Being happy and performing well at work can sometimes feel like conflicting goals. One part of us craves the over achievement and other side, wants calmness and more stability in our lives – and yet, work trumps most of the time. And here lies the problem. It’s easy to neglect the YOU in your career because you’re so busy achieving and looking after everyone. But if you want enduring success, you need life strategies, not just career strategies. This is what we are talking about today.
Being happy and performing well at work can sometimes feel like conflicting goals. One part of us craves the over achievement and other side, wants calmness and more stability in our lives – and yet, work trumps most of the time.
And here lies the problem. It’s easy to neglect the YOU in your career because you’re so busy achieving and looking after everyone. But if you want enduring success, you need life strategies, not just career strategies. This is what we are talking about today.
Presenter: Gillian Fox
Guest: Shannah Kennedy
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https://www.yourbrilliantcareer.com.au/free-guide/
Being happy and performing well at work can sometimes feel like conflicting goals. One part of us craves the over achievement and other side, wants calmness and more stability in our lives – and yet, work trumps most of the time.
And here lies the problem. It’s easy to neglect the YOU in your career because you’re so busy achieving and looking after everyone. But if you want enduring success, you need life strategies, not just career strategies. This is what we are talking about today.
Welcome to the Your Brilliant Career podcast. The podcast that teaches you how to get the most out of your career. Thank you for being here.
I'm your host, Gillian Fox, executive coach, women's career expert, and entrepreneur.
I talk tactics, tools, and stories that help incredible women like you achieve the success you deserve.
If you want to learn more about how to create the brilliant career you've always wanted, I encourage you to check out the RISE Program.
It's my four-month career program for women who want more from their career. Through a combination of individual executive coaching sessions and group workshops, you'll discover how to overcome obstacles, create opportunities and reach new heights in your career.
Hello and welcome to Episode number 18 of the Your Brilliant Career podcast. I have a beautiful guest for you today, Shannah Kennedy. I meet Shannah earlier this year and we kicked it off immediately.
She is one of Australia’s most celebrated life coaches. She is also a seven-time bestselling author, she does a cracking keynote, runs workshops for the corporates and most of all, she is a lovely and inspiring human.
I’ve invited Shannah to share some simple tools and strategies on how to create your best life.
It’s crazy to think that we can cultivate a brilliant career without a good life supporting it. We’ve all seen the impact of that person at work dealing with a personal issue, such as going through a divorce or a loss. It can affect their mood, their performance and sometimes even impact their reputation. But more than, it affects how they feel. It is the relationship with themselves that is compromised and can hurt the most.
So good careers require good lives and when we have that, it allows us to come to work as our whole self, someone who is clear on who they are and what they stand for. It is a pleasure working with these people – people who have worked this bit out.
The flip side is working alongside those people who haven’t and how different does that feel. The person who is so stressed or has nothing to contribute to the conversation outside of work because work is their whole world, or they don’t look healthy because they’re not healthy or maybe they’re just fueled by fear at that time.
Shannah is the master when it comes to really helping people become unstuck and find the clarity, purpose and direction in their lives and this translates directly back to great careers. Shannah’s gift is that she is particularly good at making the complex simple.
I employed her as my coach. Today, I am going to share with you some of things that I have learnt… that I think will be of great value to you too. Things like how to stay grounded when you don’t want to slow down, how to stay true to your values and how to create a road map for your life (which BTW includes your career ambitions). So interesting, right!
Who doesn’t want to create their best life? It sounds awesome. But most of us need to learn how. And that’s why this episode is so exciting because what’s we are going to do today. Learn how to create your BEST life. Get this and your brilliant career will flourish. I know you’ll take away something incredibly valuable from this episode and with that… let’s dive in.
Gillian Fox: Well, hi, Shannah. How are you?
Shannah Kennedy: I'm great. It's Friday. It always feels good on a Friday to do these wonderful conversations.
Gillian Fox: It's creativity day, Friday. I feel the same. Well, it is an absolute pleasure to have you here, so thank you for joining us. Let's dive in and talk about life before being a life coach, because even though your life is very interesting now, Shannah, it was also interesting back then as this high exec in the corporate sports sector. Maybe tell us a little bit about that and how you decided to become a life coach, because they're quite different career paths.
Shannah Kennedy: They're poles apart, aren't they? I know. Like a lot of young women out there, very ambitious, very career driven, very achievement orientated. It was in this incredible job, like Jerry McGuire, and just really worked my way up to that sort of level of work hard, don't go home, just keep working hard, wear it like a badge of honor. Just loved my job, married the job. You know? This is 30 years ago. I just thought, "Wow, I'm in this fast paced, getting on aeroplanes, going to sporting events," around high performance the whole time. There really wasn't very much self-care awareness or wellbeing or mental health awareness 30 years ago, so it was just go hard or go home. I really loved working more than anything else. I just was in love with the job.
What happened was I just didn't have any self-care and it took my health away. My job, seven days a week, because I chose it to be that way, ended up taking my health, so I didn't protect the asset, which was myself. I just didn't have any care about, "Let's just keep flogging this asset as long as you can and see what happens." So, it ended with chronic fatigue, depression, full burnout, like burnt. So burnt that for the next 20 years until today, I still have to manage it. I have to manage it. I have plenty of structures and rules in place to allow me not to burn back down. But in that time that I was really sick, I was thinking about, "There has to be a better way. We cannot just keep burning." I actually got myself a life coach from the US, because there weren't any here.
Gillian Fox: Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: It was unheard of. But I didn't want a counselor and I didn't want a psychologist, so I was thinking, "What do I need? I need a coach. I've just watched my athletes have coaches for 10 years. Nobody did it alone. Everyone's got a coach, a sporting coach. I just need one for my life. I need to rebuild myself." So, it was really interesting, because nobody knew what I was doing or what I was talking about. Through that experience of having a coach, having that safe place to rebuild myself, I thought about athletes. When they go from hero to zero overnight and no one has a plan, nobody had a life plan. They had a sport plan. I had my career burn and churn plan, but we didn't have the full picture.
That made me study life coaching just to coach athletes into retirement, because nobody cared about them back then, and there was huge destruction. So, that's how I started the business. Then over the 20 years of being a coach, it sort of moved into corporate. It moved into entrepreneurs, it moved into small business owners, stay at home mums, university graduates. We all need a plan, a big one, not just our health or not just our career, but actually looking holistically at the whole lot, and how we can have longevity without burning out and still achieve in all of those areas.
Gillian Fox: It makes so much sense. You've taught me a lot of things around that, and we'll get to that. But we work with some phenomenal women, and probably like a lot of the athletes that you worked with, they're incredibly focused. They have business plans, they have career plans, they have very high expectations of themselves as well. But sometimes within that framework, they can also be very harsh on themselves. That little inner critic, the disappointment that perhaps they didn't reach where they perceived they should be reached, I'm sure you see this, Shannah, as a life coach, what sort of advice do you give women in those sort of situations?
Shannah Kennedy: Well, we're all cut from the same cloth, aren't we? This A type overachieving perfectionist achievement junkie type of woman.
Gillian Fox: There has to be an acronym for that, for sure.
Shannah Kennedy: Oh, there has to be, doesn't there? I have to pick that one up. But that's really the type of person that we're dealing with, isn't it? You deal with them; I deal with them. We are those same people. You know?
Gillian Fox: Indeed.
Shannah Kennedy: We are achievement junkies. We're driven, we get things done, we set goals. We want to smash them. That's our personality type. It's not everybody's. For that personality type, I always ask one question, and this question is on my wall, it's on my mirror, it's what I teach a lot of my clients, and that is what would love do? Because we are so driven. We are so working from our head; we are so analytical. We think, we strive, but sometimes we've got to say, "What would love do?" Just to soften that edge a little bit. Sometimes I say, "What would you tell your best friend in this moment?"
"It's okay. Let's back off 10%. We're not failing. We're on the path of life. We're on this amazing adventure called life. We're all dots on the planet spinning around the universe. Why are we so stressed out that we didn't get that deal or that email was stressful?" It's great to sell 5,000 more books and it's great to yesterday to go and speak in Sydney, and it's great to have lots of clients, but at the end of the day, what is fulfilling is for me serving others, but also looking after myself and having a great, positive, healthy relationship as a human being to myself for my 10 year older self.
Gillian Fox: Yeah. Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: You know that Matthew McConaughey speech that we've talked about, your role model being your 10 year older self, well, if you keep going the way you're going, what does that look like in 10 years’ time?
Gillian Fox: That future self piece is such a compelling piece, isn't it? If what you're doing today is not supporting that vision. Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%.
Gillian Fox: How do you get women to slow down then? Because this all makes so much sense, right? To get that perspective and to pause and to be a little bit more compassionate. You know what I mean? At those moments when they're running for that next goal. What are some of the things that they could do to try and manage themselves in those moments when they're tested?
Shannah Kennedy: Yeah. Well, the word slowdown is always a red flag for all of us, because we don't want to.
Gillian Fox: Yes, yes.
Shannah Kennedy: If you're told to slow down, you're like, "No, then I'll get behind," because of our achievement brain.
Gillian Fox: Yes.
Shannah Kennedy: So, I like to think of it as you're the racehorse and we need to pace. So, we don't need to slow down, but we need to pace. We need to breathe. We need to find groundedness, calmness in what we're doing, because we're racing too much and we're using so much fuel and creating so much stress hormone in our body that Dr. Levy always says Rushing Women's Syndrome. We are not built for that, so you will burn, and you will fall. If you could just pace yourself a little bit, breathe, no one's breathing. All of these women, no one breathes. They just breathe to hear. There's no oxygen. We need to learn to calm our nervous system down so that we can achieve more by pacing ourself calmly.
Gillian Fox: Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: I think a lot of it is state of mind, not how much you're doing. It's the mindset that's connected to our beautiful I get to do this list. On my to do list, it says, "I get to do this podcast. I get to coach the next client. I get to put the washing on." It is a different framework to I have to. "I have to do that email. I have to do that proposal. I have to do all of these things today." That is just creating in the body that rushing syndrome where if we just said, "I get to do this, and I'm going to breathe through it, and every time I go to the bathroom and I wash my hands, I'm going to take three deep, grounding breaths and refuel." They're like the Gatorade stops on the marathon.
Gillian Fox: Yeah. I love that analogy of yours. Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: What women are doing, these awesome, beautiful, amazing young women are doing is just running the marathon every day, no Gatorade stops, no warming up, no cooling down, and trying to do it day after day after day, and then having autoimmune issues or mental breakdowns or finding themselves burning out, which leads to depression and all of these things, when if we could just pace every day, like an elite athlete does, warming up, making your bed, doing some breath work, moving your body, entering the marathon of the day, which is life is messy, but every time you go to the bathroom, you ground yourself and you just breathe, and then you cool down. You know when to switch off. You know? You have a time where you say, "I have to put the phone away. I have to shut the laptop. I now need to go and move my body. I need to stretch. I need to breathe, and I need to be a human being."
Gillian Fox: Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: If you don't do that, you're like the athlete that never leaves the track, and you go into this full burnout. That's really sad, because there's so many talented, beautiful, amazing women out there that, if they could just pace a little bit, they'd just be able to do so much more without feeling the burn.
Gillian Fox: I talk about pace with some of my clients from a different perspective, and I think they're so complimentary, because I talk about pace, because a lot of the women that joined us on our RISE Program are around 35 to 45. So, you think about that age bracket, we're still going to be working for a decade or two. You know what I mean? And not everything has to be accomplished this week, this year. Pace is incredibly important when you're thinking about your career, but pace in a day is equally important, and this is what you're saying. One of the interesting things that you've really taught me too Shannah, is this idea of just anchoring yourself and being kind to yourself, and those moments when you do go into the bathroom when no one's around, those rare little moments, using it in a way that allows you to connect, and just bring that calmness back in, reset and get back out there and be productive and as powerful as you want to be for the next episode of your day. Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: Well, it's high-performance living. We want to have high performance in our career. Then you have to have high performance in looking after the asset. So, we have to treat them equally. We can't just have one without the other. We want to keep performing for the next 10 years on your 10-year plan. You need to pace it, obviously. That's why you and I have done the 20-year plan.
Gillian Fox: I know. How freaky is that? We have to talk about that.
Shannah Kennedy: I'm always thinking about my 70 year old self and thinking about, "I've got to pace myself to be an awesome 70 year old. I don't want to burn out at 55. I've got to pace, because she wants to have energy and not have health issues, etcetera." So, it allows me to make the decision today. But imagine if every day of our life we made our bed, moved our body, did some breathing, did a journal, did a bit of a stretch, that 70 year old is going to go, "Thank you. Thank you," because you've been able to have a high-performance career, which we all have and we all want, but if we're not doing high performance maintenance, which is rhythm, ritual and routine during your day, which is non-negotiable, then you can't have that high performance career. It's like you're the athlete that refuses to do the recovery. You can't keep showing up.
Gillian Fox: No, you just can't. You just can't. So, Shannah, I have you as a coach, and we'll come back to that, but you also employ a coach yourself. It's not just at moments where at the end of that career transition you actually actively pursue a coach every couple of years. Maybe talk about that, because I think a lot of people would assume that coaches don't have coaches.
Shannah Kennedy: Well, well Tony Robbins has a coach.
Gillian Fox: There you go.
Shannah Kennedy: Say no more.
Gillian Fox: Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: An athlete has a coach. If you want to go from this level to this level, you cannot do it alone, so you look for different types of coaches depending on what you need. I've had a speaking coach, I've had a health coach, different types of coaches to go, "Okay, who do I need on my team to quickly educate me, make me accountable, and make me change, who is not going to tell me what I'd like to hear, but is going to tell me what I need to hear?" That's the difference, right? So, when we talk to our friends and our family, they are going to tell you the things that are going to please you and support you, maybe give an opinion or two, the coach is going to hold the mirror and say, "You just said that. You said you wanted this, but your actions are doing this." They're going to call you out a lot of the time.
For me personally, two years ago when COVID first hit and all of those speaking arrangements were canceled for the year, which is a lot of my income, the very first thing that I did was pick up the phone and get a coach, because I knew, "I do not want to be stuck in my head. I'm going to have to reinvent myself. I'm going to have to change all of my programs. I'm going to have to learn how to Zoom. I'm not very technical." So, I got myself a coach, and completely worked, had probably the best two years ever.
Gillian Fox: It is that opportunity, isn't it, to unpack those thoughts, unpack some of the emotions in the coaching process. It helps you get where you want to go. I think that's the most powerful part of it.
Shannah Kennedy: It's not your partner's job to do that or your parents' job, because they're a love relationship, an emotional relationship, whereas the coach is not emotional with you. This is purely being your partner in life to help you go from one level to the next level.
Gillian Fox: Shannah, one of the things that I loved learning from you is the planning process. We did the 20-year plan, which was profound. When you first said it, I just thought it was lunacy, but then you sit down, and it all makes such good sense. But then the other thing that came out of that is the seasonal plans. The seasonal plans are, of course, that snapshot of the season, and it's like an at a glance sheet. I have it in front of me all the time, so we're in winter at the moment, and it has strengths, values, my morning and PM routine, my work goals. I love the fun list, and it's not that there's anything different on the fun list.
All those things are in the diary anyway, but because they're there, I'm more excited about the 40th birthday parties that we are going to, and the dinner parties that we're hosting, and the weekends away. I think why I love that particular plan is that it kind of gets me out of those silos of work, family, and it makes me think of myself a little bit more holistically. I think one of the things that you love to say, strategy brings freedom and results. I feel like that's my strategy, my little winter plan.
Shannah Kennedy: Yeah. Exactly. When we can divide the 365 days of a year into 4 12-week blocks, and I try to get overachieving A types to go into seasons instead of quarters, but we keep challenging ourself to soften up a little bit. You think of winter, and you think, "Okay, well, I've got 12 weeks." When we can see the whole 12 weeks on one piece of paper, that is our whole life. You know? You've got on the wall, my four are here next to me on the wall, I look at them every single day, they're right here. I see them every single day.
I'm looking at them, and then behind this winter is last winter and the winter before and the winter before, because success leaves clues. What was I listening to a couple of winters ago or what was my habit I was trying to really embed into my life? What was on the fun list? Because you forget. You forget when you were at your peak, or you were really happy what you were doing. This is also a great way to record what you are doing, how you're feeling, what's important. What it does is it completely, "I don't have to think. It's all there."
Shannah Kennedy: And it's all based on last year and what worked last year. So, each year it gets refined. I don't have to think. I just have to set some goals, because the whole structure of everything is catered for. When every four times a year you're writing down your strengths and your values again, the same things, you keep going back, because we all know that we need to do repeated things repeatedly for them to stick. So, if you do that for 20 years, you'll never forget your values, because you're writing them four times a year. That sort of came to me on a banana lounge one day when I was on holidays as all the great creative ideas happen.
I was thinking, "How do I get myself and my clients to have all of this information condensed into a bullet point on one piece of paper?" Because the brain needs a map, and when the brain has a map, it can think clearly. When it doesn't have a map, all the external forces come in. The weather, I don't care about the weather, I've got things to do. I've got such structure; I've got such a roadmap in front of me that I don't worry about all of that other stuff. I'm not influenced by that other stuff.
Gillian Fox: You place a lot of emphasis on values, it was one of the first things, in fact, that we did together. Tell us a little bit about why values count for so much because not all coaches take that approach, but it’s a very important component of your approach.
Shannah Kennedy: It is the number one for me. It's because it's the first thing that I did that actually changed my life is let's not work on what the company's values are that I work for, but what about my own? The business of me for the rest of my life. I had to look inside for the first time instead of externally. So, whether you're an elite athlete or a CEO, I say, "Well, what are your own values?" Because when you know home base, your values are the boss of your life. That's who you should be serving.
Gillian Fox: 100%. Yeah.
Shannah Kennedy: The job is what you do. It's not who you are. So, when we say to people, "Who are you without your job?" And they don't know, it means they don't know their values. The values, mine are on a sticky note here, they've been here for the last 20 years. They're on my phone, they're on the mirror. I don't forget. That's who I'm working for today, not the coaching business. What am I doing for my mental, physical and emotional health today? How am I showing up for my family, friends and clients today? What's my achievement today? It's the walking, it's the breathing. It is not selling 5,000 books. It is what am I doing to make sure I do not burn out and can do this for the next 20 years on my plan, how I want to do it rather than just destroying myself for the quick gain?
Gillian Fox: Any final tips for our beautiful listeners?
Shannah Kennedy: Well, I think that life is a playground, right? All of the jobs that we do, that we get to go on, we get to, we don't have to, are different rides in the playground. You might have that job for two years and that job for 10 years, one's a rerris wheel, one's the zipper. There's a whole playground of rides. But when you get off the ride every night, you've got to enjoy being in the park. What people do, they won't get off the ride every night and just recover and then get back on and enjoy the ride the next day. Life's a playground, you know? So let's treat it a little bit lightly, little bit more joyfully, a little bit like what's on my to-do list is my I get to do list, where my focus goes, my energy flows.
So, if I'm going to focus on the weather or the news or that client's annoying, or I don't like doing proposals, that's exactly how your energy's going to be. I think for especially young people, it is learning to embrace the pace, and it's learning how to change your story, what you're telling yourself every day. For me, it's showing up like Roger Federer, calm, confident, grounded, and that's a skill that needs to be practiced. Once it's practiced, it becomes who you are.
Gillian Fox: Always so articulate and inspiring, but you make it so digestible for all of us, and that's what we need, that accessible content. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate your wisdom and your kindness and your contribution, and I'm sure it will be enormously valued by our listeners.
Shannah Kennedy: Fantastic. Thanks for having me, and just have a wonderful, wonderful one day at a time.
What a great conversation. Now if you want to learn more about Shannah, head to her website shannahkennedy.com. There you can buy her books, check out her courses, vision board kits and so much more.
Have a great few weeks and I’ll be seeing you soon.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I would love to give you something for FREE to help you with your career right now.
If you look in the show description there's a link there to my free 16-page guide on how to make your value more visible at work.
In this guide, I share three strategies to amplify your accomplishments at work and practical ways to boost self-confidence.
The insights and tips in this guide are the same I share with my one-on-one coaching clients inside the RISE program.
If you would access to this guide, click the link in the description or go to yourbrilliantcareer.com.au/free-guide.
See you soon.