Wellbeing is a word that’s everywhere these days — but do consultants take it as seriously as we should?
Phil is joined by Fiona McKinnon and Alex Strang of Moment Company to discuss the all-too-real impact of burnout — on our practices and on our clients.

We also discuss a range of ways that consultants can protect and enhance our own wellbeing with the performance coach Dominic Beecheno, who has been helping people survive and thrive at work for nearly two decades.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Phil Lewis: Wellbeing. It’s one of those words that gets all sorts of reactions, including people’s eyes rolling back in their head as they get exasperated with yet another HR style gimmick. But here’s the thing. None of us is a machine, and if we’re not taking care of ourselves, and we’re not encouraging our clients to take care of themselves, then we’re racking up all sorts of problems. Welcome to The Consultancy Business. We are here to champion ethics and excellence in independent consultancy. And on this episode, we’re looking at these important questions of wellbeing. We start with a conversation with Fiona McKinnon and Alex Strang of Moment Company, in which we discuss the very real impact of burnout, what to do about it, and perhaps most importantly actually, how to make sure we’re not burning out in the first place. And then later on in the episode we’re joined by a brilliant coach Dominic Beecheno, someone who for nearly 20 years now has been helping clients to think in very different ways about how they experience the world and how to take care of themselves. Those clients including lots of independent consultants like you and I. Let’s get into it. Here is my conversation with Fiona and Alex of Moment Company. Alex and Fiona, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:24] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: Hello. Thank you. Nice to be here, Phil.

[00:01:27] Alex Strang – Moment Company: Hi, Phil. Very nice to meet you.

[00:01:28] Phil Lewis: So I thought we’d begin with a bit of an overview about the work that you do and indeed how you got into doing this work in the first place.

[00:01:37] Alex Strang – Moment Company: Not to speak for both of us too much, but we both sort of come up from… through ad tech, adland, work environments. And have experienced the impact of high performance, but potentially also the combination with sort of some toxic environments that led to our own experiences of burnout. Fiona’s physical, mine more mental, affecting my memory. And, that ultimately, all those years back, set us on a path, a pursuit of helping organisations to set up high performance environments, but that drive people outcomes as well as business outcomes. And for us, that’s all about anchoring wellbeing into almost all elements of the business.

[00:02:25] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: So yeah, echoing what Alex said, I had a background in ad tech for around 20, 25 years now and, our personal experience of organisations where there was great working culture and encouragement of leadership and also environments that were not so good, where for me, not being able to set personal boundaries, being absolutely terrible at saying no to anything meant that I suffered from burnout. And, you know, I think, combined, our experience has led us to be very passionate and driven to ensure that people don’t suffer the experiences that we did, because there’s definitely a better way that organisations can run teams can run, but also as individuals, we can take more control and be more empowered behind what we can do ourselves around our wellbeing, our vision, our personal goals. And sometimes they get overlooked in terms of just building businesses. And both of us have set up our own companies previously and also being in startups. So that was a particular environment that we know is highly pressurised. That founders and smaller organisations simply do not look after themselves as a main priority. But as we know, if we don’t have a good solid foundation of well being, then it’s highly unlikely our organisation will over time. And it’s that sustainability piece that really is the foundation of what we do.
So how do we help you grow and learn over time and not just, you know, a quick fix.

[00:04:02] Phil Lewis: There’s a number of things in what you both shared that I’m curious to explore with you. Where I’m inclined to go first is discussion around burnout. Its drivers and how it manifests, I guess. I mean, my sense of burnout — and I think I’ve experienced burnout… well, I have experienced burnout once in a major way in my own career, and I suspect there have been long periods of my career where I’ve been sort of what you might describe as bumping across the bottom — and I would observe that the factors that contributed to that were pretty complicated. So they were everything from you know, organisational culture and bosses with questionable behavior, which itself, by the way, tends, in my view, to be a byproduct of poor incentives in the organisation, all that sort of stuff. Through to, you know, the monkey on my own back around performance and what performance at work means through to a sort of, I guess, set of beliefs around my value in the value of the people around me, which often is grounded, I think, in our levels of productivity, quote unquote, because that’s the, you know, economic message we get drilled into us from birth, if nothing else, so I’m interested in your analysis of… It feels like burnout is a sort of really emotionally and physically horrific symptom that is driven by potentially quite a complex interrelationship of root causes, if that makes sense.

[00:05:43] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: I think you summed it up very well. And I think what’s also interesting, on my reflection of my burnout journey, is that moment of physical collapse for me. So as Alex said up front, my experience was physical burnout. Actually the mental had been going on for years. I just wasn’t listening to the signals. I wasn’t seeing the signs that I needed to step away from toxic environments. I was living abroad for 10 years and I was moving country every, every two years, moving, setting up afresh. And I just didn’t appreciate how much toll that had taken on me. And I would say that all of the different elements that you explained there from, you know, the leadership, the culture, the environment, the personal boundary setting, were all areas that when you’re in your late twenties, thirties, you know, no one tells you about these things. Which is what really drives me to be a coach and to help support people is on the two occasions that I was offered coaching through that experience, it literally saved my life. I really, truly believe that. When I was in LA, the company that I worked for, gave me some exec coaching sessions and the poor lady ended up being a life coach because it was so much in my life blowing up. Because that’s the thing. It’s not just about what’s happening in your, in your work life. It’s also about what’s happening as a ripple effect into your personal as well. Her guidance, her support, the lessons that she gave me in that moment that I still use today and use in my own clients that we, we coach. You know, literally having that third party be able to drag you out of your own kind of personal challenges was, was, as I say, it was life and career changing for me. And that’s why I want.. at Moment we’re really about helping people advance their own performance, whatever that means to them. You don’t have to be in the depths of despair of burnout in order to want to have a more positive trajectory. But I couldn’t even see that at the time that I was in the depths. So I think that was something that really saved me and then has changed the course of my, my career as a result.

[00:08:04] Alex Strang – Moment Company: What I really appreciate is when I reflect on mine is that it was a huge team game. I don’t blame workplaces. There was my own behaviour, how I was addressing things. There were friends around me, there were, there was workplace… there were all these different elements that in the way I was, as I say, interacting with all of them is what took me down that path. And I guess in the context of our consultancy work, it’s working out what the responsibility is of business. That’s what I’m quite interested in. Of the workplace. So it’s… workplaces are not wholly responsible, but I do believe hold a proportion of it and should be there to either notice, call out, provide support, like Fiona mentioned. And so, yeah, infinitely complex. And I’ve spoken to a lot of people about a lot of burnouts and they’re all very different. I’m thankful, you know, mine wasn’t to the point of hospitalisation or not being able to… or being housebound. It can get very, very serious and thankfully I wasn’t that bad. However, the passion that burns within me is to really flip workplaces from environments that drain people into environments that kind of help them thrive. So it’s the opposite of creating burnout. It’s a platform for growth.

[00:09:30] Phil Lewis: That question about where responsibility actually sits is to me, absolutely central in any discussion, not only about combating burnout, but also enhancing performance within the individual, within a team, within a wider organisation, you know. I mean, without this becoming a sort of political point, you know, capitalism is intrinsically exploitative, right? So the value of regulation in markets is ultimately to stop organisations, businesses, behaving in the way that they would behave if they weren’t curtailed by legal and regulatory restrictions. And they behave that way because ultimately they have a set of incentives that fuel that behaviour. So there are always needs for checks and balances, and that question about where responsibility sits feels really, really important. And it also feels really important through the lens of what you were talking about Fiona as well, which is we talk about burnout, but it isn’t just about waiting until you get to rock bottom. What I heard in that was the idea that actually there’s a whole world of performance and potential that we’re able to access as people if we can look after ourselves and those around us in the right ways. And again, there’s the question about; where is the individual’s responsibility in that, and where is the business’s responsibility. In the context of your own work, how are you helping businesses to navigate through those sorts of conversations, so that they can start to reflect on their own responsibility, and they can start to make better choices. And I guess as a related question, how is it that wellbeing doesn’t just get sort of co-opted or funneled into some cul-de-sac in HR? How is it actually made to be an organisational wide imperative? Because that’s the other issue in all of this. There’s the issue of responsibility, but there’s also the issue of where does the ownership of this agenda point, if you want to call it that, sit.

[00:11:31] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: From our perspective in the work that we do and when we speak to organisations, I think that there’s a responsibility within an organisation, we believe, to create a framework for that growth, that personal development and discovery to happen. So it’s not about being overly prescriptive. Because everybody’s individual, everybody has a different set of challenges, as we also explained up front, different set of personal circumstances that are important in how they might need help at any given time. Their roles are different, so there isn’t just a broad brush for everybody, but it’s about creating enough of a framework so that people can then find their individual action points, so you cannot create change if the individual doesn’t want to. You have to make their shoulds become musts so that they actually want to create the change themselves. But that can be difficult if they don’t know how to, where to go to, or have a framework in order to know what growth and success for them looks like. So I think what’s important for companies, if there’s a framework of personal development that allows that to happen — and measurability is a really big piece of that — but you have to have opt in at the individual level. You can’t force someone to change. You can’t tell them how they need to change. It has to be driven from, from themselves, I believe, to really kind of have demonstrable impact. So that’s our responsibility really, is to create the framework at the organisational level, and then work with the individual to find their own version of what that growth means to them. And back to your point, Phil, it doesn’t have to be from burnout. It can be highly performing executives who want… are curious what the next level entails for them and then how that impacts how they can help others, because the beautiful impact of individual change is that you immediately change those who you work with because you show up differently, you ask questions in a different way, you respond differently in meetings and that automatically creates a ripple of effective change within others in your team and organisation. So it’s definitely a combination of business responsibility and individual.

[00:13:48] Alex Strang – Moment Company: A pet peeve of mine… I’ve sort of become almost anti these sort of wellbeing solutions plastered on the outside of organisations to say; Hey, we’ve got well being sorted here it is stuck on the outside. Because ultimately a few people will engage with whatever that is, but it’s not part of the organisation itself. And through our own experience, I think early on of selling wellbeing we found that we didn’t enjoy actually selling it and that wellbeing is only needed for people who have ‘unwellbeing’. And that actually it’s kind of just bringing things up to a baseline that should exist.

[00:14:33] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: Well, this is my new pet peeve. Isn’t it, Alex, that well being is such a blah term. Who just wants to be well? Why do we celebrate just being, you know, if you say, how are you? Oh, I’m well. It’s kind of like a… yeah, I’m all right. So why, why is that something we should be celebrating? So if anyone can recommend or you can think, Phil, of a better word, that’s more dynamic than wellbeing, we’re on the hunt right now for that. Because it feels so passive and just. Yeah. Okay.

[00:15:00] Phil Lewis: It feels, it feels like a very kind of meh word, doesn’t it? You know, and it’s like, where you go is, is into the world of performance, which feels again, very kind of like drive, drive, drive, make the money, make the money, make the money, you know. And actually we’re trying to talk about, you know, and then you get into the sort of related concepts, I guess, like states of flow and all that kind of stuff. But it is really hard because this language, I think either feels really bland, or actually has been co-opted by a value system, which is actually creating the very problems that your work is seeking to tackle. And so striking out and finding a new language for it or finding a better way of framing it, I think… that doesn’t feel like a marginal question to me. That feels like quite an important question in terms of really unlocking the value of what the kind of work that you guys are doing, you know.

[00:15:55] Alex Strang – Moment Company: Certainly the way that we’re talking right now is that there are actually layers of language for different audiences. The business itself still wants high performance growth. And then once you get into the kind of, we’ll just call it an employee level, it’s interesting. People are less sort of maybe high performance mad, but people, it turns out still want to grow and get a promotion and earn more money. And so I think softening that language… it’s a more enjoyable conversation for us as coaches and facilitators of workshops when people are wanting… people join in and want to move up and grow and sort of flourish and thrive, versus a; how can we all just be well kind of thing. So I think there’s a direction of energy that comes with performance that we prefer to, I guess, pure wellbeing, but definitely audience based, you know, if you just say, you know, the classic law firms are like high performance environments, right? Which are famously not so good for your health. So I think, I think for us, it’s finding language at different levels. But ultimately helping organisations define what performance looks like for them. And our job as well, whether we speak about it very openly or not in the communication and how we set up, is to ensure that we are weaving wellbeing into all the actions that we take. We ultimately come from mindfulness approach backgrounds, and not just in terms of mindfulness practice, but how do you go about your day in a mindful way? How do you speak to someone and listen actively to them when you’re in that meeting, and different ways in which you sort of approach the workplace? So for us it is, I think, looking at the different layers within the organisation and ensuring that we find ways to communicate effectively to each, each layer.

[00:18:02] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: What we’ve also discovered, or come across, is that companies who focus on wellbeing by; Hey, we’re going to do once a month yoga classes. And then they say, right, we’ve ticked a box because now we encourage wellbeing in our organisation. That actually can have a detrimental effect on culture because, great, you do your classes that suit the people that want to do yoga and let’s face it, are probably already doing it. It doesn’t help with communication in the organisation. It doesn’t help move projects forward. It doesn’t actually help someone’s wellbeing if they have a toxic manager and they don’t know how to speak to colleagues. So it is not wellbeing. So these one off workshops, these one off engagements, these talks are not helping organisations and I actually think they’re doing a bad job of encouraging culture and encouraging people to take responsibility. It doesn’t match the objective and I think it’s a negative badging that they’re doing. It doesn’t impact communication or culture.

[00:19:09] Phil Lewis: Frankly, anybody who’s working as a consultant who is a helper to, whether it’s a CEO or to a senior team, is going to, whether they address it or not, be running up against these sorts of issues. Because the world of work is so relentless and so punishing for so many people. And Fiona you used the word ‘suffering’ earlier on, and certainly in terms of my work day in, day out, I do see a lot of suffering. And so those of us who are consultants who are working with any sort of senior team in any sort of organisation need to be alive to these sorts of pressures, these sorts of issues. And I would say whether we build those competencies ourselves, or whether we choose to work with very capable people like the guys on this podcast, is something that we need to be thinking of really actively for our clients. But I also think it’s something we need to be thinking of in terms of our own lives and work as well. So to talk just personally for a second. I mean, I guess I have two competing realities in my work. I don’t know if this would resonate with you guys or if it would resonate with anybody listening, but I guess on the one hand, I’ve got the kind of angel on my shoulder going; you need to look after yourself, you are a person of worth, but also you are your single point of failure in your business. If your health and wellness suffers, you actually aren’t able to perform for your clients at the level that your clients deserve for you to perform for them. And also, quite frankly, in the worst case, you can’t perform at all. So for example, I was brought up very close with this in October, November last year when I lost my voice for a week. And realised it’s incredibly difficult to be a consultant if you can’t speak. But more generally, if I’m feeling really a low ebb from a physical, mental, spiritual, emotional wellness perspective, it’s really hard for me to show up for my clients in a way that I feel I want to show up for them, but I also believe I have an ethical duty to show up for them. So I have that sort of voice on the one hand, on the other hand, I run two small businesses and do things like this podcast and various other kinds of activities to one side. And the nature of consulting work, as we all know, can be unpredictable. It can be quite lumpy sometimes in terms of your own sales performance and your P&L. And there are pressures that come through from the clients that you work with, and sometimes their wants and needs start to influence how your… the pattern of your work life is for a period of time and so on. And all of that, plus, of course, in my case, a very, very high level of intrinsic drive — I once had an organisational psychologist tell me I over indexed against 250 MDs and CEOs on drive… his advice to me was make sure you don’t have a heart attack by the age of 45 — so on the other hand, I recognize that and that pulls me into a space where I am extremely tempted through a combination of drive, ambition, fear, and just the realities of the market that I’m in, to work very, very hard in quite a relentless way. And I really recognise that tension. And there are things that I do around my own health and wellness and all of that to try and mitigate some of the impacts of that. But nevertheless, that is my lived reality. So I say all that, not because I want this podcast to become a kind of personal therapy session for me, but I say it because I do believe that to be the lived experience of a lot of independent consultants. And I’m curious, talking to you guys, about where do you start then when you’re working with the individual? Because if you understand that burnout, as we were talking about at the outset of this recording, is actually driven by quite a complex set of factors, then the solution itself also, it stands to reason, is going to be a lot more than to your point, Fiona, attend a yoga class, which is just a bit fucking stupid as a solution to anything, to be quite honest. So, where do you begin in a kind of journey like that? And how do you help an individual, if they’re an independent consultant, for example, or somebody who’s a senior leader, to navigate out of that place into a place that might be more healthy and sustainable for them.

[00:23:45] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: Getting a coach or getting someone that you can speak to, a mentor, someone who has been through this before, that you can ask is a really, really good place to start. So talking to someone… I’m lucky I’ve got Alex. I think doing what we do as individuals would be way, way more challenging than having a partnership to do that. Definitely talking to someone I think is the first port of call. You know, just that speaking your challenges out loud almost help you solve because after all coaches don’t tell you what to do. We just create the space for you to solve those problems yourself. So, definitely speaking to someone is a really good place. And, you know, as you know, as well, Phil, consultant, being a consultant can be a really lonely place when you’re the only one going in and solving those challenges. And you perhaps don’t have the relationships with the team because you’re going into different organisations on a regular basis. So I think finding a support network, a mentor, a coach is a really important place to start. That’s something that I really do… And as I said previously that really changed things and saved my life having someone to talk to. And then I would also say as well that there’s not one size fits all solution. Sometimes there will be other areas of your life that you are stronger in and it’s recognising where you might need more support. So is it time? Do you actually need to say no to a project? Because at the end of the day, how you feel about the work that you’re doing and how aligned you are with it is ultimately what I believe leads to the burnout. Because we all have the same 24 hours in the day. We can all fill every minute. For me and my experience, and the people that I work with and coach as well, is that if something isn’t quite right, for whatever reason, it’s a project you’re not really aligned with, the team just aren’t gelling well, there’s just something in your head is screaming; No, I don’t want to do this. Then that’s where overwhelm starts to kick in. So being really sure of the projects that you’re taking, being really aligned with your values or the values of the people that you’re working with and working for some of those things that can lead to burnout, magically disappear when you’re aligned, motivated, got good people around you.

[00:26:12] Alex Strang – Moment Company: For my side, I tend to always, certainly later in life, prefer simple and light or simple and fun over serious or boring and complex. And so for me, really the answer to what is an incredibly complex problem — and I say this with care, we have great frameworks and some fancy things we do at Moment Company, structures that help make the work we do real and sustainable — but what’s really the most effective part, core part is the conversation. It’s the conversations that we enable within an organisation. And so when it comes to working one-to-one with an individual, I believe it’s that initial conversation which starts to unpack the complexity of the problem. And it’s only when you start to unpack it through a conversation with someone else’s head, give perspective, reflect back that you’re able to find your own solution to this problem. Because it’s your solution is only going to be your own and it needs to be… it can’t come from someone else. And so it’s that the conversation for me is the central point of solution for all of this if i was to make it as simple as give you the simplest answer I can.

[00:27:38] Phil Lewis: That feels real to me as well though. I mean, I remember talking to a consultant sometime last year who had been listening to one of our podcast episodes. He said, I burst into tears when I was listening to this episode. And I was like, pretty sure whatever we examine on this podcast shouldn’t bring up that reaction, you know, but he said, I burst into tears. And he said, I realised just how lonely I’ve been. How lonely this has all been for how long, you know. And I think there’s something in what you’re saying about burnout as a condition being intrinsically linked to quite a lonely experience. You know, that what happens is certainly in terms of my lived experience, the more kind of… Fiona, you talked about overwhelm — that the more that you get into your own head on something, actually, the more… it’s kind of like a lostness, I think, that happens. A sort of sense of disconnection and certainly I think burnout shows itself as a kind of or can show up as a kind of a complete severing almost of the individual from the organisation or indeed the individual from their own emotional and physical well being or whatever, you know. But there’s an intrinsic loneliness to that that I think what you’re both talking to, which is, well, in effect, find someone to talk to really helps to address. And there’s plenty of research on this as well. I mean, when I was doing my psychotherapy qualifications, we did quite a lot of reading around just the therapeutic benefit of being heard, you know, and actually having somebody sit and genuinely listen to you is extraordinarily beneficial for the individual. Because what the individual intuits in all of that is; you are somebody who is worth listening to. Which is why AI, by the way, is never ever going to be able to replicate the work of coaches and counsellors and the higher end of the consulting market that does more heart centred work in my view. Because it is the feeling that somebody else is putting the effort in to hear our lived experience that actually there’s a huge amount of benefit for us as individuals. And the other thing I find myself thinking to your point, Alex, about simplicity, I mean, certainly in terms of my own experience of how I’ve recovered from some of the things that I’ve experienced in my life, whether at work or not. I mean, I spent a lot of time finding ways to laugh, you know, I mean, it’s… my great breakthrough is I’m very, very well therapised as listeners to this podcast will have picked up from previous conversation. I’ve been in and out of therapy for 20 years, highly recommend it for everybody. But I mean, my great breakthroughs in therapy have all come through laughter. And my therapist has a unique experience to make me see the innate ridiculousness of my own, you know, predicament to my own mindset on some stuff. And actually that’s really, really helpful to me. So there is… I think you’re absolutely right. The kind of… sometimes the… it’s as simple as the the antidote for darkness is light. You know, it’s something like that. So I picked that up in what you guys were saying as well.

[00:30:37] Alex Strang – Moment Company: Absolutely, and my coach Roberto Suarez goes by El Happy Coach! And I, same as you, need the ridiculous, and to laugh and it just unlocks everything. And, you know, he pops up on Zoom and I’m smiling. And that in itself is a tonic that I could almost close the window again and I’d be, you know, 50% better than when I dialed in.

[00:31:03] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: My simple one is music. I love to… and movement, right? They’re really important elements of that, that cost nothing, that can literally change your mood in a second. So it doesn’t always have to be deep thought work. You know, just sometimes putting on your favorite tune and jumping around the kitchen can be a tonic as well, with a bit of laughter thrown in. So none of these things have to be overly serious. And we actually did a workshop, didn’t we, on humour and how you can bring humor into the workplace in a thoughtful way as well, because it just helps break those states, and it helps break your pattern of thought that can make the difference of a good day or a bad day.

[00:31:44] Alex Strang – Moment Company: Yeah. Why does it all have to be so serious? That’s, that’s… in business, in the workplace, like I genuinely believe you can go about things in a serious and complex way. Or, as far as an approach, in a lighter and more simple way. And I do believe the seriousness and over complexity contributes quite significantly to the load people carry in addition to the work.

[00:32:13] Phil Lewis: Well, there’s something about taking the work seriously but not yourself that sort of deeply appeals to me. As a bloke from the north of England, that really deeply appeals to me, the idea of being able to sort of find things about your own behaviour and your own predicament to laugh at. But I would also tell you, by the way, to your point Fiona, one of the single biggest breakthroughs in terms of my own health and wellness in the last five years — I cannot believe I’m about to disclose this on this podcast — but is disco playlist that I was forced to put together for uh, one particular session I was doing. I can’t even tell you… that playlist has been an absolute tonic. Because if anybody is ever having a bad day, go and get some… I mean, proper disco music on. There is, as always with humour and lightness, there’s something it’s pointing us to in all of it, which is actually a fundamental point, which is, yes, the work that we do sometimes is serious, the work that we do helping clients is serious, the predicaments that clients are in can be serious, because actually livelihoods and the ability to provide for families and everything else depends on it. But then it’s also all about perspective as well, isn’t it? And being able to, you know, to understand that sometimes the best way through really serious, heavy things actually might be to try and find a different and sometimes much lighter perspective on them, or just don’t pay attention to it for a bit and then come back and see if the energy’s changed. Those things are often overlooked, I think, in how we think about our own work lives and how we think about helping our clients and, and potentially to the detriment of our work as well as to the detriment of our own well being.

[00:33:52] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: It’s important to bring personality. It’s important to bring different perspective and that’s not just in the outlook of the work, but it’s also bringing personality into it. So, you know, I had a couple of little goes of testing how much of me I brought into it. And I always came to the same conclusion that authentically turning up as myself and, and sometimes my, my swearing Scottishness, sometimes it’s just who I am. And that’s important that I show up and be myself as well.
So I do appreciate as consultants, we have that fine line to balance, of you know, you don’t want to walk in in a crazy clown outfit and banana shoes on day one, but you also want to bring something of your personality to the projects as well.

[00:34:32] Phil Lewis: You know swearing has been proven to index to emotional intelligence?

[00:34:36] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: Well, I’m doing f—-ing great then!

[00:34:38] Phil Lewis: Guys, been really good talking to you. Thank you. As we close out, I want to ask for one piece of advice. If somebody is looking to really enhance their performance from where they are right now. So, you know, they may not be in that burnout place, but they’re thinking about their life and their work, and they’re thinking that there’s more that they could be bringing, and there’s more that they’d want to be doing, and they want to have a richer and fuller experience of their work and their life, right? Which I think is really the essence of performance. What would be one thing that they might consider or one avenue for them to explore?

[00:35:16] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: For me, the most obvious one is speak to a coach. Find someone to talk to to help you unlock that. It’s not something that you can always do yourself, so speak to someone who can help you with that. And I would say that nine times out of ten, it’s not what you imagined that you need. The first layer of the onion is never the part that really can produce the most impactful change. So speak to someone that can help you. That’s my best bit of advice.

[00:35:44] Alex Strang – Moment Company: Start having conversations with those people around you who you feel might have some clue as to what the next step might be for you. My personal reflection has been coaches have unlocked so much for me, different coaches over different stages of my life, but have been such a game changer and are why what I do what I do, because I want to be able to give it back. Basically.

[00:36:11] Phil Lewis: great stuff. Well, for any… both clients and consultants listening to this podcast. We will put links to your very good business, the Moment Company, in the show notes to this episode. Thank you both for joining us. A particular thanks to you, Alex, because Alex has called in all the way from New Zealand for this podcast recording where it is very, very late at night. So good to be joined as Alex and Fiona. Thank you as well for making the time. It’s been a really useful conversation.

[00:36:39] Fiona McKinnon – Moment Company: Brilliant. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. Thank you, Phil.

[00:36:45] Phil Lewis: A big thanks to Fiona and Alex for what was a really fascinating conversation. Talking of fascinating conversations, here is the second of today’s episode with Dominic Beecheno, a coach who not only looks at matters of wellbeing, but actually how that connects to our intellectual life, our spiritual life, and what we do and how we show up physically in the world as well. So without further ado, here is my discussion with Dominic. Dominic, welcome to the podcast.

[00:37:17] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: Hi, Phil. It’s great to be here.

[00:37:19] Phil Lewis: If I think about the world that I’m in and you’re adjacent to Dom, which is the world of independent consulting. So if we think back over the last couple of years, not just here in the UK, but across Europe and in the US, the economic headwinds post COVID have been massive. Inflation, interest rates going up, client budgets being cut… just harder and harder to get work sold in. And I have conversations over and over again with independent consultants who are just finding it ever harder to really keep afloat, or even if they are keeping afloat, finding the move from surviving to thriving ever more difficult to do. A lot of the people that I talk to would struggle to feel a sense of empowerment because it feels like so much of what’s going on out there is beyond their control, and so much of what goes on even in the client organisations that we’re all dependent on to make a living is beyond our control as well. So I was keen to get you on the podcast really to explore questions of empowerment. I’m interested in your reflections on what it means to empower yourself or to be empowered at times when it feels like everything’s working against you.

[00:38:42] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: So my philosophy is that we live in a world of duality, which means there’s an opposite to everything. And so if we see empowerment as being a problem, then the problem, actually, is a gift in disguise. And going through the process of overcoming that issue, that problem is exactly what we need to deal with in order to come out the other side effectively with the gold, with success, in that area. So there are always problems. You cannot… doesn’t matter who you are. If you see a problem as an opportunity as… this is a lesson for me to get, then you show up as a different person like right, okay, what’s what is this? I can overcome it. What is it I’ve got to learn in order to move forward. That’s empowering, because it means that you’re not a victim of the external world. So you’ve got your internal world, your thoughts and feelings are going on, and people are blaming the economy, the lack of funds, whatever… parliament, whatever it might be. They’re blaming the outside world rather than looking at themselves in the mirror and going, what is it that I can do differently? Who do I need to be? How do I need to show up? That’s going to enable me to overcome this problem, which is actually exactly what I need to focus on to grow, Which is another fundamental human need, that growth.

[00:40:14] Phil Lewis: I think this is where the idea of mastery really comes in, isn’t it?
Because I think back to my year, last year, 2023, I wrote a piece about this in December and the piece that I wrote was in effect, it’s been a really rough year. Here are the things that I’ve learned. Now, it’s kind of easy to sort of look back at experiences with the benefits of a bit of distance of time and say, you know what? Actually, here are the things that I extracted from that experience, but I would also tell you in all candour that I was like a bear with a sore head for about six to nine months last year. You know, as I said in the piece, we got hit by a number of things that were just not our fault: really bad accounting advice, a big bad debt situation, just a couple of things that did not go our way from a contracts point of view with our clients… or potential clients I should say. And it felt like we just couldn’t catch a break. So I think it’s one of those things about mastery is the being able to catch that in the moment, isn’t it? I think about consultants I know, and we’re all very good at the retrospective in position of narrative order on the chaos in our own work lives and the kind of chaos in the clients that we serve but it’s when you’re going through it that it matters the most. And I say that because I’m conscious that there are people who are listening to this podcast who may well be going through it at the moment themselves. And I think it can be very difficult to sort of work out how to extract the lessons. But I think what you’re saying is actually you always have choices in those moments, at least about how you show up.

[00:41:56] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: I think certain problems in our lives keep recurring until we get the lesson that perhaps the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, chi, love, wants us to get. I remember having a very, very, they call it a dark night of the soul. It’s not a dark night of the soul. It’s your brain, whose role is to think, and thinking is you talking to yourself, but you don’t have to believe your thoughts, and it’s being able to detach yourself from that thinking, believing that those thoughts are real, and catch yourself, and in that moment, when you’re having the negative thought, which, by the way is the default mode of the brain, because it wants to keep us safe. The ego mind, the thinking mind, wants to create drama because that’s exciting and that has identity. So catching yourself in the moment of when you’re feeling and thinking negative thoughts, and choosing to do something different. So you can manage your state of mind, state of feeling. And so, quick example, would be when you’re having these negative thoughts and you’re feeling maybe lethargic or apathetic or feeling like that second glass of wine, in that moment, actually you do something else to change the chemistry in your body. You go for a walk, you pat the dog, you give your loved one a hug, you do some stretching, do some yoga, have some dark chocolate… all these things which would change the chemistry that’s going on in your body so that you change your state quickly and and then re-engage with the work you might be doing with a better or optimised mental state and energy. So that’s… that would be what I would suggest as a way to overcome the difficulties in the moment.

[00:43:40] Phil Lewis: I want to talk about this word optimise. Whenever I hear the word optimise, it’s one of those sort of words that is a trigger word, actually, for me, because it feels like a very kind of businessy word, but like the word growth. Everybody’s obsessed with growth, aren’t they? Yeah, I’m interested in your definition of optimise because associations I have with it are I guess twofold. One is I think we sort of optimise machines rather than human beings. But I also have those horrible LinkedIn posts in mind where it’s like, I rose at 4.30am and kissed my sleeping wife on the cheek before heading off to a day at the sales call face, you know. You just think, oh, there’s no resemblance to anybody who’s actually living and real in the world right now. I’m interested in what you mean by optimisation because again, many independent consultants listening to this feel they’re engaged in a fight to stay afloat. And again, optimisation might feel like a bit of a luxury.

[00:44:41] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: So growth, optimisation, high performance. Yeah, they’re all interesting words, but ultimately it’s about you being you in this moment. Because remember, time is a dimension, is a concept. All your problems exist in the past or the future when you’re completely present in this moment and you’re just not worrying. You’re being actually present. That’s when life gets an awful lot easier. I was coaching someone yesterday. She’s like, I’m 42. Life shouldn’t be this difficult. Who made up that law that life shouldn’t be difficult by the age of 42? It is what it is. If we take away the judgment of; the situation should be different or better or worse or whatever it might be, and just are completely present in this moment, then everything… nothing really matters so much, and you’re just in awe of how amazing life is, how grateful you can be for having the arms and the legs and the ability to speak in a relatively safe country.

[00:45:39] Phil Lewis: What I heard in what you just said with your story is also the idea that anything that happens is personal. One of the things that really helped me last year, when I was going through the times I was going through, was really connecting to the idea that behaviour is impersonal. That actually, if you look at all human behaviour and how we quote unquote treat each other a lot of the time, actually, what’s happening with all of us is we’re just acting out our own behavioral archetypes. We’re acting out our own behaviour, internal scripts, we’re doing what we think we need to do to keep ourselves safe in a hostile and impersonal universe. Now, I think there’s a distinction that needs driving here, which is that there’s been a phrase in business for years, which is, it’s not personal, it’s just business. Which is usually a kind of get out of jail free card for absolutely abhorrent behaviour. We’re not saying that there’s an excuse for abhorrent behaviour, it’s that behaviour is impersonal. It’s just actually a fact. Nature is impersonal, behaviour is impersonal, nothing is actually really targeted at us in the way that we think it is. Life is difficult, life is easy, most of us have a blend of both in different ways, right? And internalising that seems to me to be absolutely critical because while, yes, we all make our way through the world doing what we can to keep ourselves safe, stuff is going to happen. People are going to behave badly. Situations are going to transpire in which we as consultants might get shafted, for example, or treated poorly in other ways. And learning that actually this feels like it’s targeted at us, but isn’t actually targeted at us at all, I think he’s so helpful. From a coping standpoint. Because if we can let go of the idea that it’s personal, then we can let go of the idea that we have to, in some sense, cling onto that as a kind of attack on ourselves.

[00:47:41] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: What springs to mind is that there are effectively… the first three levels of awakening. One is the first level that most people are at, because most people, 80% or so are living in fear and doubt the whole time. But it’s the victim mentality of life is happening TO me. The next level is where we work; that sort of personal development, understanding, that if we take these actions then we impact the world and that life is happening BY me. By my thoughts, by the action, by my feelings, and all those things. The level beyond that, which is a little bit more difficult for people to understand, is that actually you go; well, what needs to happen THROUGH me? I’m a human being on a planet among 8 billion other humans and maybe there’s something that actually I’m here for, and I’ve got to discover what that gift is, then I’ll know I’m living the best life because I’ll be in flow, I’m enjoying each day.

[00:48:41] Phil Lewis: There’s a great story that I read towards the back end of last year about an Indian — I think he was Indian — about a great spiritual teacher who has, you know, had hundreds or thousands of followers. And he said to them one day, I’m going to announce the secret to all of my teachings into my enlightenment. I’m going to reveal to you the great hidden truth at the heart of all of this. All of the followers were cockahoop and beside themselves with excitement about this. And everyone showed up for this big reveal. And the big reveal was: I don’t mind what happens. And you can sort of just reflect on that forever. And I got to the end of the year, you know, wrote up my lessons from the year and everything else, but one reflection I did have was; none of the worrying that I did, and none of the obsessing that I did, and none of the sort of bitter recrimination stuff that I spent some of my internal monologue on, made any difference whatsoever to where we ended at the end of the year. And that I think is… was an important insight for me. It was like all of that energy that I’d spent was kind of wasted energy that could have gone on something more productive, something more productive, not necessarily being work, to your point. It could actually be, you know, taking time out to relax and recover all of those sorts of things. And also to your point about nature, the other reflection that I had was; when things are really tough and tight, you know, the job in one sense is do what is necessary to hang on, knowing that spring will eventually come.

[00:50:31] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: Wholeheartedly agree. And another way of looking at it is that… we know from quantum physics that… and Einstein, you know, E=MC squared, energy is matter, matter is energy, and it’s just our senses that mean that we perceive it as physical matter, actually, there’s nothing there, it’s just space. So if everything is energy, we know that it’s measured as a frequency, and a frequency is, you know, it’s a wavy line. So there is the high, and there is the low, and both exist, and you cannot have one without the other. And so knowing that is comforting, as you say. After winter, spring will come and summer and things will be good again.

[00:51:07] Phil Lewis: One thing I spend a lot of time reflecting on is that I am in effect the single point of failure in my business. You know, to put it in the most simple terms, and you may castigate me here for an overly negative worldview, but I think, well, if I go down, if my health goes, then it takes down everything else with it, right? It takes down my ability to serve my clients, and then in time, it takes down my business. So although none of us know what’s around the corner, I do think there’s something about stacking the deck in my favour. So for me, that means, you know, heavy exercise, good nutrition, a focus on sleep. And again, I rush to say, I am elaborately uninterested in that kind of highly alpha male view, which is, you know, again, I woke at 4.30 and had my bulletproof coffee before spending an hour and a half in the ice tub, you know. It’s like… not talking about any of that. If you want to do that, fair enough. I’m talking about taking good care of oneself, and taking good care of relationships and, you know, the basics of life, I guess you could call it that. And although I think wellness and wellbeing is something that is commanding ever-increasing attention in general in the world of work, I don’t think it’s something we spend a lot of time talking about in consulting. And actually if you look at consulting and you look at the consulting marketplace, the finders minders and grinders model, which another guest on our podcast, Steve Hearsum, was talking about recently, means that a lot of the time people working incredibly long hours, they get burned out, they don’t really take care of themselves, and then they’re not resourced to do the work that they want to do. So that point to my optimisation taking care of the basics: sleep, nutrition, health, all the rest of it, feels absolutely essential to being able to run any kind of meaningful independent consultancy practice.

[00:53:26] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: I think people usually are of the mind that high performance is the ability to work 12 hour days and really sort of smash it when it comes to long hours and hard work. But actually, if we… I like to study some of the greatest minds that have lived on this planet, and one thing that I’ve noticed that’s common among them all is that they take massive breaks, like massive breaks. It’s like a sports person, you know, they say that recovery is just as important as the training. And so, for example, let’s take some examples, Gandhi. He walked for two hours a day and meditated for at least two as well. Michelangelo, who painted the Sistine Chapel, famous for falling asleep whilst doing it, having a nap whilst on the job. Leonardo da Vinci, again, another one who would do nothing for many hours during the day. And we live in this world of, you know, using our brains, our intellect a lot, and it uses up an awful lot of energy. 20% of our energy goes into our brain. So if you’re doing cerebral work, you know, thinking work, which consultants generally are, it’s really important that we have equal amounts of disengagement from that work, and that we go for a walk, do exercise, do some gardening, do some painting, some art, whatever it might be, but using, effectively, the right brain rather than the left brain, thinking, logical, analytical mind. We’re using the right brain, which is entirely present and it’s creative and it’s more around the feelings and we have that balance because again, we live in this world of duality. We need to balance who we are being, just as well as what we are doing each day. And that’s why it’s so important to take really good quality breaks; meditation, exercise, good nutrition, all of those things that allow us to re-engage and work fully at the time that we’re needed, rather than try to push through.

[00:55:26] Phil Lewis: I will greet your story about Gandhi with one about AC/DC. So the producer Rick Rubin tells a brilliant story of working with AC/DC and he said, at the time, I was a much younger producer and, you know, studio time’s really expensive, and AC/DC would sit around sort of smoking cigarettes and drinking tea for hours and hours and hours. And he said, these people were total pros. You know, total pros, but they would sit there and they’d drink tea for hours. And he would be sitting in the control room, tapping his watch, going, can we do another take? Can we do another take? And members of AC/DC sort of wave back and go, yeah, just let me finish my cigarette and drink my tea. And it would still be another hour before they got around to playing again. And what he grew to realise was that they were sprinters. And that basically what happened was they were like, we can do this song three times really, really well if we take the hour, hour and a half between each take. But if we do 20 takes of this song, it won’t be as good. So it was this really interesting insight into a band like AC/DC, which is, you know, globally hugely successful rock band — was like high performance for them meant way, way, way more time away from instruments than actually on the instruments. And to your point about sports people, Chris Hoy, I think it was said when we’re not racing, we’re sitting down and when we’re not sitting down, we’re lying down.
So effectively, it was either we’re in performance mode or we’re intensely out of doing what we do. And again, I think, you know, for those of us who work in independent consultancy and I’m sitting here in all candour going, yep, I’m teaching what I need to learn because, you know, time off for me can be a real challenge. It’s this thing around, you know, we can serve our clients best sometimes and serve ourselves best sometimes by doing anything other than work. And it’s very, very hard to do that. When I think you’ve got new business to attend to, and you’ve got accountants wanting answers on things, and you’ve got websites to build, and you’ve got clients wanting answers on questions, and you’ve got maybe a team you need to keep briefed and happy and all the rest of it. It can feel like everything else is a luxury, but actually as your Gandhi story and the AC/DC story proves it’s actually anything but, you know.

[00:57:55] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: An essential part of successful business is to take regular breaks.

[00:58:01] Phil Lewis: Dominic, thanks for coming on the podcast.

[00:58:02] Dominic Beecheno – wellbeing coach: Thank you very much, Phil. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

[00:58:08] Phil Lewis: Huge thanks there to Dominic. And thanks to you too for listening to what has been a pretty bumper episode of The Consultancy Business this month. As always, new episodes are out on the first Monday of every single month. And if you’re finding value in what we’re doing, please do like and share this with anybody who you think might benefit from it as well. As still a relatively new podcast, any and all support helps us out more than you could know. That’s it for now. See you soon.

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