught up in the tech overwhelm and worrying about how it worked and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever pull it off. And it all felt very overwhelming.

Anna Lundberg [00:01:09]:
So really pleased that I was able to get over myself. And I launched the podcast in December 2018, and it’s been five and a half years since then, and Tada. We’re on the 300th episode now. I’m so glad I started this for selfish reasons and because I’ve been able to have kind of a channel to talk at you, unfortunately, most of the time. But I feel like I’m having a conversation with you thanks to your wonderful messages. And, you know, I’m obviously creating episodes based on questions that you’ve asked and clients have worked with and so on. And so that’s been, again, selfishly for me, a really great experience, really valuable part of my business. Of course, also selfishly, I started the interview series with people who have reimagined success for themselves.

Anna Lundberg [00:01:56]:
And that has been an incredible source of inspiration and connection for me. And I hope it has been interesting for you as well. So, of course, a massive thank you to you as a listener, whether you’re new, whether you’re a longtime binge listener follower, I so, so appreciate it. Every download, not that I, to be honest, measure, download so much, but every, every, to know every person of you who is listening to me, it’s just, it means a lot. And it’s not about the big numbers, is it? It’s really about those conversations, the dialogues, and to hopefully inspiring some shift, some change, some action. And thank you also, of course, to those of you who have come on and generously shared your insights and your time and your experience of changing what success looks and feels like to you. And of course, I have shifted the focus a little bit over the years. I’ve played around with different topics and different formats, but one thing hasn’t changed, and that is the overarching message of success being personal.

Anna Lundberg [00:03:04]:
It’s something that you can and should, must define for yourself and also really importantly, and that comes across all the time, that it can and will evolve over time, your definition of success, and that’s absolutely fine. So it’s hard to come up with an idea, I suppose, or rather, I had many ideas, but it’s hard to choose one idea for what to do to celebrate this episode. And I’ve chosen a very small selection of interviews to highlight today. And I’m really sorry if I couldn’t include yours because, of course, there are so, so many nuggets, and I’ve really enjoyed combing through them to pull these out for you today. But I’ve chosen five episodes that give you a little sampling if you’ve listened to them before, hopefully a really valuable reminder. And if you’re new again, it will give you an insight into the kind of things that you could learn if you listen to the archive, as well as, of course, the work that I do with my clients as well. If that’s of interest to you, let me see the order in which I put them in before I tell you who they all are. So, first of all, we have Chloe Temple, who found me years ago.

Anna Lundberg [00:04:09]:
I believe she found my book, leaving the corporate nine to five. We then met in a clubhouse room, believe it or not, if you remember that audio platform during COVID and we have now gotten to know each other. We’ve met in person. And that’s been just a really wonderful relationship blossoming for me. Starts off with those random online meetings, and then it becomes something more substantial. And Chloe’s background is not dissimilar to mine in terms of leaving a corporate, sort of high performance corporate job. And I found this particular clip that I’ve chosen really interesting as she describes how she basically achieved her definition of success. She got the dream job.

Anna Lundberg [00:04:47]:
She was living by the beach in Australia, for goodness sake. And yet she vulnerably shares about her burnout and about the decision to leave that behind. Also interesting. We don’t quite get into that in so much detail in this short clip, but she also shares the danger. We talk about the danger of loving your work too much to some extent, because then it becomes really difficult to get that balance, and that’s something that we all continue to work on. So that’s the first one. That’s Chloe Temple. Then I have Lodie Ferchaud, who I work together with at Proc, John Gamble, in my corporate days, again, and lod now works in a company called Boundless Life, which I have my eye on because it’s really set up to make it easier for young family to travel, to continue the adventure and, you know, world exploration and learning without having to have all the stress of the logistics and the schooling and so on.

Anna Lundberg [00:05:40]:
Right. It’s a wonderful new initiative, I think. And again, we don’t go into the detail of that business, but do cheque it out. Boundless life. In the meantime, she shares how she used to have this very external definition of success and gradually has done the hard work, the deep work, and thanks to a few external triggers, to work out what her internal definition of success is. The third one is Chris Ducker, who you may have heard of. He has coined the phrase Eupreneur. He’s got the book the Rise, the Eupreneur.

Anna Lundberg [00:06:11]:
He’s also written a book on virtual freedom, and I think in this clip he talks about that and how he timed that very fortuitously with the four hour work week as well, back in the day from Tim Ferriss, and we talk about how he had this hustle season, and I think the season is quite an interesting concept, how he chose to put in the hard work in those early days in order to achieve the massive success he’s had and to be able to live the life of balance and enjoyment and so on today. So that’s a really interesting one as well, with Chris Ducker. The fourth one is a more recent one. Verity baldry. Verity and I did some work together in her startup life a couple of years ago, and she had an interesting experience in the last few years where she pondered, perhaps retiring, which seems very odd because she’s very young, and landed on the idea of fractional work, which is a relatively new term to me as well, but a really interesting one to look into, as she calls it, a bit of a rebrand of kind of freelancing contract work, but it’s a really interesting business model, I think. And we also talk about how our ambitions and definition of success evolve over time, from when we’re in our twenties to when we have a family and so on. So that’s a really relevant piece as well. And then finally, finally, I’ve got Sarah Wyler again.

Anna Lundberg [00:07:27]:
We met in actually, in the early days of my kind of exploration outside of corporate, and we met in a cafe in London. She runs these ukulele workshops, which I’ve also always been jealous of. I play a little bit of ukulele myself. I performed at a festival party a few weeks ago, so that’s my little claim to fame. But I love ukulele, for me, just represents my fun days in Hawaii when I was single and carefree and in that sort of peak of excitement after having left my job and travelling the world and discovering, coaching and all those good things. So I have this special place in my heart for ukulele and for Sarah and the people I met along the way as well. And she finally then talks about this really interesting concept that she has invented, coined as well, of having a carousel. So I’ve talked a lot about portfolio careers.

Anna Lundberg [00:08:16]:
People talk about the slashy, squiggly careers. There’s all sorts of concepts, right? But the carousel. What I love about this is that you can have all these different projects you’re working on and the question is, what’s at the front of your carousel right now, that doesn’t define who you are. It’s not the only thing you do, but it both helps you position yourself when you talk to other people and also, you know, allows you to juggle those different projects, to lean in, to pull back as your energy, as the fun kind of grows and. And ebbs and flows and so on. So that’s Sarah at the end there. So, five episodes. We’ve got Chloe, Lod, Chris, Verity, Sarah, thanks so much to them, thanks to everyone else I’ve interviewed, thanks to those of you who’ve listened and do enjoy these clips, do go back and find the full episodes as well.

Anna Lundberg [00:08:58]:
If you’re. I’m sure you will be curious to hear more. And again, look, here’s to the next 300 episodes. Do you think we’ll make it? I’ll see you in another five and a half years for episode 600. Thanks so much. Enjoy.

Chloe Temple [00:09:16]:
My definition of success has evolved over my life, if that makes sense, and the business has been one component of that. My background, and partly why I’m so passionate about what I do now, is I experienced a decade of depression and anxiety and it was a really, really tough time. There’s years within that period that I genuinely don’t remember because they were just so painful that I think my brain has been kind to me and has tried to kind of blanket over and because it had come from that. One of the things that made me feel better. A coping mechanism, let’s say, was actually working. And I became obsessed and addicted in the same way that some people are with drugs or anything, like alcohol. I was addicted to work because it gave me some sort of level of validation or feeling that I was enough.

Chloe Temple [00:10:14]:
Yeah. So many things were reinforcing that obsession, almost, with work, work, work. And there are often some kind of misconstrued definitions of what success looks like in that context. And for me, it was around promotions and growing and the next thing, the challenge and all of that, I was constantly challenging myself to grow and develop and move on to the next challenge. And so those measures of success for me were, am I being promoted? Have I got a pay rise? Those sorts of things. And I remember when I. The day that I finally got that dream job that I described at the beginning, and I’d pitched to the. It had been a kind of six month process of pitching to the business to, to build this team that didn’t exist, and I got to create it from scratch.

Chloe Temple [00:11:17]:
And it had been a six month process until I got that. Yes. I remember coming home when it was kind of finally announced and it was all out there, and my sister and partner were celebrating with some bubbles, and I was like, that’s how we celebrate. And I remember thinking, oh, like, why do I feel so rubbish? I’ve just got my dream job, I’m living by the beach in Australia, and why do I feel like this? Like, what’s missing? And I think that was the realisation for me that success was never an external thing. It’s got to come from within, and that there is never going to be, whether or not it’s starting a business or nothing external to me that’s ever going to be enough, not sustain happiness. You might feel good for, you know, a day, a week, a year, if you’re lucky, that something has happened, but it doesn’t last. So that my realisation around, actually, the more interesting thing to find and the more interesting definition of success for me is around fulfilment. And if I’m living as long as I’m living in line of, with my purpose, which I’ve now spent lots of time finding that success.

Anna Lundberg [00:12:35]:
And how are you finding.

Chloe Temple [00:12:37]:
I don’t know what you.

Anna Lundberg [00:12:39]:
Sorry, you are lagging a little bit. I was gonna say, how are you finding living that now in your own business? Because I found, and I find this very interesting, that we’ve kind of brought it with us to some extent. I have a lot of clients we can kind of demonise the nine to five and that achievement and the promotion. So. And yet we recreate those same structures and it’s easy to get sucked into. We have to be the best selling author on Amazon, and we have to have 10,000 Instagram followers. All these things. So are you finding that a challenge? That it’s not just that, okay, now I’m going to be fulfilled and that’s it.

Anna Lundberg [00:13:09]:
But it’s actually the ongoing reinforcing, that shift in mindset and the different definition that you’ve created for yourself.

Chloe Temple [00:13:18]:
Yeah. It isn’t that you wake up one day and everything’s changed for you, that it’s an evolution. And I think that’s the best exciting thing about life, is that we get to evolve and we get to come into the people that we’re growing into. There is a difference, and we’ve talked about it before in terms of not those things. That baggage will just follow you into a different guise unless you actually deal with the thing. The repeating pattern is going to show up in a different way. And so for me, it’s just that awareness of when I go too far into do, do, do, I’m not a human doing, I’m a human being. And when I centre back to understanding, no, it’s b.

Chloe Temple [00:14:06]:
It’s like well being and put yourself, you know, calm and slow down. That’s what recenters me. So it looks very different now in that. One of my biggest challenges is that work doesn’t feel like work for me. I actually think of it as play and mission, and I love it and I enjoy it. And if anything, I struggle more with stopping because I’m enjoying it. And so I’ve got a lot of structures from. I have to build in things that support me.

Chloe Temple [00:14:44]:
To take that time off, for instance, I’m taking Gustav, which, yeah, is almost unheard of, to try and create that. And I don’t like the word balance, but to try and create that space to make sure that I’m not just in the do all the time, I get to be in the b.

Anna Lundberg [00:15:05]:
Isn’t that interesting and ironic that we love it so much and then it’s so hard. And I felt like early on, I had that almost excuse, and I see it celebrated on Instagram. You know, I love my work so much that I don’t need to take time off. And I think we’re missing a trick there because, of course, there is, however important your mission in the work, and however fulfilling and so on, there is still so, as you say, so many other aspects to you as a human being, your relationships, your interests, and so important to have that time off as well.

Elodie Ferchaud [00:15:38]:
I think many of you will remember those lovely days in the UK where you had to homeschool for like, six months of the year. I also had a tragic event in the family. And then suddenly I just paused and I was like, why am I doing all of this? Am I enjoying myself every day? Is it something that. Where I feel fulfilled? And I asked myself, like, a lot of the tough questions, and I decided that I didn’t have any of the answers, but it definitely didn’t feel right. And so I talked with my partner and yeah, I decided to take a sabbatical. That was a big thing for me because I was, like, super hard working and I didn’t want to give up and I wanted to keep on climbing that conveyor belt, but I was like, no, like, I really need to stop. I need to pause. And so I took a sabbatical.

Elodie Ferchaud [00:16:30]:
I have to say, the first day was amazing. Like, I could do so many things, and the first week was horrible. Suddenly I felt completely lost. I didn’t know what to do. But eventually, like, spending the time, I rediscovered myself and eventually went to start my own company, re beauty, which was a big passion point for me for quite a few months. And it gave me the freedom. It gave me the freedom to work remotely, which was really powerful as a mother of three kids. And as I discovered that freedom of remote working, I decided to live for a few months in Portugal.

Elodie Ferchaud [00:17:13]:
We were in London back in the days, and we just needed to see something different. And for a long time we had talked about this lifestyle of moving from one place to another every three months, which was impossible because we had three kids, so how would that be even possible? And that’s when we joined a company called boundless life. That made it, like, really easy for us to travel from one place to another. And after a few months working there, I discovered that there was just such an alignment in terms of values. I decided to pause my business and decided to join boundless life just simply because it felt absolutely right and because I wanted to try something different and I didn’t want to have any regret. So it’s like the last two, last twelve months have been absolutely crazy. So it’s a little bit difficult to answer this question, but a lot has happened. And I’m happy to say that now.

Elodie Ferchaud [00:18:13]:
Like, I do feel like I’ve found my ikigai. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this concept.

Anna Lundberg [00:18:21]:
We talk about it a lot on the podcast.

Elodie Ferchaud [00:18:22]:
Absolutely.

Anna Lundberg [00:18:23]:
But as you said, I love that. As you said, before we recorded, before we started recording that, it’s really, you found something that’s really at that magical place, right? The sweet spot between your passions, your values, the things you’re good at and so on, right? So I think that’s very powerful because interestingly, in a way, you’ve gone back to a full time job, in fact. But as you said, it’s fully remote and it’s at the intersection of all those things that you love, and it works so flexibly around your family. So I think it’s so important to realise that that success can look, can take a different shape, right? It doesn’t have to be that you’re contracting or you’re running your own business or whatever it is, it really can and should look however you want to. But I do remember you mentioned the 13 countries there, right. Because I remember you thinking differently even when I knew you, and I think you lived. In fact, I visited you guys in Japan and in Stockholm, you were in London. And I loved.

Anna Lundberg [00:19:13]:
I have a vague memory, but a strong one of you thinking about sort of the criteria for where you wanted to live. And at the time I was single, so it was. My criteria were a bit more vague, but I thought it was such a good way of looking at things because it can be so overwhelming. You can go anywhere, but you just need to think, okay, I don’t know whether jobs, work, children, whatever it is, languages, and then you can kind of start filtering. And I love that approach. I guess one question I have, and you come from that kind of luxury, beauty, background, as you said, and now you’re doing something quite different and becoming a mother of three and travelling the world and so on. How has your view of what success looks like evolved over that time compared to, as you said, when you were sort of hustling away in that office? You mentioned there, the pandemic. You mentioned a sad personal experience as well.

Anna Lundberg [00:19:59]:
How do you look at success and how has that changed over these experiences?

Elodie Ferchaud [00:20:03]:
That’s a great question. I think I was very much influenced in the past by an external vision of success, like it had been already defined. Like I had learned from a very young age that, you know, moving up the ladder was going to be the definition of success and I should work hard and I should prove myself. And by just, you know, moving from manager to director to vice president, that would be the definition of success. So very externally driven. I think what I learned over the past twelve months is to try to define what is my own definition of success. Like, what do I define as success? What does make me happy but also fulfilled and at the end of every day, feeling like I’m acting on something that makes sense for me, where I’m driving value. I think what I’m doing now enabling more families to travel around the world easily with their kids, this is what I call, this is what I call success for myself.

Elodie Ferchaud [00:21:11]:
Like, I know that I will change the lives of those families, whether they love it, whether they stay or decide not to stay with us at the end of the, at the end of the day, that’s an experience that they will talk about as a family forever. And I know as a mom that creating those memories, those like, lifelong memories with your kids is everything. And so I think that now I’ve learned over the past few months to define what is, what is important for me versus what is important in the eyes of society and what is this external definition of success. But it took me a really, really long time to accept that. It took me some time also to stop and go back to who I am and not what I am, what is my role in society. So I used to define myself a lot by, you know, I’m working in this company and I’m a mom of three kids, and I think now I do a switch. It’s just like, what do I love doing? Well, what are my passion points? What are my values? And my passion points are, you know, travelling, discovering the world, and raising my kids in a very, in a very future, forward looking way. Those are some of my big passion points.

Elodie Ferchaud [00:22:32]:
I had read this amazing book called Untamed that really talked about this moving from how you define yourself, what is your role in society? To who are you? What do you love doing? And I think that’s the first step to then redefine what success means for you, having that own personal understanding. But it does take time.

Chris Ducker [00:23:01]:
I think my definition of success has changed quite a bit over the course of the last 1516 years or so. At first, I was very money hungry, very money led. It was all about the money at the end of the day. And it wasnt necessarily about getting to a million dollars, that seven figure thing that everyone goes on about. It wasn’t about that. I knew that that would happen just as a natural conclusion of hard work in the industry that we were in, because it was a big industry, it was booming, it was growing very quickly. Going into the outsourcing world after being steeped very richly in sales and marketing, consulting, I knew we would do well if we could just keep our costs down and land a couple of decent sized clients. And we did that.

Chris Ducker [00:23:51]:
And then going into 2010, we opened the doors to virtual staff finder, which was our second business in the group, and that just went gangbusters. Like, you know, the four hour workweek had just come out and everyone was talking about lifestyle design and outsourcing and all these kind of things. So good timing. Yeah, really good timing. Some people might say lucky. Nope, it was just good timing. Plain, simple. I think you make your own luck.

Chris Ducker [00:24:16]:
I truly believe that to a certain extent, anyway. And I think that up to probably like 2013, 2014, I was just all about the money. And to be frank, by that point we were already doing multi seven figures on an annual basis. With at least 2014, we would have been 250 staff or so. And you don’t really realise, actually, this is where it started to change for me. It became. It was Christmas 2014 that year. My book, my first book, virtual Freedom, had come out earlier in the year and we have this huge company party every Christmas.

Chris Ducker [00:24:58]:
And Christmas in the Philippines is a really, really big thing. Really big. And so we had this massive party and there was like 250 people in front of me and I was on stage giving out various staff awards. And then it hit me, this is success. It’s not necessarily the money, the money’s good. But knowing that 250 families plus, plus are being fed because of something that I created, albeit a few years back, I’ve grown it. This is success. But then as things change, you know, you become maybe a little bit more self conscious, a little bit selfish to a certain degree, which is fine.

Chris Ducker [00:25:41]:
And I think because I’m at the point where I’m, you know, I’m only a year, a year and a bit or so away from being 50 years old. So now the focus of my own personal success comes into play. It’s not legacy or anything like that, but it comes down to, like, how do I want to live myself? And definition of success for me now is actually being able to do what the heck I want, whenever I want to do it. It’s really that simple. And so I’ve pulled back on a lot of commitments. I say no now nine times out of ten to doing anything, quite frankly. And I’ve got to the point where I’m really only working three days a week at this point, pretty much, and that will probably drop down to two going into next year. That, for me now is what success looks like, but it hasn’t always been like that.

Chris Ducker [00:26:31]:
You know, sometimes I often say that, you know, hustle is a season, it’s not a lifestyle. So sometimes you got to put your foot down on the gas and really hustle hard, whether it be for twelve months, 18 months, five years, whatever, it’s different for everyone, but it’s not a lifestyle. It’s not sustainable to hustle all the time. But you can go through hustle seasons and we still, as a group of companies to this day, we still go through hustle seasons. Usually for us, it’s the last quarter of the year and the second quarter of the year. It just happens to be like that for us, but it might be different for other folks. But generally, that’s the way I look at it now.

Anna Lundberg [00:27:09]:
I love that the seasons is great with putting. I always think there’s a rhythm. You kind of push, push, push, but you can’t maintain that pace all the time. So then you have to pull back. Would you say, just a question that comes to mind, that you need to have that hustle, that you had to have the single minded focus on the money first, and that has then allowed you to now be a bit more sort of lifestyle designing and go three days, two days and so on? Or do you think that we can from the beginning, design a business that, you know, we love from the very beginning? Do we have to have that hustle season first up, would you say?

Chris Ducker [00:27:40]:
Well, bear in mind, like, I’ve always loved my businesses. Like, I’ve never fallen out of love with my business. Sure, there’s been some tough times. Sure, it’s drove me nuts from time to time. You know, I burnt out before, you know, all those things. But, like, I always loved doing what I do for a quote, unquote living.

Chris Ducker [00:28:00]:
I think, however, that, so in order, in order to be exactly where I am right now in my time of life, my age and the era that I’m in currently for myself and my family, we have zero debt, we have zero mortgage, we have multiple properties. We’re very comfortable financially, et cetera, et cetera. For me to be in that position now and have that Runway for this part of my life, yes, absolutely. I needed to focus on the money earlier on. I needed a hustle earlier on, but again, it’s not sustainable now. That doesn’t mean, though, and I want to caveat that. That doesn’t mean that you can’t go into a new business with a lifestyle or a work life balance focus. It doesn’t mean you can’t do that.

Chris Ducker [00:28:48]:
You absolutely can because it’s your business and your definition of success from a monetary perspective is completely different to mine or anybody else’s. There might be some people that say I have to make half a million dollars a year, for example, but then you could have somebody else who’s in an identical position with the exact amount of experience serving the absolute exact same niche or industry and their definition of success is one hundred k a year and they’re happy with that. So it’s very subjective, you know, money and numbers in general, just very subjective. But for me personally, yeah, I felt like I needed to put that hustle in in order to create the lifestyle that we’ve got now.

Verity Baldry [00:29:35]:
I think success used to be very status oriented and money driven when I was leaving university so you know, Morgan Stanley was one of the top jobs that was a very, you know, it was the sort of mum and dad be proud of me badge. I mean I interview a lot of, of graduates and you know, junior staff now for a lot of the roles I do and they’re like start up, it’s so brilliant. And my mom and dad are delighted and I’m just like, if I’d have gone straight into a startup my dad would have had a heart attack, you know, it would have just been like the riskiest thing. It’s a bit like, you know, some, some families would never entertain the thought of their children going into the arts or you know, if anybody said I want to be, you know, a music producer or something, they’d have been encouraged to go off and do mathematic, probably. So I think, you know, the guessing, the definition of success was that status role, which was big company, lots of money. And when I let go of that it started becoming more fun. But I just knew it wasn’t that I didn’t know that it was a new thing or a different thing. And as I say, kind of working in startup wasn’t seen as the groovy thing that it is now.

Verity Baldry [00:30:44]:
You know, starry eyed about getting into startups, aren’t they? And scope and the possibility. I think it was very much seen as something that was like, well you’re never going to get a pension and there’ll never be any mat leave and you work loads of hours for no money, why would you bother? And the company may fail as well. I mean all those things are probably still true, but at least now the understanding of the flexibility, the variety, the well rounded experience that you can get I think is a lot more attractive to people than going into a corporate role or you know, the grad training scheme at Morgan Stanley. I mean, back office equity settlements for the south african market wasn’t going to give me life skills, I’m pretty sure. Yes, maybe that’s just square pegs and round holes. I don’t know. So I just. I have a very different definition of success now.

Verity Baldry [00:31:39]:
Some of that is that I’m further on in my career and I’ve got that experience behind me that’s in the bank and I want to be able to leverage that. But some of that is that, you know, I have a more grown up family and I have, you know, kind of more thoughts about, you know, I’m 20 years into my career with probably 20 years left. And success for me is more about fun and interesting. It’s more about variety, having autonomy, having, you know, creating mastery, being able to. To do new things and take more risks for fun rather than for necessity. And that, I think, has been more of a joy to be able to experience. I’m very privileged because I don’t have to chase a paycheck in the way that I used to need to. And some of that working as hard as I did and saving money as hard as I did is then the platform that gives me the now.

Verity Baldry [00:32:39]:
So I don’t think I’ve had could necessarily put my definition of success back to my younger self or, you know, vice versa. I think it morphs and changes as you, as you kind of meet each different part of your life.

Anna Lundberg [00:32:52]:
And it’s such a robust background to have then, to have that already, the big company and the status and the income to be able to make those creative choices. Later, I think I heard Gary Vaynerschuk talking about how actually when you’re young is the moment when you should take the risks. You’ve got nothing to lose, which is true. But then I wonder, you know, if you do that, then do you not gain the experience? You know, maybe you’re burned and then you kind of go back to comfort zone and stay there forever. I don’t know. I mean, there’s probably no right answer, but it’s an interesting. And anyway, we can’t get back in a time machine and change the choices we made. So, you know, it’s too late for us.

Anna Lundberg [00:33:28]:
The only question is now for all of us and listeners, what do we want to do now going forwards? And when you made the decision then to leave, you mentioned it was during the pandemic. Was that a big life audit reset or was it just coincidental? How did you make that decision then to go off on your own.

Verity Baldry [00:33:45]:
I’d already felt like the role that I had wasn’t. Wasn’t the one that I was really excited about having because it, you know, was a. At that point, small cog in a very, very big machine. And so when redundancies were offered going into the pandemic, that was a good opportunity, I suppose. I guess I’d have loved to have stayed in the Blenheim Trelcott group and started again, but, you know, that wasn’t the environment. Environment. And it’s still not the environment, really. I mean, startup is tough.

Verity Baldry [00:34:15]:
And in all honesty, I think, you know, that first kind of 17 years was exhausting and I didn’t realise how exhausted I was. And when I stopped, you know, we all took a breather in the pandemic, didn’t we? Doing that. Ma creative in life. Writing was poetry. It was nuts. I’ve never, you know, I did sciences at a level in university that gave me the insight that I, you know, I think to be able to burn as fast as I had for as long as I had, I had to close down a lot of that. Those, you know, you’re in survival mode a bit. I mean, you know, but when you’ve got the young kids and you’re doing the school runs and the Pat lunches.

Verity Baldry [00:34:52]:
I know we talked about that the other day, didn’t we? Like, it’s just the hamster wheel. And when you. When you get the ability to stop, which is, you know, lucky that I had that because otherwise I might just carried on. It was my one mode and I’d never really questioned it, that I then went and kind of nourished the creative side. I then had that moment of, well, I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want that to look like the kind of midlife crisis in the pandemic. I’m a woman of a certain age. It’s a risk, and it might have been that, who knows? But there’s nothing that I realised that that is something that I need to keep doing to have that balanced whole self.

Verity Baldry [00:35:31]:
But actually, startup was my love. So I went back and took a role thinking, you know, I’m back on the. That was where we met, you know, start up forever. And then with the environment as it is, you know, that role wasn’t sustainable for me for the long term. At which point I just wondered whether I’d retired. Like, I left there and thought, you know, there’s not a lot out there. What do I do? And I knew about you, I knew about your your book and your podcast, I had that in my arsenal. I had a really lovely friend who was.

Verity Baldry [00:36:02]:
Who said the word fractional to me, because I was saying, do I go back and get it or do I do part time now? Do I go round the wheel on? Is it startup? Is it poetry? How do I manage those two things? And she said, fractional. I thought, fantastic. It’s the best rebranding of contracting or part time or interim. It’s all of those things. It can be anything that you want it to be.

Sarah Weiler [00:36:31]:
I actually created this thing, this kind of concept called carousel, which is this idea of, we have lots of interests and they can kind of come in and out of, like, focus. So what I always say to people is, like, what’s at the front of my carousel at the moment? Like, honouring what’s presently happening, but not, you know, not kind of forgetting that there might be other things that I do as well, but currently at the front of my carousel, there’s two main things. One is that I’m coaching teachers, so I’m doing one to one coaching in a school with 18 members of staff, one on one. So I used to be a teacher and I’ve been really interested in teacher well being, how we can kind of shift the culture, that kind of burnout culture and education. So that’s like the current thing I’d be working on and really enjoying. And I’ve also started a breakfast radio show with a friend, which is like absolute dream. We did it this morning and it’s a really lovely way of combining, like, my love of music. We also bring in a bit of coaching.

Sarah Weiler [00:37:27]:
I also do some comedy. So that’s. Those are some things. And I think probably what I’m realising everything I do has in common is a way of getting to be lots of versions of me at once, rather than having to keep changing hats. It’s like, how can I bring in as many different parts of me in one setting?

Anna Lundberg [00:37:46]:
Gosh, that’s so much to unpick already before we even get into the practicalities of things. But I love that because there’s a lot about sort of. I talk about portfolios, career and multi passionate, multi potential, like Renaissance men and women and all these things. But it’s so interesting to bring the different characters to the fore at the same time, as you say, because it’s otherwise you feel like you’re holding sort of, you know, being the serious corporate self over here in my consulting, and then, oh, now I get to be an adventure photographer over here. But you’re sort of not being wholehearted. So I love that idea and I love the carousel idea as well, instead of just having to say, this is my job title and this is what I do. I think if people stop listening there, I’m already quite happy with the insight. So there you go.

Sarah Weiler [00:38:25]:
But I think that’s the thing with carousel is like, you know, you rather, I suppose maybe if you’re portfolio as well, if you’re listening, and I don’t know if you, you’ll probably consider yourself portfolio as well, Anna. But, like, you can have maybe like 20 different things that you might enjoy or do at different times, and that can feel quite overwhelming if you’re holding all of them equally. So it’s just a way of being like, like, I, you know, for example, my ukulele work, so I also run like, ukulele workshops in corporates, teaching kind of leadership skills through that. That is something I do, but it’s probably not at the front of my carousel right now. So I didn’t mention it right now, but it is something I’m getting paid for at the moment and still doing. So, you know, there’s also, I guess there’s a practical carousel and there’s maybe like an emotional carousel as well. Like, so what am I emotionally excited about right now? But what am I actually practically doing? They might be different things from each.

Anna Lundberg [00:39:15]:
Other, and I think it’s very pragmatic and flexible because I think we can get so obsessed with nailing that perfect elevator pitch. And this is my exact job. And I’ve always been, well, initially I had quite a few different projects. And as you’re exploring, experimenting after leaving a very well defined job role, corporate teaching, whatever it is, you do think, oh, my gosh, this is going to be the thing. Oh, no, this is going to be the thing. And actually the fact that there can be many things and they kind of fluctuate back and forth, I think that’s really beautiful. It allows you to explore and not forget it entirely. But right now, that’s a little bit in the background while I focus on this new thing.

Anna Lundberg [00:39:48]:
And I think that gives you a lot more possibility, room, opportunity to continue exploring and to be more than one thing without the pressure of doing them all at the same time as well.

Sarah Weiler [00:39:58]:
Yeah. And also allowing things to maybe have a phase, then you have a break from them, and then you come back to it with fresh eyes. You know, maybe you pick up a project, but maybe you think a project is finished and there’s something, you know, I’m sure. You’ve had this where it’s like you’re looking at something, you’re like, I’m just not feeling connected to anymore. I put a lot of energy into it. Maybe it’s a book, maybe it’s a course you’re running, and it’s like something’s not feeling right. So the idea of actually just being, I’m just going to let that go back around the carousel. And maybe like one day you’re chatting to someone and it’s like, oh my God, I really want to write that book now.

Sarah Weiler [00:40:28]:
But it needed that break from you to get like it needed, you know, it’s almost like you can overdo something and you can be with it and put too much pressure on it. So actually having that space, allowing the thing itself to have a break from you as well, having a break from it, I think, can be really cool.

Anna Lundberg [00:40:46]:
So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed those little snippets. A very small selection from the many, many interviews that I’ve done over the years. Thanks again for listening. Thanks to all of you who have contributed to the podcast over the last few years, and may there be many more in the coming years as well. Do subscribe to make sure you don’t miss an episode, and let’s see where the next 300 episodes take us to.

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