Happy MBA

When Ayse Birsel gave her talk at our Happy Startup Summercamp she was shocked that she only had 20 minutes to speak. Not only that, we told her that she should be sharing stories and not lessons.

Ironically her talk is about lessons; lessons she’s learned from doing extensive research about older people and their attitude to life.

She compiled these lessons along her research in her new book Design the Long Life You Love: A Step-by-Step Guide to Love, Purpose, Well-Being, and Friendship.

As you can imagine this is right up Happy street and we’re fully aligned with her message.

Laurence and Carlos love her work so much that they wanted to explore her lessons more deeply and give her more time to share her stories.

Listen to learn more about Ayse’s work and how you can design that long life full of love.

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• Join the next Vision 20/20 cohort

Lizzie Penny and Alex Hirst are the cofounders of Hoxby, a community and social enterprise that provides companies with the best talent and helps people work in a way that best aligns with their chosen lifestyle.

They're both advocates of what they call Workstyle, and have just published a book called Workstyle: A revolution for wellbeing, productivity and society.

They also consult with companies to help them be more resilient and inclusive by learning how to take advantage of the rich diversity of talent across the whole of society.

During this episode, you’ll learn more about their ideas, how and why they built Hoxby and what it takes to create organisations designed to cater for individualised ways of working.

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• Become a member of the Happy Startup School
• Join the next Vision 20/20 cohort

“We are all part of this massive wood wide web. We are all connected, we are all entwined.”

Life is full of changes, some are unexpected and traumatic and others can be intentional and nourishing. Coach and Vision 20/20 mentor Lana Jelenjev would like you to help you navigate change by thinking of your life as a tree – whether ripped from the soil or mindfully re-rooted.

Re-rooting means digging carefully around your existing roots, gently shaking away old unwanted soil and looking for fertile ground for future growth. Through sharing her own story, Lana invites you to consider how you can consciously make nourishing changes yourself.

• Lana Jelenjev
• Watch Lana’s talk in full
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"When you’re writing something about your business. Anything. If it could be used – intact and just as coherently – by any of your competitors. It’s not good enough. Say something that only you can say, instead."

Mychael Owen is an enigma. He started his first business at university, won a few awards and by 25 was advising other people how to start and grow businesses By 30 he'd started his first agency, employed 30 people with a turnover of £1.5m.

On the surface everything looked great. But soon he started meddling. He was bored, restless and distracted.

At 45 he realised that he craved being truly creative again, doing something he felt he was born to do. in short he was rudderless.

So he did something drastic – over the next 6 months he closed all of his businesses. The change included

• 'Wasting' (by the old rules) £100k on a business he didn't understand
• A couple of minor breakdowns
• Choosing to seek out a new tribe because his old tribe didn't understand him any more and
• The unearthing of a four step journey back via 1. generosity, 2. value, 3. confidence, 4. preeminence.

Mychael now has something that makes him money and makes him happy because he stops businesses becoming boring, and through his various other projects he meets his needs for writing, designing and hosting.

Despite years of entrepreneurial experience, by his own admission he's still winging it and regularly has doubts and fears like we all do.

But one thing he knows for sure is this: that the stories we tell matter. And that we should all tell more stories that other people can't tell.

Join Carlos and Laurence to hear what Mychael has to say about telling authentic stories that connect with others.

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When Carlos was a teenager, he never thought he could be an entrepreneur. He had very specific beliefs around what it mean to be an entrepreneur or businessman – the entrepreneur type was loud, flamboyant and risk taking. The businessman type was sober, stern and hard-nosed.

He didn’t identify with either of those types.

These days, though, we’ve been given much more opportunity to start businesses; from anywhere, doing nearly anything, for just about anyone. The options feel unlimited. Anyone can start a business. But thanks to Silicon Valley startup culture we have a limited perception of the type of person that can build successful businesses.

At the Happy Startup School, Carlos and Laurence talk about doing the business from the inside out. They want to help people build businesses and create impact that is aligned to who they really are. The question then becomes “who am I… really?”

One way to explore this question is through understanding the Enneagram. This model can be described as a system of personality typing that defines patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. It's based on nine personality types and maps each of these types on a nine-pointed diagram, which helps illustrate how the types relate to one another.

On this episode, Carlos is joined by fellow Happy Startup members and Enneagram enthusiasts Beccie D’Cunha and Kieran Morris. This is the perfect introduction to the Enneagram and will show you how personal development can lead to professional development.

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• Follow Kieran via LinkedIn
• Connect with Beccie via LinkedIn

One of the core models shared with participants of the Vision 20/20 programme is the Story of Change. Based on the Satir Change Model developed by Virginia Satir (family therapist and author), the Happy Startup School uses it to describe the transformation they wish for others.

Rather than build products and services that they hope people will buy, members advocate a more design thinking approach that's based on understanding the change that people want to see in their lives. This helps them focus on making things that matter and creating actual value in people's lives.

On this episode, Carlos and Laurence are joined by Serena Savini, HR expert and founder and host of the I'm Back! podcast. She was a member of Vision 20/20 Tribe 4, and she shares her mission to help people come back to work from life changing injuries and experiences. And how this story is helping others.

If you're navigating a pivotal moment in you professional life or embarking on a project that is totally out of your comfort zone, then this is for you.

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• The I’m Back! podcast

Mood is a mobile app that lets users track their mood with one tap a day. It was invented by Gareth Dauncey, a Welsh architect specialising in low-impact design and adaptive reuse of historic buildings.

Gareth created Mood after years of spreading himself too thin. Things hadn’t felt right for a while so he started recording how he felt each day with a calendar and coloured pens. Over weeks and months he started to gain a new perspective that helped him take charge of his mental well-being.

Following a couple of serendipitous encounters with his now good friend Marco and Ruby Wax he was set on a path that felt like his calling. He turned his manual tracking process into an app, and was able to help others through helping himself.

In this episode, Carlos and Laurence talk with Gareth about his journey of creating Mood and becoming more aware of his mental wellbeing.

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• Download the Mood app
• Frazzled
• Mind

If you’re like Laurence and Carlos, following a squiggly life isn’t just a matter of circumstance, it’s in your nature.

Sarah Ellis, cofounder of AmazingIf, says in her TED talk with her cofounder Helen Tupper “The legacy of the ladder is all around us.” That’s the career ladder; the linear view of life where work is all about straight line progression.

Many of us were led to believe that progressing in life was as simple as ABC: school to university to graduate training scheme to skilled professional to moving up the hierarchy to getting paid more, to success.

However, Carlos and Laurence didn’t follow that path. Instinctively they knew that it didn’t suit them. It didn’t excite them.

They followed a more meandering road. Carlos been an academic, a web designer, a freelancer, an entrepreneur, an event manager, a retreat host, an online course creator, a community builder and a coach… This wasn’t a path that he’d predicted but for him it’s now all starting to make sense.

When you follow a squiggly path it’s hard to understand how all your skills, knowledge and experience thread together, and therefore how to use them in the next stage of your journey.

“A squiggly career is both full of uncertainty and full of possibility. Change is happening all the time. Some of it is in our control, and some of it's not.” says Helen in her and Sarah’s talk.

Accepting this change is the secret to your resilience and understanding the meaning of your squiggly path is key to taking advantage of your future opportunities. However, you can only understand what it all means when you spend time pausing, reflecting, and asking yourself the right questions.

On this episode, Laurence and Carlos are joined by one of the cofounders of AmazingIf and co-author of the books Squiggly Careers and You Coach You, Sarah Ellis.

They talk about Sarah’s own squiggly career, her transition to entrepreneurship and what success means to her. This conversation is designed to inspire you to make important changes in your career and also make you feel more comfortable with living a squiggly life.

One of the most powerful ways we've found to connect with our followers is through our newsletter. But how do you do it so that it's energising and not exhausting, particularly when you're just starting out?

For this episode, Carlos is joined by Lyndsay Lucero, founder of Baxley Goods. She's passionate about making exceptional goods that also help our planet. She shares her journey of creating a newsletter for her company to inspire you to do it for yourself, why having your own newsletter is important, and what makes for good and bad newsletters.

If you want to create an authentic connection with your audience in a way that feels energising and not exhausting, this episode was made for you.

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• Connect with Lyndsay via LinkedIn
• Baxley Goods

Anniki Summerville is a broadcaster, author, journalist, and speaker specialising in telling positive and authentic narratives about women in their forties and beyond.

This is about the "shoulds" and how when we reach midlife a lot of us start questioning them. The invitation is to do that a lot sooner, and lose the comparisonitis that can follow us around.

Could the solution be to could encourage smaller sparks earlier in life, rather that one big midlife explosion when we hit our forties? Join Carlos and Laurence for this fun discussion.

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• Anniki Somerville online
• Follow @annikisommerville on Instagram