Ways We Work

This week my guest is Jannell Lo, she’s a chef at J&P Grocery in Kitchener, Ontario, a private catering chef on the side and runs the food blog MyBFisGF.com - which she describes as gluten free cooking inspired by asian classics and Canadan comfort food. She’s lived and worked in many places around the world and shares how her eight years in the culinary industry helped her discover the parts of working in food she was most passionate about and led her to where she is now. We talk about how she balances serving food she knows will sell with bringing her own creations and new flavours to the community. She shares her own experience working in the intensity of the food industry, dealing with extreme stress and eventually discovering how to bring balance to her work. It was fun to have the opportunity to do an interview in person and get to know someone in my community better. And with that, we’ll get into it.

This week my guest is Katie Philo, she's the Content Manager at BritBox (Created by BBC Studios & ITV) and the host of the podcast When I Grow Up where she unpacks people's career paths and how they've arrived where they are currently in their career. She's originally from London but has spent the last year and a half making a life for herself in New York City. We talk about what happens after you've achieved your dream job, balancing ambition with being present and satisfied with where you currently are, how she's trying to fill the other buckets in her life outside of her profession and what it's like doing all of this far away from her home country. Being fellow podcasters and also two people just obsessed with how people work and what makes it important to them, Katie and I had a very natural conversation that continued long after we stopped recording and I really enjoyed all of the insights she's gathered from years of experience working in over 35 different jobs, as well as everything she's learned from her own podcast guests. She's a lovely human and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

In this episode I'm talking to Claire Baker, she's a women's coach based out of London who specializes in helping women live more in sync with their menstrual cycle. She's been coaching women 1 on 1 all over the world how to work with their cycles since 2013, and she also runs workshops, online courses and has a ton of free resources that you can find over on her website thisislifeblood.com. We talk about the value of batching similar types of work together, the importance of valuing different types of productivity, how you can bring the 1% version of self-care into your routine and so much more.

This episode I'm talking to Tom Creighton, he's currently a design lead at Delphia, a data-focused startup based out of Toronto. He previously made other cool things at companies like Wealthsimple and Shopify. He's passionate about growing the creative community through a variety of means, like through his two podcasts Framework, a podcast about the process of building and bringing a product to market and The Redesign, which is a fun podcast where he and a friend redesign everyday items with usually the end result being a poorly designed version of the original thing - Tom wouldn't mind me saying that. He also spends a good amount of his time speaking and mentoring others in the design community. In our chat we cover decision making, how to make good decisions and the process involved in that, disconnecting your identity from your role, the importance of communication amongst teams, the value of experiments and creating boundaries in both your work and side projects and Tom shares how deciding to work from home was the best the decision for his own work-life balance. This was a fun conversation and Tom has a ton of really thoughtful insights around all of these topics from his own personal experience. 

This episode I'm talking to Mic Berman, Mic is an executive coach, and is currently spending a lot of her time building up great leaders in some of Canada's best tech companies. She's held executive roles in companies like Yahoo, Mozilla and FreshBooks, so she knows what she's talking about when it comes to high performing teams and fostering innovation. She also lives on a farm with her partner, and their animals, producing food for local chefs here in Southwestern Ontario. Mic is a great friend and mentor to me and in this episode we get into so many good topics. She's living proof that you can have a fulfilling career and a huge impact on the tech industry without constantly needing to live in the hustle of it all of the time. I wanted to hear how she balances working in such a fast paced industry, while still living a lifestyle that's truly authentic and sustainable for her. We get into leadership development, how to lead effectively and human-ly, what it means to go slow to go fast and so much more.

In this first episode, Amandah gives some context on how Ways We Work began as an online publication focused on sharing honest conversations about what makes work meaningful for people. She shares why she decided to turn the site into a podcast, what that process has been like and what you can expect from listening.