A couple of weeks ago I was invited onto the podcast Your Bravo Career.

Your Bravo Career is hosted by career coach and LinkedIn Top Voice Mark Crossfield.  Mark and I have been connected on LinkedIn for a while.

During the podcast we talked about my decision to quit my job, my journeying around various corners of personal development, psychology & transformation and what I've learnt during that time.

We also spoke about my decision to go back to my old job in banking and how my experience of the 9 to 5 has shifted from apathy & cynicism to ease & flow.

As we went back and forth, Mark asked me a great question:

Have your colleagues noticed any changes in you now that you’re back in your old team?

I thought for a moment.

What sprung to mind was a comment a colleague had made a couple of weeks earlier.

Which was this:

Tom, you have so much more banter than you did when you worked in the team before

This hadn’t crossed my mind at all.

But when my colleague said this, I knew she was right.

In the first iteration of my career at Lloyds, I would quite literally shoo people away from my desk when they popped over to have a chat. 

I’d time my visits to the water fountain or coffee machine to minimise my chances of bumping into someone.

I even used to duck down behind the photocopier to avoid needing to chat with colleagues & teammates.

It’s not that I’m a total Scrooge.

It’s more that I had zero time for the people I worked alongside, at least banter-wise.

I took the view that a couple of minutes (or even a few seconds – that’s how highly strung I was) spent hobnobbing with a chirpy colleague was a couple of minutes I’d never get back.

And adding those minutes up throughout the day meant leaving the office half an hour later than I would’ve done otherwise.

Which was unthinkable.

I didn’t want to be in the office a second longer than I needed to be.

Nowadays I take myself a lot less seriously than I did before.

I still have my moments of course.

But I can have a laugh or joke around, whether that’s at my expense or not, and instead of getting in the way of work, it feels healthy.

It’s a way of connecting with other people which adds to work and my life, rather than taking away from it.

And it shines a light on the bonds and camaraderie I missed out on for a lot of the 13 years I spend at Lloyds the first time round.

So what led to this change of attitude?

I talk about this more in the podcast.  It’ll be out in a couple of weeks and I’ll be dropping the link once it is.

In the meantime, if you’re curious about how you can find some more ease and flow in your own job, look no further:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

That’s all for today.

 - Tom