Presence and Productivity, with Mayda Poc – TPW283

Former investment banking professional Mayda Poc intentionally cultivates presence in each moment of her productive life.

Cultivating presence leads to meaningful productivity

After more than 15 years in the financial industry, working in Paris, London, and New York City, Mayda Poc left investment banking and Wall Street to become an international life and career coach, focusing on helping executives find more zen, fulfillment, and purpose in their daily lives and in their careers. Today, Mayda is a coach and a certified hypnosis practitioner based in New York City where she lives with her husband of 30 years and their Chartreux cat.

Mayda has experience working in both the corporate world and also as a self-employed person. She worked in investment banking, where work-life balance is pretty much non-existent. Towards the end of her career in this field, she was diagnosed with advanced cancer. Being a highly perfectionistic person, she decided she would do it all: go to chemotherapy while working from 4 am-9 pm. While this was a bit crazy for her, it allowed her to develop strategies, and find and express her boundaries. In a way, working while battling cancer was a saving grace for her because she had an excuse to pause for a second, realize there were things that weren't working for her, and find the courage to express that.

Today, as a self-employed person, she has to daily find the motivation to be self-reliant, and she finds herself using the strategies she'd learned back in the corporate world. While being her own boss means the needs of her business often supersede her own needs, she is learning to be productive, to manage a schedule, and also to experiment different strategies that she can then communicate to her own clients, so they can craft the strategies that work for their individual needs and circumstances.

A typical day

Mayda wakes up between 4 and 4:30 each morning, which is a remnant of her international investment banking days. She kept this habit because the morning is usually a quiet time when she can journal, read emails, go on social media, catch up with family members who live in Paris, etc. She works out at home and then begins her workday. Many of her clients are international - from France, the UK,  and South America - so her calls with them can begin as early as 7 am. Throughout her workday, she speaks with her clients, works on her social media, and prepares for consultations. Though her day is pretty flexible, she says it was very important for her to first create the structure that she could be flexible within.

Mayda emphasizes that it is important to go back to your "Why" when you run your own business. Thinking about your mission and purpose of being in business for yourself will lead you to think about "How" you can achieve what you set out to do, helping you to prevent treating your business like a hobby. Mayda was determined that she would professionalize her business and hired professionals to set up her website and contracts. But, more important, she worked on her attitude and behavior as a serious business owner; she plans her day like a business owner, she dresses as if she's going into an office, and she finds ways to keep herself motivated every day.

The nature of her business requires her to be flexible in her availability for her clients, so she is often working on weekends and evenings. However, she is well aware of her personal needs such as needing to spend quality time with her friends and husband, so she makes sure to build time in for those activities. She also knows her brain doesn't work well after 8:30 pm, so that's when she comes to a hard stop for work. Another non-negotiable habit of hers is that when she eats, she focuses on eating. This is a habit that comes from her French background, as well as from her former banking days.