Friday Newsletter: №8
Hey Friends and welcome back to my 8th Friday Newsletter!
Every week I’m sharing: One Insight, One Source and One Question which I found particularly striking or useful, so you can read, reflect and take action.
This one will be dedicated to career growth and your relationships with the manager.
Weekly insight
This is my personal insight I come across over and over again and which is quite simple: “in order to succeed in your career - keep your manager happy”. I made this mistake and saw how others did it.
It doesn’t matter what company or organisational structure you are working at: you want your manager to be on your side. This includes both: WHAT (your metrics, for example) and HOW (your attitude, your teamwork skills, leadership etc).
If you keep having challenges with the manager, I see 2 ways:
Discuss with your manager, what’s the challenge (in your weekly meeting or quarterly performance conversation) and adjust something in your behaviour (of course, without crossing your values and self-respect). If something is uncomfortable or the goal seems unachievable, initiate the discussion again (by providing the manager your feedback). If you keep trying for quite some time but it doesn’t work, I would follow the option 2 below. In fact, any relationship - is a partnership.
Change the manager or company. It is also quite often a good option.
You can challenge something, then - provide constructive feedback (not complain). What’s important: you should challenge the idea, not the manager (and particularly not in front of his/her other reportees - this is a mistake I did and see others do as well).
I believe this is fundamentals of your growth: you should be open to feedback (and be ready to adjust your behaviour) while being curious about the best possible partnership with you manager (and this should be ideally coming from both sides).
Weekly Source
Today I wanted to share a very important video from "The Diary of a CEO” on a slightly different topic than usual: pregnancy and fertility as quite often this topic is tabooed. I personally found the whole video very insightful both for men and women but if you are busy, please watch at least the first half.
We all know that having children (or not) in the majority of cases is a choice but if you are planning to have children in the future, this video creates awareness around this topic and provides some useful actionable insights. Some key points below:
When you are 30 years old your chances to get pregnant are about 20% per month, so on average people get pregnant within 5-6 months. When you are 35 y.o. - your chances are 10-15% per month and when you are 40 y.o. - 5% per month. The egg production quality also changes with time.
This information doesn’t aim to scary people but instead to provide data in order to make conscious decisions (particularly now, when the average age of women getting pregnant is constantly increasing). In fact in 2021, the average age of mothers who gave birth in England and Wales increased to 30.9 years, while the average age of fathers remained at 33.7 years.
As people are also getting more lonely and it could be harder to find a partner, Dr Natalie Crawford suggested freezing eggs (if you are planning to have kids) ideally by the age of 37. After that it is also possible, but it can be more complicated.
Weekly Question
Our decisions and actions predetermine the quality of life we have. Unfortunately some things are out of our control but having a “victim mindset” never helps to succeed (vs the “player mindset”).
I really love the question below to reflect and potentially adjust some of the decisions/actions we make on an auto-pilot mode in order to keep growing & enjoying our life:
How do you want to feel at the end of today? What do you need to do now, so you can feel this way?
Let’s stay connected!
Looking forward to be in touch with you all and connect again in the upcoming Friday newsletters! Wish you all a joyful day!
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