Focus your development: Your Life, Your Career, Your Game | Talking Talent

Talking Talent recently continued it’s strong coaching presence with Your Life, Your Career, Your Game, showcasing more methods into clarifying and mapping your future.

WeAreTheCity attended the coaching day, to listen in on the top tips being shared with the professional women who attended.

Taking over a space at the Oxo Tower Wharf on 28 February, the day saw workshops guided by Talking Talent’s Jo Lyon, Co-founder and MD, and coach Lucy Dale – who have 30+ years combined skills and experience in the coaching profession. The team are committed to developing and maximising the female talent pipeline and immediately got straight into the agenda for the day.

At the event were professionals from companies such as Coca Cola and EY, investment bankers, solicitors, a mixed-gender team of co-workers who had all been made redundant and a table of new mothers, all who needed help clarifying a direction in their life and career.

One woman, currently on maternity leave from investment banking, asked:

“I want to try and get a good work-life balance when I go back to my role. I never want to step down from my career but how can I balance the two?”

As a group, we assessed that most of the career issues in the room were directed into three areas;

• Career performance and happiness/unhappiness was down to management.
• Settling things in our personal lives may help find balance to our work priorities.
• Understanding our own progression and how it may differ from others is integral to finding success.

Jo Lyon began by explaining that the purpose of the day is to understand what you want, and we set about using ‘Card to determine’ in order to assess what was most important to us;

“Our values are stable & form core beliefs, motivations can be changeable according to environment or circumstance.”

The general consensus of the room was that arguments could be made for each of the cards, but that they all factor into each other. We agreed that the ones that we chose first clearly take precedent in our lives and should be focused on.

The coaches continued to use the cards as a method of discovering our priorities. A female attendee from EY chose excellence, friendliness and flexibility, citing:

“I think it’s important to come from a company with a stellar reputation, with co-workers to be proud of. You need a friendly team as you’ll be spending most of your time with them, and the ability to make your own choices at work is integral to keeping a healthy mind and a healthy heart.”

The Agenda then moved from understanding ourselves to visualising and plotting our future goals. The group discussed our greatest achievements with each other, before making large maps to determine what we can see for our lives in five years time in both work and at home? These exercises were useful in assessing our priorities, making ourselves aware of what we want for the future and forcing us to brainstorm what makes us happy.

Coach Lucy Dale shared a story about a future birthday party, in which the group had to visualise every aspect of the party, saying:

“Who from work and home was at the birthday party? What food, decorations, theme was there? Are you happy? Why are you happy?”

The exercise resonated with the group, who all took away further clarification of their future priorities.

The workshops overall provided strategies to help achieve future goals, reflect and plan, and share ideas with like-minded individuals who are at a similar crossroads in their lives. You can find out more about Talking Talent and their coaching workshops here.