Work Life by Design

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 into a national franchise of 35 centres. When her business was acquired in 2016, she began coaching other people on how to scale their service-based businesses, however, she found she was often repeating the same fundamental information and so decided to create an online course.

Deciding to test out her newfound freedom with online course creation, Tina set off to travel the world for a year with her husband and two children visiting 28 countries, whilst growing the online business a few hours a day.

Since returning her online empire has continue to grow and she know runs her "little' online business from her small farm on Australia's East Coast.

In today's chat, Tina shares with us both the ups and downs of business, but more importantly how her mindset and approach to her work life has morphed and evolved to match the seasons of her life. She shares how her purpose for her life and her business fuels her drive every day and the routines and rituals that she has embraced to ensure that she is showing up in a way that delivers massive value to those that work with her.

As a member of Tina's Her Empire Builder, I have had the great pleasure of working closely with Tina over the past 12mths and seen the passion that she has for her business but also the foundations that she has laid for herself to ensure she's living her best life in alignment with her vision. Tina Tower

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Melissa Marsden

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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 others, whether that be our family, our friends, our boss, our colleagues, our clients, or even just society in general. Just like I did.

Today, I unpack why it's important to understand what makes you tick, how this helps you show up in work and life and how having this knowledge and insight can help you maximise your strengths and help you work towards what you want.

I cover:

• Tools to understand your motivations
• How this knowledge allows you to level up your life
• The value of personality profiling style tools in a team environment

LIVE A LIFE BY DESIGN

In this six week program, I take you through the tools and the frameworks that I have curated over the last 10 years to live a life by my own design. Plus, I've also then taken the steps of how to put it into action and provided a framework to help you start designing your dream life. Learn more about the Live a Life by Design experience here, and join the waitlist.

FREE DOWNLOAD

If you're interested in the first tools in the workbook to see if this is for you, download the Setting Your North Star exercise!

Melissa Marsden

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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 brands, celebrities, and influencers such as Megan Gale, Nespresso, Victoria's Secret and Drew Barrymore in the Australian market. However, while she was getting everyone else's message out to the world, she realised she had her own story to tell.

Launching Torstar in her twenties, she had built a fabulous life as a single mum, running a global business with a team of 22 including two executive assistants. It was a near death experience and 10 years of being stalked that gave her a fresh perspective. She wanted a life with more purpose.

Today, Tory is the CEO of Powerful Steps where she is on a mission to share her toolkit with high octane businesswomen to plot their personal roadmap to success.

This was such a fabulous conversation with Tory where we journeyed through her previous business Torstar and the possibilities and opportunities that she has embraced to see her create Powerful Steps. She shares with us the importance of trusting your gut instinct, the power of clear values and her mantra for life, as well as her 3 pieces of advice for anyone wanting to live a life by design.

Tory Archbold

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Melissa Marsden

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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 on purpose and how I searched high and low for my true purpose and the meaning of a life truly authentic to me. I'm talking self-help books, philosophical paradigms, conferences and retreats, life coaches; you name it, I did it.

This journey over the past 10 years has led me to explore various tools, frameworks and ideologies around people, culture, leadership and business, that have supported me to design this work life that I love and this is what I'll be sharing with you with the help of some incredible guests!

If you're interested in getting started right away, you can download my FREE mini workbook on purpose and values; activities that will help you set your North Star.

Go to: www.melissamarsden.com.au/northstar to get your copy!

I am very excited to be bringing you this season because it is one that is very close to my heart. It has been a personal journey that I have lived and I want to share that with you so that you can have it too, whether you are an entrepreneur or you are climbing the corporate ladder – you can get where you need to go if you have the right tools.

As always if you have any questions, want to know more get in touch on Instagram @melmar or send me an email, [email protected]

I look forward to bringing our first guest to you next week!

Melissa Marsden

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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 with different ideas on how to navigate the future of work and manage the expectations of their people with the bottom line of the business.

This week I take you through a summary of each episode to give you the key takeaways and actionable strategies from topics such as:

• Equality at work
• Remote and hybrid working environments
• Productivity and Wellness
• The importance of culture, belonging and humanising the work experience
• Reimagining the future of work
• The role of technology, for better, for worse and how to manage it
• Dealing with the zoom fatigue and the cognitive load of remote working
• The importance of The Third Space and preparing your mindset for interactions
• Workplace design, the impact of the physical space on chemistry and the importance of strategy

If any of the highlights spark your interest, listen to the full episode and let me know what you think and what you'd like to hear more of via Instagram @melmar, LinkedIn or on my website.

I'll be back next week with a brand new season, with a focus to helping you develop the skills and strategies design the life you love.

Thanks for joining me!

Melissa Marsden

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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 week I discuss:

• Why offices just don't work, even if they look amazing The essential things you need to consider when designing a workplace
• The foundations of a workplace strategy
• Why that workplace strategy is crucial to commercial success

If you are experiencing challenges in your workplace and you like the sound of how a great workplace can begin to transform your business, there are few options;

• Your Workplace Future Ready program – 7 week do-it-yourself workplace transformation
• Workplace Dynamics Blueprint AUDIT – opportunity for us to look at your organisation and give some advice on how to start to transform
• Workplace Dynamics Blueprint – full strategy solution to see your workplace transform and create an environment for high performance

If you're not sure which one you need, book a call and I'd be happy to have a chat and discuss your options with you. Let's design a workplace that works!

Melissa Marsden

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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 looks pretty different right now.

Today's guest is Cameron Douglas, the newly appointed CEO of Videopro. Cameron has been a long standing employee of Videopro who has worked his way to the top and is now proudly leading the organisation into an exciting new technology enabled world.

As the name suggests, they are the professionals when it comes to video, servicing the professional services and education sector along with their retail stores open to the public.

Cameron and I discuss the opportunities and challenges that technology has afforded us, as well as taking a look at where the future of workplace technology is going and how it is shifting our experience of work.

We often think of workplace technology as our laptops, the servers and the connectivity of these, however the world of workplace technology can be far more expansive from recognising your number plate as you enter the building, to assigning you a desk and ordering your coffee.

It has the ability to transform our experience of work.

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 have been lost. So, have we created digital silos, or as I call it, the cubicle of 2021?

In today's episode, I look at how the rise of digital communication has impacted us and how to tackle the delicate balance between digital overload and digital silos. I cover:

• The value of tacit learning and external perspectives and different departmental views
• The real cost of productivity
• Actionable strategies and resources to breakdown the digital silos and facilitate strengthening team bonds

I'd love your feedback!

Take a screen shot of the pod or a pic of where you're listening today and tag me, share and slide into my DMs @melmar so I can send out a huge thanks! I'm keen to understand how these episodes are helping your work life. Or, Join the Work Life By Design Facebook group for more content. Let's connect!

Melissa Marsden

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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 moments has become increasingly important.

So, who better to chat to about the impact of these moments than Dr Adam Fraser; researcher, speaker and the author of "The Third Space" just one of his four best selling books.

Dr Adam Fraser is a human performance researcher and consultant who studies how organisations adopt a high-performance culture to thrive in this challenging and evolving business landscape. In this time, he has worked with elite level athletes, the armed forces and business professionals of all levels. In the last 10 years he has delivered more than 1500 presentations to over half a million people in Australia, US, New Zealand and worldwide.

In today's episode we chat about;

• What is 'The Third Space'?
• How cognitive overload is affecting our ability to move through "the third space" effectively
• How can you use Adam's three-part process to effectively prepare yourself in that critical transition moment in "the third space"
• How we can re-recreate lost "third space" moments when we are working from home
• How we as leaders can support our employees through change
• The workplace's reputation for dismissing emotion and how we can hold space for our teams to move through emotion
• The impact that constant interruptions are having on our mental capacity to concentrate and ways that we can begin to find periods of "flow" in our work day

Adam's research is peppered throughout this entire conversation providing a data driven response to his thoughts and giving many of our "feelings" a valid and scientific explanation.

Dr Adam Fraser

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Melissa Marsden

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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 seem like anything new because certain industries and professions have always carried these expectations.

Regardless this is something that we need to be paying attention to. The World Health Organisation has released a report stating that we are at a 35% higher risk of stroke and 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease when we work 55 hrs or more, compared to working 35-40hrs a week.

So in this episode I want to share with you some of the research around why we are feeling this way, examine the science behind it and provide you with some ideas to manage your work life to reduce your feelings of fatigue, overwhelm and exhaustion.

Let's jump in!

LINKS WHO - Working Longer Hours https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2021-long-working-hours-increasing-deaths-from-heart-disease-and... Microsoft Brain Research https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/brain-research Microsoft 2021 Work Trend Index: Annual Report https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index Change your Microsoft Calendar Settings Settings in Microsoft Outlook