 Hello and welcome to today's Business Skills webcast, how to make a difference in the world as a time pool manager. My name is Sarah Gonzalez and I'll be your facilitator and your host for today's session. Today is all about discovering how you can make a difference, achieve social purpose, and then construct your own personal plan. Now, before we get started, I'd just like to let you know that we'd like to keep today as interactive as possible. So please feel free to ask questions by the Ask a Question box in the bottom right corner. I've got my trusty iPad here. So when we get to the Q&A session, I'll be able to hand over your questions to the presenter. I'd like to welcome today's presenter, Phil. How are you? Hi, Sarah. I'm great. Great to be here. Yeah, great to be working with you again. So I'd like to really get started, just get straight into it. I think everyone out there is really looking forward to today's session and I do know that we've got a lot to cram in. So I just want to take a look at the slide. I'll put it on the screen right now, because that slide looks amazing to me and I would love to be there as much as I would love to be here with you. But when we talk about making a difference, when we are time, Paul, it seems to be a big topic, but how and why should we be talking about it and what should we be learning? Yeah, there's a lot to cover and I want to address the why first. So the why is if we refer back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, for example, we know that when our basic needs are met, we're looking for something a little bit higher, something a bit more meaning and something a bit more purpose. But because we're time poor, how do we get that? So what I want to do today is bridge that gap between we know what we want and how do we actually get it. So it's going to be very valuable if you're just generally time poor, learning how you can connect with community and do something with purpose. But it's also going to be handy if you're already involved in your community, but you're feeling a little bit worn out or you're taking on too much. So it might help you cut back and focus on one or two things rather than trying to do five things poorly. And the way we're going to do that is look at someone who's inspired me and I'm going to step through what they did and then unpack how they did it because there's three essential elements that need to come together. So we're going to walk through those elements so everyone will be able to construct their own plan after that. Excellent. And is this something that's just a nice to have or is it something that's a little bit more serious than that? Certainly it goes a little bit beyond nice to have. I think it's about, you know, because we really want that meaning and purpose if we can get it. So it's a little bit more essential than nice to have. But from the other perspective, I think there's a prevention angle to this conversation as well. For example, sometimes, you know, we're so busy, busy, busy. We head along in life and it can be months or even years until we stick our head up and say, where am I? What's going on? I don't know if you've had that experience. A few times. And when you stick your head up, you thought you were swimming close to the shore, but now you've found you've slowly drifted out to sea and you're in a vulnerable place, you're in a potentially sort of dangerous place and you can have crises. And that crisis can be about going, wow, I really need these things but I don't have them, what do I do now? And crises can lead into physical health issues, mental health issues and even relationship problems. So I'd argue if we get the balance right today, we're better off going into the future. Yeah, and I noticed a few people, thank you for submitting when you complete the registration form, some information on what they're hoping to learn and what they're hoping to gain from today. And I think a lot of people, for a lot of managers out there, especially it's about, you know, understanding that the people who you're managing or yourself sometimes, you know, you've got the work related stuff that you're dealing with but that can also impact your personal life and vice versa. And someone mentioned that they, and I'm aware of it as well, that many people are putting in volunteer days and stuff like that. Does that stuff sort of help or are we looking at much more deeper things here? It certainly helps. And I think we, though, have to take a much more holistic view of this because what works for you is going to be different to what works for me and it's going to be different for everyone out there because we've all got different things going on in our lives. So employee volunteering opportunities or corporate volunteering opportunities are quite useful but just remember they are constructed by your employer, therefore they may tick the box for you or they may not and there might be things outside of work that you're looking to do as well. So I just say step back and take a bigger picture of you here. An interesting little aside there is for every charity that I talk to that has a great experience with corporate volunteering, I generally find one that has a not-so-great experience. So for example, a lot of corporates might ring up a couple of days beforehand before they were going to do a team-based volunteering event. They say, oh look, a big announcement's been made at work. We need to put this back a week or a month. And the poor charity, which is totally lacking resources to organize anything in the first place, just cannot reschedule it for another month. It's taken a lot of work to get to here. So sometimes the two sectors don't understand each other well enough to make it work properly. And there's a standing joke in the social sector that there's only so many times you can go and paint the Matthew Talbot hostel. So there's pros and cons to that but I think what we're talking about today is a plan for you that's going to be more suited to you individually rather than what your employer might be offering up. Okay, so are the tables on you now? Because I can. Have you ever been a time-poor manager? I certainly have been and I'll give you the very brief backstory. I grew up in Hobart and then I moved to Sydney when I was 21 and I started working with an insurance company as a trainee actuary. I don't know if you know what actuaries do but I'll fool you in. They do all the statistical work for life insurance companies. Really exciting, I'm sure for most people out there. So you can help calculate life insurance premiums and all that. Now, but there is a very important reason actuaries exist. Those to make accountants look charismatic. Okay, so there you go. Boom-tish. I started off there, I did that for two years then I moved into the investment operations and I had a 19 year career in corporates in investment finance roles. Now, 18 years in and sorry, most of that time was managing teams as well. 18 years into my 19 year career, if you looked at my personal balance sheet, you would have seen that Phil is, he's married, he's got two kids, his mortgage is under control, he's earning fairly good money. You know, anyone would kill for that, right? But what you didn't see in that, I guess fairly accounting-based view of your life is that I was very time-poor. I was leaving home around five AM, I was getting home at 6.30 PM, saying hi to Karen and the kids when I came in the door and then probably jumping straight back on her emails, right? So very time-poor and just somewhere inside of me, I felt this need to wanna connect with the people around me and my community but I just didn't have time to do it. So I found myself in that situation that I had my head down for years and when I stuck my head up to look around, I'd been dragged out to sea and that set off a little bit of a personal crisis. Now this is not therapy, I'm looking to drag you through that. I'm on a couch, so. It does seem like how that sort of set up. But I will say that, you know, we make jokes about midlife crisis and things like that but when things get out of whack, it can be serious. It's not a matter of days or weeks to get through it. It can take a couple of years to work through these things but the point to all that is, knowing what I know now, I think I could have applied that really effectively back then and headed a lot of that off. Now as things turned out, they're okay but I could have, I think, avoided all the risk in the meantime and produced a much better outcome. Would you say you felt trapped? I definitely trapped and I wonder if anyone else out there is, you know, thinking about their day job and feeling a little bit trapped. So not only do we have financial obligations, maybe our kids are at private school or we've got a big mortgage or other thing, or car finance, I looked around myself when I was working in the corporate landscape and I saw a bunch of people who really had two options. So option number one, and these may resonate with you, option number one is, okay, I'm just gonna get my head down, I'm gonna keep working, I'm hoping my career is gonna go well, I get promotions or I run my own business and then in five, 10, 15, 20 years time, I'll retire early and I'll give something back. So that's the conversation a lot of us have, which is sort of okay until we start saying, well, I don't wanna wait five, 10, 15, 20 years and at the same time, we don't know how life's gonna play out for us, a lot of things can happen. So do we even get in that position? And the third thing is that I think deep down we see other people out there doing stuff and we have a little nagging sense of guilt that we're not pulling our weight or paying our way. So option number one is we just put our head down, keep doing what we're doing with the view that maybe one day we'll give something back. Now option number two is a little bit more radical. That's total life change. That's when you sell your BMW and you buy a Combi van. And you head up the Mid-North Coast, you get a Byron or Belingen or Nimbun or somewhere that has a B in it and then you try a new life up there. And that can work for some people but it doesn't work for everyone. So that's a risky proposition. Do you have to have that level of risk? So I would say, yes, we feel sort of boxed in. Option A, option B. And what I've been doing is taking note of people who've managed to get that balance right and create option C, which is a much more balanced life and that's where I found the three common elements that came together that really locked together and worked for them in doing that. So that's where we're going today is to find out what those elements are. Yeah, so would you say that you leave in the corporate world and doing what you're doing now is your Combi van moment? Look, it was an interesting path here. To be honest, there's certain drivers that saw me just wanting to leave that industry not because I didn't like the nature of the work. It was just the right time. And you get to age 39 or 40 and you say, is this the rest of my life? And you've got to make a call there. So there was elements of that that were about general career and lifestyle, but there was elements about being time poor and getting it across the situation. But to be honest, getting to where I am today was a pretty strange path. If you, I think, mapped to bumblebee going around in circles, you'd probably get there. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the plan. Now, we want to create a plan for ourselves and not every plan is going to be the same. So does that mean we need to actually prepare before we plan? We need to prepare. We've got three preparation points. And I've got to try and work the clicker here on the slide. It's okay. Number one. Number one is effort versus outcome. So I just want to use a business analogy. So read back conferencing. How do you measure success? You'd be thinking about profitability. So we all understand your business. Profitability is the way we think about success. We also know that that's a function of revenue. And we go, yay, if revenue's going up. But we can't judge success by revenue alone. Because if expenses are rising faster, then we're not doing a good job. So the point is it's a two-dimensional thing. We've got the good stuff revenue, and we've got the energy and resources consumed. They're going to producing it. To take that into a personal situation, sometimes we go out there and do things that make us feel good and make us feel satisfied. And that's like our revenue line. But we've also got to think about how much energy is going into producing that. Because if you're putting in 12-hour days of work, and then you're going home and you're spending two or three hours working or doing some role for a charity, then you're going to be totally burnt out. And you're not going to be enjoying life very much. Which means you're not going to sustain what you're doing, which is no good for you. And it's probably no good for the people you're trying to do it for. So we've just got to get this balance right because we're feeling time poor. We've got to do more with less. So let's be really smart about what we choose to do and get the maximum impact from it. And that's, again, what today is all about. So just keep that in mind. It's not just about the good stuff, the satisfying moments, but it's also about managing the energy that goes into it. Okay, what else do we need to do to prepare this master plan? The second point is try and understand how much should we contribute. And I don't know if that's an easy question for you to answer. But I'd ask you to think of someone who inspires you, and I'm putting you on the spot in a bit, Sarah, but is there someone in the world, or in Australia, who you look up at and go, wow, I like what they do, and I'd love to be like them? Yeah. Is there anyone there? I do have a, someone who really does inspire me is Lisa Wilkinson, I would say. I think she's a really strong female presence in Australia. I think she's worked hard to get where she is. She seems to be on top of things and has it all, but I think she's strong in her convictions as a person as well, and she doesn't back down easily, and I actually really, really admire that about someone. So I'm not quite sure what answer you usually get for that, but that's what she's always been one of my... I haven't got that one yet, but I get lots of different answers for that question. And so for you, it's Lisa Wilkinson. For me, it's other people, like the last two Australians of the year, Adam Goods and Rosie Batty, look, I look up to them and I'm in awe of what they do. And for everyone out there, you're probably thinking of someone completely different. And we tend to sit here and look up at those people and go, wow, they're so awesome. Could I be like them? Then we have that little deflating moment. And we get back to work. Back to work. Well, that's five, 10, 15, 20 years time away. So sometimes we get disheartened. So that raises the question, well, how do we set a manageable benchmark or target for ourselves? And I really struggled with this question, so I kept asking lots of people about it. And I was sitting having a coffee with a friend of mine, Jenny, who does some great work in the communities south of Wollongong. I was having a coffee with Jenny and I asked this question. I was stirring my black coffee. And Jenny said, you know, I think we should contribute a lot relative to our capacity to contribute. And that was the point where I stopped stirring my black coffee. And I said, Jenny, just hold on. I just want to write that down. We should contribute a lot relative to our capacity to contribute, which is very important, again, when we're feeling time poor, because even if you only have five minutes a week to make a difference, maybe that's one phone call. And one phone call to one person that makes a difference in their life. So we go through different stages in our life where we can only contribute five minutes. So what is that one activity we can do? And that becomes our benchmark. So instead of saying, I've got to be like Lisa Wilkinson tomorrow, that'd be nice, but it might be unachievable. Let's set a meaningful benchmark so that you can look back at the end of the year and say, I did it. I achieved the thing I was going to and I feel good about it. And that's obviously going to rub off on people who you're managing as well, isn't it? If they see you being like this as a person, because obviously if you're time poor, you get stressed out and all these other things, you know, accumulates like a domino effect, really, people see that and they see you get stressed out through certain ways that you behave. So being able to do this is not only going to help yourself but possibly other people who you won't even realize. Yeah, I think it really kicks your attitude a lot. So there's the attitude that, well, I'm just focusing on work. I'm a work person and I'm going to drive anyone hard at work and I'm totally stressed if things aren't going well at work. And then there's the person who takes too much on and therefore gets frazzled and comes to work pretty grumpy. Let's find that middle ground. The goal I think would be to be that person that someone else wants to aspire to, wouldn't it? Well, you kind of saw that. We're going to come to that soon. Okay, sorry. What are we going to next? We've got a third preparation point and this is probably something obvious but I just want to point it out anyway. There's many ways we can make a difference. So it's not just about things we can say do at work through corporate volunteering. It's what we do outside of work. When we're outside of work, we could do this through a formal charity or volunteer, volunteering opportunity or we could go and do our own thing. And I also want to increase, people's perspective on what doing something good is because let's say you're visiting a relative and you're spending an hour a week with them because they're ill or there's something, some issue they've got. I think that should be included in your budget or your, sorry, your impact in doing something good. So recognize some of those things you're already doing because you might feel much better about what you are doing. And let's say you had a choice to spend an extra 20 minutes doing something. Maybe it makes sense to help that person for an extra 20 minutes. Rather than trying to pick up something completely new. And everyone's definition of good is going to be different, isn't it? Exactly. So don't feel so hard on yourself. Exactly. Okay, so there's three steps for preparation. Let's get into the plan. Okay, so I'm going to talk about someone who's inspired me and that person is in this photo here. Now, in the right-hand side of this photo is Lynn. Now, Lynn lives in Hobart. And this is Lynn when she was young, by the way, because today... I was going to... Go, Lynn. She's a busy bank branch supervisor in her day job. By the way, on the left-hand side of this photo is my brother Scott, who unfortunately passed away last year. And so he's no longer with us. In the middle of this photo, this chubby-checkered little cheeky kid is yours truly. No. So, you know, you're... I haven't been able to stop staring at that little kid since they came up. So did George Clooney look that cute when he was young? Okay, okay. We're doing our best. So Lynn lives in Hobart, and she's a busy bank branch supervisor by day. She lives 20 minutes out of Hobart, which, by Hobart standards, is a pretty long commute. Now, when she drives home, she turns off the highway and she goes about a kilometer down a road, which is a dead-end road. At the end of this road, there's about 40 houses. And they fan out in a scallop shell sort of shape. And most of them have these great views over a lagoon. There's oyster beds and it's just a nice part of the world. Now, in 2005, Lynn was sitting down with her friend Sue and she said to Sue, look, I really enjoy living here, but I'd love to know more of my neighbors. I tend to just interact with them when I'm reversing out of the driveway in the morning. And if I see someone else, we give each other a wave. But I'd feel much more safe and secure if I knew more of my neighbors. So what Lynn and Sue did was they did a letterbox drop and they said, morning tea in a week's time, come around if you can. A few people came around. The following month, they did it again, a few more. The month after, more again. And it's been going now for 10 years. So these monthly morning tea events. Now, what is that doing? Well, what that's doing is several things. One, every family puts in $5 and they collect the money and donate to charity. And I think they've raised more than $5,000 in that 10-year period, or it's probably much more now. At these events, they really engaged families in the community. One family bought along four generations of their family to one morning tea event. There was another really nice story where an old lady, Maureen, she couldn't live in her house independently anymore. So she sold and went into a retirement home, or a nursing home. Now, while she was there, someone would bring her back for these morning tea events. And the young family that had moved into her house would clip some flowers from the garden and come and present it to Maureen. So they were the flowers she planted, which is a really nice thing. And one of the other benefits it's had is that when the council was looking to put in a boat ram that didn't quite make sense, then this was a forum for the community to get together and talk about it and I guess put forward a coherent response to the council. So we can see that that works on many levels. It works on the level of Lynn being time poor. This is a once-a-month activity. So it gets that big tick. And the other thing is that we think about the $5,000 or more that they've raised and we go, isn't that great? But at the same time, I'd say everything else it's done, building, I guess, the social fabric in that community, you cannot buy. That can only be created by the people in it. So the Mastercard ads say that's priceless. So I think, you know, Lynn has certainly inspired me because when I was looking around at how to do this, I looked at that simple example and I thought, yeah, that works. And we might get into looking behind it a little more. Yeah, that's something I didn't really expect when you said you were going to give an example because it's amazing how one small idea can just transform and I think even doing that within an organization and within a company and being able to do that or as a team would just be remarkable. So what are or what were the elements that really came into play here with this story? How does it all come together? Good question. There were three elements that came into this story and I think we've got a chart here, yeah. So the first thing is because, again, we're time poor, we should play to our strengths. So doing more with less, you know, why go and reinvent the wheel when we've got something working for us? So in Lynn's case, she's very personable and she's very social. She likes social situations. So that sort of lines up with this idea that she's the person bringing this gathering together. Let's say you're an accountant, then yes, going and volunteering for a charity to do their accounts would be natural and we call it school volunteering. But if you're not an accountant, it wouldn't really make a lot of sense for you to go and say, I'll come and do your accounts because that would probably mean doing a three year accounting course. That just doesn't make sense. So let's identify our strengths and play them. So that's what Lynn's done really well. That's number one. So do you just write them down? We'll come back to that in a minute. How are we gonna go through this? I'll just step through Lynn's three first. The second thing is in doing this, she was addressing a core life need that she had. Now I don't know if you remember why Lynn and Sue decided to take this on. Lynn said, Sue, look, I wanna feel more safe and secure in my community. So this just wasn't some whim that she had. Wouldn't that be a great thing to do for no reason whatsoever? This was actually addressing a need that she had. So I wanna come back to these core life needs shortly and tell you what other types of needs there are. But so far we've talked about Lynn's strengths, Lynn's needs. Now we've gotta look externally and say what's the community benefit or what's the social issue or trend that she's addressing. In Lynn's case, it's not so clear but I'm gonna explain what it is. Because a lot of people ended up coming along to these events, they obviously saw value in it and they felt they wanted that sense of belonging just like Lynn did in a way as well. So within her community, there was a, I guess an unmet need and that was the sense of belonging and feeling the same way she did. So the social issue in this case is belonging. Now if you're gonna work for a charity, their missional course is pretty clear but in Lynn's case, she was just tapping into to that need amongst her neighbors. So we've gotta bring these three things together and I've got a picture of a money box up here. I don't know if you ever had one of these but I used to have a Commonwealth Bank one that was green. And it had a code, I think my code was 007 by the way and every young boy in the neighborhood probably had the same code but you'd have to twiddle the three dials to get the right code or combination to open the safe. So this is a similar process. So those three elements, what are they for you? What are they for me? What are they for people watching? And how do we get the right combinations to work? Yeah, how do you bring all of those elements together? That's what I'm... We have to, I guess, step through the process so I'm gonna go through each element in turn. So identifying your strengths, you mentioned do we just write them down where we can but I'd suggest we can go a little bit further than that and be a bit more effective. So it's much better if you do it with a trusted friend or colleague because they can see things that you can't and sometimes you get blinded by your own strengths. So it helps if someone else is helping us. So as long as they're a trusted colleague or friend that will work. And I challenge you to think in these three different categories. So think about things in your character, capabilities or skills that you have. So if you're an accountant, accounting might be your thing. And connections. So what types of networks do you have, whether they're social networks or networks of friends or maybe work colleagues that you really get on well with and want to do something together? Think about what all those connections are because they can be valuable in certain situations. So that's a little guide about how to bring your strengths to the fore. There's some other exercises you can do and later on I think I'll mention a book that you can get hold of which has a few questions to challenge you such as what's the best thing you've achieved at work and what did you contribute to it? So when you think about that and use that framework or those three categories it might help bring out some things you're quite aware of. What about the core life needs that you spoke of? What's that all about? There's eight of them and I'll run through them fairly quickly and I built this list from some Smith family research. They had about, I think it was five or six key needs they identified as to why people volunteer and I took them and added a few on. So very quickly the types of life needs you can address include belonging. A lot of us just want to have a greater sense of belonging and we saw that in Lynn's example, career progression. So let's say Sarah you wanted to take over the top job here but you felt you hadn't had the right exposure to leadership or management experience then getting that in a volunteering situation could be a very sensible move for you. So you gain that skill. Thirdly fitting into say a new community you've just moved somewhere new and you want to learn more about the place and how it works. So it's sort of related to belonging but in specific situations we might want to fit into a new community or culture. The fourth one is economic or self-interest. Now for some people that might sound like a dirty word to do something out of self-interest but I'll tell you what, when I volunteered for my kids P and C association for three years running, I had self-interest in mind because, right? I wouldn't be doing it if my kids weren't at the school. I don't think I would have done that for fun. So there is- So it doesn't need to be, it doesn't have to be too selfish because obviously that's for your kids as well. That's right. And even in Lynn's situation she wanted to feel more safe and secure. Yeah. That's the self-interest. Everyone has a- Yeah, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah. Empathy. So empathy might be when there's a cause or a thing you've got to do that really resonates with you. So I did mention the unfortunate story of my brother earlier on. His daughters or my nieces are very tuned into raising money for cancer research because they've been through that experience with their father. And the reason that's different is- The reason that's a core life need is because I don't think that's discretionary. I think that's something they really have to do rather than just might want to do. Yeah. It becomes a real driving interest for them. So that's sort of empathy. The next one is expressing personal values. Some of us just want to give. And I have that need to want to give in certain circumstances. People who are aligned to a religion or a philosophy might have that same driver. Self-development is about learning new skills and new things and we all want to improve somehow. And the last one, work congruence. If you can find this at work, then maybe that's really fantastic for you. I've got a friend who recently left the corporate or business world to work for a charity and that just is resonating with her so deeply. Really? But she just really had to find that work-life congruence. It wasn't an option. Yeah. I could see her heading there her whole life. Yeah. OK. So once you've identified your strengths and you realized what you were at through various amount of channels and then you know your core life needs, how do you then find a social issue or cause or get people on board? How does that all work? Good question. I mean, some of us will probably naturally know what those issues or causes are. However, we might need some prompting questions as well. And again, in the booklet I've got, some of those questions are there, but they would be what types of things do you wish you could change in your community or change in the world or broadly or when you get together with friends, what do you all complain about? Some of these prompters will help give us a clue if we're not clear. But the other thing I would mention is that and I've put a whole bunch of stuff on the screen which you can get later on anyway so no one needs to feel compelled to write this down. There's lots of different areas we can volunteer or make a difference in and there's many, many different roles that we can do. So there's a pretty wide net out there and don't restrict yourself greatly. The other thing I'd just ask people to think a little more deeply about is that quite often we're drawn to the bright lights of the guide dogs or some of these things that are really flashy, interesting, and they really hit you hard in a really nice way. But there's a lot of organizations out there that don't get the love. If you're talking about Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, there's not a lot of people queuing up to do a lot of work with them. So if you were driven more by playing a particular role, then wouldn't that be great to help out some of these charities that don't always get the frontline cues? I think that's an important point. And if anyone wants to find out more about these social causes or anything, we've got a huge charity program and a lot of charities that we work with, so feel free to let us know. But a lot of people who become part of our charity programs here at Redback, they say it's not about the dollar value or the contributions that they receive, it's about the exposure that they get and the help that they need because they don't have the marketing budgets and whatnot to be as well known, but there's so many smaller organizations out there that are just starving for someone to volunteer an hour a week or something like that and you could make a huge difference, not only yourself, but if you roll out that toward in your organization as well. And I think that picks up on a point that especially when we're time poor, one of the best ways, let's say we're earning good money and we're time poor, there's nothing wrong with donating as a way of making the difference because by doing that, you are I guess helping people do more with your, that's one of your strengths. If you've got money, that's one of your strengths and you should lever that. So I think that's a very valid way to go about it. And so I might just come back to what do we do with all these three things? So the idea is that we've just stepped through some ideas for recognizing your strengths, recognizing what your core life needs are today. And thirdly, what are the social issues or causes that you wanna plug into? So your challenge firstly is to, it's like baking a cake. When someone comes up with a great recipe, it didn't just happen the first time they tried it, they probably experimented around. So they had all the ingredients, then they had to get them in the right order and right combination. So our challenge is to get the right combination. So by looking at these three elements, I want you to try and link up three things that work together well. And I want you to try and get two, three, four or five different options of things that you think would work well together. And once you've got those options, then factor in the amount of time budget you think you have. So again, if it's five minutes, you're probably then gonna choose just one of those options and say, okay, well in that I can do this for five minutes a week. If you have 50 minutes a week, maybe you'd still choose one option, but you can do a bit more. If you have five hours a week, maybe you're choosing two options. And so come at it from that direction. Once you've got your options, factor in your time budget and then make a selection. I think that those three circles there are so powerful. I do some volunteer work for a charity now and I chose to do that. But if my manager came to me once and said, okay, would you like to be involved in doing something a little bit different, making a difference somehow and showed me this and asked me to evaluate, I think that would have been so powerful. And looking at that person just going, wow, like you really, really care and you care about where I'm spending my time as well. So yeah, very, very important. And I think it's important to make a conscious choice about this because again, I mean, I've been in situations recently where I've had to cut back on some charity work that I was doing and I had to really think hard about what I did do versus what I didn't do. So it can give you a bit of a framework or a method for doing that. And because I think if you don't think about this, you just go into it. And I think that's when everything just goes a little bit crazy, doesn't it? And just on that, and I'm so glad Angela has asked this question because this is something I struggle with as well. So how do you suggest dropping busy work that has a poor effect outcome or relationship? Busy workers in the workplace or outside? What's this charity work do you think? Busy work within the workplace, I'm assuming. Well, I think there's, look, there's a balance to be found with the workplace and it's a bit hard not knowing the situation to make a comment about it. I would think from my own personal experience in a management situation, when I look back, I think I spent about 5% of my time managing my people and 95% of the time doing the technical things and other things that I had to do. In hindsight, I wish I'd spent 25% or more of my time actually managing my people. And I think that's far more important than the technical things I was doing. And when we tend to get into this, I think it was Dr. Steven Kovey talked about urgent versus important things. So I don't know about you, but I would gravitate towards the urgent important things and the important but non-urgent things I tended to shy away from, but they're sometimes the things we really, really have to do. So now whether that answers the question, I don't know, but I think if you're getting things right outside of work as well, and you get a greater balance, I think you get a better perspective on what the value of work is and you can make some better and more decisive, incisive decisions about what you do. Yeah. So I hope they'd address the question. Yeah, yeah. There can be a follow up. So, insanely, so obviously you have done this, otherwise you wouldn't really be educating people on it, but do you constantly do it and do you walk the talk or is it something that you struggle with at times and how do you sort of, is it something you need to come back and reevaluate or is it something that just happens easily once you put these steps into place? I was like, no, I don't do it. No, of course I'd do it. Look for example, there's the three or four key things I do and make a conscious decision about doing. So the big thing I took on this year was being the president of the National Speakers Association's New South Wales chapter. Now, there's a lot of, I guess, core life needs that's ticking for me. In fact, I actually regard that as work time when I do that and it's a pretty heavy role from a volunteering perspective but it's, so it helps me network with people I need to be networking with. It helps me gain knowledge of the industry that I'm working in and as a speaker and a workshop facilitator and a consultant. I pick up so much from that and so it's ticking lots of boxes for me. So that's one conscious decision I make. Another thing I do is a food event in my local community every three months, help organize a curry night. People come along on a Sunday night when they don't feel like cooking and they get a $5 curry. Wow. Everyone loves that. And again, for me, I love cooking. I don't like a la carte cooking but I like making a big pot of curry. So it ticks that, I guess it stems from that strength and that need. With my son's football club, I do some web work for them. It's pretty low time. Something I can do remotely, it sort of fits in. I couldn't spend the time going down and being at training and all that. It just wouldn't work for me. So I found the thing that works. So yeah, I found those things that I think work out pretty well. Okay, seems like you're busy then. I look busy but manageable. Do you even work? Well, you know, when I was, I'm running my own business now. So I work for myself and I do, I'm running a small business. So I thought I was busy when I was working corporate life and I'm probably busier now. So it's even more important now to get this right. Yeah. Okay. Now a question from Peter. Getting introduced in something like this into the workplace as a manager. What are your tips on something like that? Yeah, it's an interesting one because this is talking about people's, it's almost like life coaching in a way but it's in a specific area. I think it's a difficult thing for employers to say to their team, look, I want you to do this and think about your life in this way. So from that perspective, maybe you can introduce articles and little tidbits of this conversation into publications or newsletters or just drop it in at team meetings. In terms of workshopping it and what we're talking about here is something that takes a bit of work to get right. For example, we've got to set those mini goals and figure out what we're going to achieve in the year ahead. There's a bit more work to it. So I think from that perspective you've got to get people self-selecting into this area if it's a workshop or a coaching environment. Definitely. Yeah, I think it'd be hard to force you in and say, yes, you've got to come and do this. You have to do this, no. But having said that, I think it's a fantastic way for employers to support their staff in a more engaging way. And just to quote a senior, there was a lawyer who was quite senior in the public service in New South Wales that were finding out about this and this person said, wow, this is not just another training course that I'm being forced to go on because I have to go on a training course. This is something that's going to make a difference in my life. So imagine what that's doing in terms of enhancing the reputation of the employer. And I think even as an employer, like implementing, we did touch in the beginning but like one or two volunteer days a year and something like that to sort of work people into it and see if they are interested and dip their toes in the water. We're going to go to some questions now. So while we're going to the questions, we'd love you to stay online but there's a resources tab in the bottom corner of your screen feels kindly put some resources in there which we'll go through in a moment and you can take those on board, print them out and then save them and actually pass them on through your organization if you like. And there's also a little tab next to the slide that says feedback. So we'd love to hear your feedback from today as well as any additional comments that you may have. Now just from Trent, so just moving over from the whole individual assessment thing which we've been spending a lot of time on at the moment, what do you think of the idea that people should find a coalition of similar time poor folks and pooling ideas and experience, replicating the style of corporate work that many are used to? Okay, well that's an interesting perspective. I think it's a great idea. The pros and cons to that are one with a small motivated group and if your values and objectives are very aligned that's such a powerful way to go. The only con I can see is that requires organization time. And I've talked about the 2-2-20 rule. So this is my experience from being in voluntary organizations that might resonate with you and viewers out there is that it takes two minutes to go and buy a sausage sandwich from a sausage sandwich fundraiser. I really feel like a sausage sandwich. It takes two minutes to buy it. It takes two hours to do a shift as a volunteer serving or cooking the sausages. It takes about 20 hours of organization time. And most people would go, what, how could it take 20 hours of organization time for a sausage fundraiser? Well, if you haven't been through it, talk to someone who has because once you talk about everything involving choosing the date, getting the permissions, doing the setup, getting everything you need to be there on the day, the food, the tomato sauce, the drinks you're gonna sell, the treasure to bring the float, roster the volunteers, pack up at the end of the day and there's about five things I've missed out there. Once you start adding it up, there's a lot of work there. So, and I think this is why we look off for people in the business world, we often look into charities and go, why don't they just do that? And what we don't realize is they don't have the capacity to do that. This is a common theme in the work that I do that keeps coming around. When we go and suggest things to not for profits or charities, we should be very aware that they're not paid. They don't have the scope to do a lot of these things. So we've got to factor that in. So I like Trent's idea, as long as they're willing to do the organizing. Okay, and this probably ties into that question as well. So we've got someone, I'm Karine out of Crossroads here, which I think this question will resonate with a lot of people. So from your experience and your research, what do you think provides the biggest impact? Using skills to work in a high paying job in the corporate sector, where you can then donate money to a chosen cause, or do you work for a social enterprise where you work for a lower wage but have a meaningful impact for that organization? Well, that's a tricky one. Yeah. Thank you for that. Not an easy one to answer, but I'm actually going to throw in another option here to make it even, I guess, more tantalizing. So a lot of work I do is with businesses and helping businesses connect with social issues in a way that not only helps someone in the community, that also builds on their profitability. So a very quick example of that is there's recently documented a group of real estate agents in Western Sydney that've been getting together and helping some social services providers. What they're doing is helping to tip them off when they see problems with tenants. So tenants might have financial issues or there might be domestic violence or other things going on. And what happens is when people get into that situation, they can often get evicted from their property and they end up in a homeless situation. So they become involved in an initiative to identify those things early and social services providers come in to support those people because sometimes people aren't aware that support is available. And out of 102 situations, they saved 57 tenancies. So there's a big social benefit in that. So that's a big tick. On the other hand, they're actually saving themselves hard costs by avoiding the eviction process. So their own business is improving its profitability. They're saving a lot of money for their landlords in terms of misdrent. They're helping to, I guess, avoid misdrent and also doing up the property when you kick someone out and get someone new in. So there's a link there between financial benefit and social benefit. And so that doesn't... Now, when I come back to Karina's question, the social enterprise sort of tries to do both of those things at once. So I love the social enterprise model. It has sometimes some challenges and that is getting capital in to do big things and do things at scale. So that's where I've seen social enterprises struggle a little bit. But nevertheless, I think a well-run social enterprise will deliver just as much bang for the bunk as that situation. And so I challenge anyone who's in the work, in the corporate situation, to think a little bit more deeply about what they're doing at work and how they, whether it's through addressing issues in their supply chain or new products for their customers or just aligning what their company does with real social needs or societal needs, not just keep doing the thing they've always done, but making sure they're totally aligned with what society needs is a very powerful way to act as well. And I think for someone in Karina's situation or anyone else out there, I think going through that core life needs section would be a massive part of answering that question wouldn't end up finding out what. Oh yeah, and there's a really nice tie in here because we've still got that diagram on screen. We're talking about this from a personal perspective. But if we look at that same diagram and say take the business perspective, what are the strengths of the business? What are the core strategic needs of the business? And what are the social issues or causes the business could help out with and align those three things? So in the case of the real estate agents, those three things align for them and they're not only addressing a strategic need of increasing their profitability, they're also helping with reducing homelessness, which is a social cause. And the strength I'd say they brought to the table in that case was their willingness to collaborate, their willingness to think a little bit outside the square and get together. So it all ties in doesn't it? It really ties in. So that's an eerie parallel that we've come up with. That wasn't planned. Well that brings us to the end. Thank you everyone for joining. It's been very, very insightful and I'm sure we've all learned a few things that we can take away and adapt ourselves or maybe even filter on to our employees as well. I'd like to pass it on to you Phil for closing comments and thank you so much for today. It's been excellent just to sit down, have a chat with you and also learn a little bit more about you as well. But yeah, closing comments for anyone else out there and what would you like people to walk away with today? Yeah, well I'd say go out and do it. So I think it's the resources tab on the website here. You've got a worksheet. So that worksheet will help you bring together the three elements we've talked about today. And on the back you've got a list of all those different areas you could make a difference in and the roles you could play. So that's number one. The second attachment is about if you're an employer or a HR position and how can you use this to help your team to increase I guess engagement with your employees. There's a white paper there that will help you through that. So outside of that we want to provide if you come back through Redback or through to me there's a booklet here which will step you through everything we've talked about and give you a few extra tips as well. So that's available too. So I'm just very happy to have the opportunity and really have enjoyed this discussion. Thank you. And we'll send a recording of this event within 48 hours so you guys can then take a look at it or pass it on to anyone else who you may know. So thank you once again for joining us as part of the business skills series and we hope to see you at future events. Have a good afternoon everyone.