Hello, and welcome to the first LinkedIn and Facebook Live of 2023. I hope you had a lovely Christmas, and Happy New Year to everyone watching today live and on the replay. Today, I’m delighted to chat with Anna Meller, and we will discuss how to get the work-life balance you need in 2023 and upcycle your job.
Anna, an author, has published a book titled Upcycle Your Job: The Smart Way to Balance Family, Life, and Career. The idea for the book came from a colleague during a conversation. Upcycling is taking something that was once fit for a specific purpose but no longer suits our lifestyle and adapting it to suit us again. During the conversation, Anna mentioned that this concept applies to the book, which encourages working parents, particularly mothers, to upcycle their jobs rather than downshift and lose their skills when they have a family, and the challenge becomes too great. Anna wants to encourage these individuals to continue using their skills flexibly, perhaps by thinking differently about their jobs.
She believes it is important to adapt our jobs and careers to fit modern lifestyles and meet the changing expectations of women. In her book, Meller introduces the PROPEL model, offering ambitious working mothers new opportunities to advance their corporate careers. The book guides readers through a six-step, evidence-based process to help them achieve work-life balance. It includes practical exercises to help individuals create a work arrangement that satisfies both their employer and their goals, and to develop the necessary skills to maintain this balance. Please stay tuned!
Key Highlights
[00:00:29] Introduction to today’s guest: Anna Meller
[00:00:55] Inspiration behind the title: Upcycle Your Job
[00:03:37] How to know how to upcycle: The PROPEL Model
[00:05:05] Step 1: Balancing between parenthood and working
[00:07:51] Step 2: Investigate your role
[00:11:51] Step 3: Explore your options and get the right flexible working arrangement
[00:15:01] Step 4: Realizing that there are always other possibilities.
[00:19:06] Step 5: Essentials skills to upgrade
[00:21:04] Step6: Being a leader in a flexible working arrangement
Notable Quotes
- Working arrangements fail when we don’t know who we’re being or where we’re setting our boundaries.
- We are almost in a boundary-less era where they’re not there unless you set your boundaries.
- I always recommend that people start by meeting their employer halfway and then push the boundaries further from there.
- One of the things I also say to people is to check what’s going on under the radar because, in many organisations, there are people who are already pushing the boundaries, pushing policies, and stretching things. Still, we don’t know about them because someone has agreed on an arrangement.
- When you’re thinking about what options might be available to you regarding flexible working, it’s always worth asking, who else do you know who’s working flexibly?
- Part of finding the right balance for you is recognising that most of us work at the team level people have different, so maybe opening up the conversation to how can we all support each other to find the balance we all need? It’s important.
- Whatever arrangement you want to work in, having looked at who you want to be and how you want to work flexibly, you may need to upgrade your skills.
- In my book, I look at a whole list of skills that you might want to upgrade. None of them are new skills; all of them will be an upgrade, and the key skill that comes out of all the research around how to be a successful, flexible worker is communication.
- If you work flexibly, whether you want to communicate your boundaries, your working days, your working arrangements, what’s acceptable to you or not, all of that is down to you.
Let’s Get Social!
To connect with Anna Meller:
Anna’s Book on Amazon: Upcycle Your Job: The Smart Way to Balance Family, Life, and Career
Anna on LinkedIn: LinkedIn
If you want to upcycle your job, check out the latest flexible, part-time, and work-from-home job vacancies on the Investing in Women job board today.