So I want to start by talking to you about the 90,000 hours. Did you know, we spend 90,000 hours in our work over our lifetime. And that's an incredibly long time. And surveys suggest that 70 to 75% of us are completely disconnected with the work that we do.And that's a Gallup survey. And I'm guessing you're here because you don't want to be one of those people. You want to have this incredibly connected career. You want to feel that what you're doing is purposeful. It's quite driven, you're here because you want to contribute to something and I call it waking up, motivated and going home, fulfilled. And I know exactly what this feels like. So as Anna said, I'm the founder of empowered leaders in tech. I'm a high performance and leadership coach and I'm also a global head of data. So I know from my 15 year career in it that it can be quite challenging to achieve levels of career growth. And I'm gonna talk to you more about my story as we go and hopefully you can learn some things from that. So when I talk to people about what they're trying to achieve. These sort of words come up quite often. I wanna be confident, but I wanna be really confident and competent at what I do. I want to be able to have an impact and influence on others and that's something that you can all do.

And it's about how do we find out what personal growth will we need to do alongside our hard skills? We're all really good at developing and honing our hard skills. And I did that for years. But it wasn't the answer following the same steps as somebody else. It's not that simple, having the same qualifications. It doesn't mean you'll get on just the same or that you'll have that same impact that you want to. And when you have that potential right inside you, it can be really important to grab hold of it and do something with it, feel the fear and move on anyway. Of course, there's some problems as we know. And one of them is that we have this psychology that we believe when we're happy, we will be, we will be happy when we've achieved X, when we've had this promotion. I was definitely there when you have this big house. When you have done the thing that is your next goal in your career. And 80% of millennials that were surveyed said that they thought they'd be happy when they were rich. And the reality is so many research studies have proven that having money doesn't buy you happiness. It doesn't make you happy at all.

So we need to figure out how do we get happy now so that we can get strong and fulfilled to show up every day in full flow without waiting for that ta da moment where you finally achieve something because that goal posts is always shifting. When you get that promotion, when you achieve that leadership title, it doesn't mean everything changes for you when you get there, a whole new challenge comes before you, a whole new career goal that you want to strive for. So moving on from here, you're thinking, I've got to do hard work. I've got to do the hustle, I've gotta do long hours and that will equal success. When the reality is, we know that being in a stressful situation, we don't perform at our best and we need to find a new, more sustainable way of doing things so that we can advance. And then here we have another problem, our level of support has gone down, but the pace of change has rapidly gone up and you're here probably because you wanna build your supportive network and that's fantastic. You're the kind of person who's going to network. You want to meet people, you want to find that inspiration and your peer support and that will really help you because whilst our supports gone down, particularly in the pandemic and the change in tech is really high.

We need to maintain a level of a support network and that's what really successful people do. So you see what happens in our career is we have three stages and the first stage can be as long or as short before you re you have this realization and this establishing of your identity. This is where you develop limiting beliefs or you develop factors that from experiences that you have when you're a child, when you're at school, what somebody tells you you're good at and we embed them and they start to form these be limiting beliefs for us. And then we have this phase where we determine what our identity is. So we start to embed all of these limiting beliefs internally. We see others succeed leapfrog over us, do things or get on maybe their face fits and you feel that yours doesn't they experience rejection and failure while you might experience a level of imposter syndrome, who am I to do this? And then we have the relationships, the connections with others, whether we form good bonds with our managers or with the people that can support us in progressing, whether we have influence over the decisions made in our team or in our organization.

And if we feel that nobody's listening to us, we're not being heard. We can again start to internalize that to mean we don't have anything of value to contribute. Then there's the external world, the things the bias that has been talked about a lot in this conference and the judgment of others. What will they think of me if I show that show up in this way or if I do this presentation? Are they gonna judge me as being inadequate, the wrong person to do this? We've obviously got COVID restructures and redundancies also have a huge impact on the economy, things that we can't necessarily directly control. So then you form this belief. I don't know what it takes.

Um II, I could never do that. The successful people that I see around me are incredibly lucky and I don't have those skills and these are dangerous beliefs, but incredibly common and broad in terms of what we experience. And in fact, it's actually a bit of neuroscience going on here. So inside your brain, you've got this, this section at the front that is trying to protect you. It's really clever. It can simulate that if you take an action, what the risk might be. And obviously, the a part of your brain is designed to keep you safe, to protect you. So if you're thinking about getting a new job, if you're thinking about taking another move to um a new country, your brain is doing this simulation to work out all the things that could go wrong and then trying to protect you in that process and that can hold you and keep you stuck.

It can give you a health amount of fear that keeps you where you are. And it's learning to recognize that you can do that simulation. But then challenging it with logical thinking, there's an awful lot of mindset in this and we do this by all the things that we've picked up in the first stage of our career. And we've embedded as part of our belief system. And then we can have this section where we have this idea of understanding what our goals are, our identity. And we really want to get focused on that. Sometimes that can be a breakthrough that's happened because you've had a child because you've moved countries because you were made redundant and you are forced to think about do I really want to do this? Is this really my calling and some of us, we will take that true calling like Anna has here and you will do something that's incredibly valuable. That means you're purpose driven and you're in full flow because you're reaching in and getting your potential and you're delivering something that makes a difference, you're contributing to something that you're passionate about and that you're in full flow and others, we play a little bit safer and we do an adjacent career.

We do something that's next to the thing that we want to be doing. You might be supporting somebody who's doing the thing that really you would like to be doing. But when you have that viewpoint, that perspective, your eyes are wide open and the possibilities are endless. And that's what you want to get to the, the situation where you can see everything opening up. Now, I was incredibly hungry for a promotion. I wanted to be in this full flow and I thought that by beating that leadership thing getting to that top of those steps, that leadership ladder would really help me. And the reality is when I got there, I wasn't very prepared for it. I had climbed this career ladder. I've been very gung ho about it and done some things that were quite working long hours, working late nights and then taking on a lot of stress and a lot of extra work with lots of plates spinning and I can talk to you about that more in my talk this afternoon. But what I realized is that I would lie in bed at night with insomnia, my head was spinning, my heart was coming, beating out of my chest and I was snappy at home. It wasn't working for me. And eventually I suffered life changing burnout during that period.

I vowed that I wasn't going back to the same way of working. And I did an incredible amount of personal growth and study about the and work with the execs around me to figure out how do they cope with the overwhelm, the pressure, the pressure we put on ourselves as well as the pressures around us to still achieve great things and still feel like we're connected.

And the answer is these three dimensions, it's like the infrastructure that underpins everything you can have the hard skills, you can have your technical knowledge and skills. But when it comes to really getting on in a, in a safe and sustainable way and being present, you really need to have these three elements in place. So the first thing is clarity, it's incredibly powerful when you know who you are and you'll stay true to your identity. A lot of people, I talk to talk about something not aligning with their values, having that purpose driven identity, where something aligns with who you are, how you wanna show up and you're not being asked to do things that rub up against your values that you don't agree with is incredibly important.

And that can be as simple as the organization you're in or it can be, it can be the role that you're doing. So I want you to imagine five years from now be really forward focused. Where do you wanna be? Remove those limits? Where do you really want to be? What kind of life do you really want to try and build and then make better decisions? Because when every decision comes up, ask yourself, does this get me closer or further away from where I want to be? Because long-term thinking will affect and improve your short-term decision making. So envisage your future frequently and by future frequently. I mean, every single day think about what is it. And you start to embed those things, you start to show up in that way. For me, I wanted to be a leader and I knew I needed to show up early as that leader that I envisaged being. Even if inside, I felt that I was a bit of an imposter still because where you focus, that is where your energy's gonna go. That's where your intentions are going to go and then write down your goals. There's some incredible research that proves that there's 14% of people who write down their, who, who have goals, they're 100% more likely to be successful by their own definition than people who don't have goals.

And there's another 3% of people who are 300 times more likely to achieve those goals simply by writing those down and committing to them. And then the second element of your 3d dimension is whether you believe you can or you believe you can't going back to those limiting beliefs. I don't have what it takes. I could never do that. I don't have the skills. The successful people are incredibly lucky. You need to be able to see it, to believe it in your own mind. Really difficult. What you're doing here is great. You're showing role models in each of these scenarios and those role models will serve to others to show other people what can be done. But even when you can't see that trail, so you can't see that person doing the thing or your face fitting, you have to see it in your mind to know you can do it. You wanna feel more confident, more comfortable, feel happier, believe in your future and take control to make it happen. Because you know your thoughts at the top of this grid, your thoughts. I am good enough. I'm not good enough. I can learn this, affect your feelings, your feelings then affect the behavior, the action that you take. And we all know that it's only by taking action that we start to see results.

Sometimes there'll be failures and you'll have to go back round to your thoughts and make sure you don't internalize those failures of I applied for that job, but I didn't get it. I'm not good enough. You need to reframe that to, it's ok. I'll work harder. I'll try harder. I'll practice, I'll be better next time or maybe the role wasn't right for me, but I'll find a better one and that's your thoughts driving your behavior, which in turn drives the results that you're getting. Your mindset is incredibly key here. And here's some actions for you. Some really practical actions. I want you to think this. Not that every time you've got something popping up in your head, I'm gonna think this not that change it, flip it on its head to the positive to how you can spin something. If you, if you are suspecting something's not gonna work, be ready for it, be ready for how you're going to tell yourself the new story. And if you really want to boost these two things, always really work for people, list all your achievements, everything you've done because you will be astounded at where you've come from. When we think we haven't achieved anything, we're reflect back over our career and think I didn't get to where I wanted to list your achievements. You'll realize you've done so much more.

And when you get focused and intentional on where you wanna do, where you wanna be that clarity, you'll do the next step because you know you've done it before and brainstorm your superpowers, I call them superpowers, you can call them strengths, natural talents, whatever you like even ask other people.

What do you think? I'm good at? What are my strengths? I found some incredible insight from this when I asked my colleagues because when you feel strong, you improve your circle of influence. You know that thing about people not listening to us bringing on to support the final circle in our three dimensions. Did you know that the five people that you spend most time with are a reflection of you? They, they make up the most of you. So it's incredibly important to choose your support network carefully and to build those people around you, those people that you have shared interests for. And this is the conference where you can, you can do an incredible amount of that networking peers really matter. The quality of your life is the quality of those relationships you build. They will, they will lead to opportunities, they will lead to support when you need it. When things are failing and you have that network around you, you don't feel that you're alone in it. You also need a safe place that you can go and explore ideas. And when I was talking to these executives that were doing so well, that felt to be on top of the world, they had these supportive places, they had places, people like them peers, they could go and talk to a coach, a mentor, all of them.

In fact, they would have these places to explore those ideas and increase their opportunities, allies become more resilient, all of that kind of great stuff. So here's my actions to help you build support. Today. I want you to follow one new person that is inspiring you to grow to strive for better, to move on and up level. And I want you to find one new person either in the Slack group or in this channel where you can hold a virtual coffee this week, somebody you can really connect to and start to connect with and support them and vice versa and each other on your journey. And the final words I want to say to you is that you shouldn't wait. I think a lot of people have said this, but seriously, you have to keep, keep moving forward. There is never a right time. And I want you to ask yourself frequently, how can I move forward? What small action can I take today this week? That's gonna move me forward on my goal. So thank you very much for listening to me folks. I am doing another talk this afternoon on thriving in your 1st 30 days in leadership. This is where I teach you what I learned from my experience.

And if you have any final questions, you can either pop them in the chat now or you can pop them over in the Slack channel.