Work Work Balance - A Real Life Story

Eventually I was invited onto BBC educational TV... I don’t want to big this up by the way. The programmes were broadcast during the night and were probably watched by no more than 15 insomniacs one of whom was my mother.

What connects property law to the BBC, Freud to Modern Dance, Classical Music to Swimming in Swiss Lakes, Film Production to Music Festivals and the National Garden Scheme to Venice Biennale. My Dad...

I talk a lot about what I call a "work/work" balance (as opposed to the well known concept of the work/life balance).

Coaches - in particular - are very likely to have chosen to move into the coaching space as a way not only to help others flourish, but because the attraction of a more independent, entrepreneurial, creative and joyful work life are very attractive to them.

They may class themselves as having reached their "midlife", see themselves on a "Second Mountain ", be disillusioned by the corporate world, by being beholden to the 9-5 structure of time, or just bored of the rat race... Covid and Working From Home have helped us all reconsider our options.

But bills need to be paid.

And when you are just starting out as a coach, getting clients can be tough. So sometimes we need to do other work to supplement our income. AND, when we have a unique blend of work practices going on, it can really help to make us stand out... as long as we are able to speak to why the various hats we wear make us an Authority, have Empathy, and have an interesting Story enough that people want to work with us, employ us, appoint us or ask us for our help.

My father is Steven Fogel . I am going to be interviewing him on Thursday 20th October about his life. Please join us for that conversation. He has had "a lucky discovery that left him feeling happier and more fulfilled." Here's what happened...

My dad's work/work story inspires me. He is also fantastic at describing how he has got to where he is and how it all makes sense... on retrospect at least...

I hope you can take inspiration from how his many hats dovetail, ask yourself what your work hats are, and get better, bolder and braver about sharing your work/work story as a result.

Do please join us for the live discussion on 20th October.

Steven Fogel - My Work / Work Balance

I like the thinking behind asking me to consider my work/work balance rather than focussing as is traditional on work/life balance. It brings home to me that for most of my working life I’ve been far more preoccupied by the balance I achieved at work rather than the balance between home and away. Sad but true both for me and so many like me...

The only comfort I take from this is that it could have been much worse. Some people are preoccupied with work so extremely that all their leisure activities occur within the framework of their working lives. I’ve often thought this when people tell me how their evenings were taken up with working trips to the opera and how they were prepared to entertain clients over the weekend.

The prospect of being reduced to playing golf in manicured slices of the great outdoors is bad enough …….but regularly entertaining clients while wearing patterned pullovers with logos……Dreadful.

Anyway, I was brought up in a conventional way. I imbibed two conflicting mantras. “Work comes first“ and “family comes first“. Juggling between these was a constant source of anxiety until I fundamentally changed my attitude to work. This was first by chance and then by design.

Nowadays someone hearing from me about the pressures of my early working life might observe that my mental health was compromised. But, as far as I was concerned, it was simply a matter of telling work colleagues that work came first while pretending at home that home came first. In reality I would spend some time at work worrying about what I was missing at home, and much time at home and on holiday thinking about work. I suspect that this is a common position even today and rather than compromising the juggler’s mental health may strengthen the afflicted. As Nietzsche said, that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But, for those living in couples, it doesn't make for a fair division of labour. We sort of already knew that then. We know it much better now.

What I understand to mean by a work/work balance is that you manage to achieve a situation where you are not bound as a slave to performing a monotonous task in your work but instead you achieve a degree of balance between various activities.

... A more advanced form of work/work balance is where you do several jobs and each is different. More advanced still is when you take on activities, irrespective of whether they are paid or not, where you neither think of them as work or leisure. They are activities you just…… like.

To be perfectly honest, I only happened by chance to stumble into a position where I was able to achieve a work/work balance. Something happened in my working life which gave me opportunities to achieve that balance. It was never planned. It just kind of chanced on it and the result left me happier and more fulfilled.

So what was my lucky discovery? It was simply that whenever I suggested an activity that my more conventional colleagues weren’t doing themselves, I carved out an experimental niche. With hindsight, some of these were bound to work, right? The trick was to start the experiment stealthily.

So, if the experiment failed, no one would really notice. But if the experiment worked then I could develop some cred. I could even bargain with this. As my authority grew I got the power to choose other interesting sidelines.

I’d better say at this stage that the career I had chosen was law. I went through quite a tough initiation to become a solicitor and chose a demanding firm in the city. I was lucky to have a boss who trained me well. I stayed on after qualifying and had a long career in that firm. Long service in one place used to be normal. It’s been replaced by much more professional promiscuity. My job there lasted 40 years. However it ended in failure because I had taken on one big experiment too far. And yet that failure led to my really big opportunity to get a good work/work balance.

So I will tell you about some of the experiments which worked and the ultimate failed experiment which led to a radical change of direction.

My first experiment was to present myself as the office swat. I specialised in property law from an early stage. I had hated this subject at university and almost failed at it, but a recession early in my career meant that there were no opportunities available in fields of practise that interested me. Also

I discovered that being a working property lawyer was quite different to studying the subject academically It involved a number of sub-specialties and one of them was landlord and tenant. I came to like this because I could identify with the real life shops which were the subject of the leases. My dad had opened shops in various parts of the country and, perhaps without my conscious awareness, had exerted an influence upon me. So I became interested in the law of shops. I decided to become an expert on the subject by, at the outset, reading the practitioners textbooks carefully. Soon I was asked to review new legal publications. Then I started writing about the subject for journals. And eventually writing books. This morphed into a paid sideline in lecturing to other property professionals. And that all gave me the cred. to bring some great work into the practice. The clients came through the door and the revenue increased.

Pretty soon I started having fun with all this. I decided that the traditional method of lecturing wasn’t cutting through to the audience and that it was time to jazz up presentation methods.

My contemporaries seemed unable to grasp that PowerPoint didn’t merely corrupt: it corrupted absolutely.

Audiences would doze through PowerPoint slideshows only occasionally to be awakened by the buzz of their new Blackberries. I, meanwhile, treated the occasion like a party. I assembled a team to make computer games which we would project on screens. We awakened the audience into participating and gave the winners take home party bags. We staged legal cases as little plays. Eventually I was invited onto BBC educational TV where I tried to simplify difficult cases for viewers. I don’t want to big this up by the way. The programmes were broadcast during the night and were probably watched by no more than 15 insomniacs one of whom was my mother.

By this time I had become a partner of the firm and was able to volunteer for some other jobs which complimented an otherwise narrow focus on my little corner of business law. For example I took over the task of recruiting young trainee lawyers. It was a two-way process where we tried to choose the best, but the best people had even more power than us because they got to decide whether to choose us over all the other firms. We therefore had to make the interviews distinctive so they would want to come to work for us. We even showed off a bit. One thing we did was to abandon all the traditional CV based recap enquiries ( eg “ So I see you went to Puddleduck Grammar School: did you like it there?”) and, after making our interviewees comfortable, went on to ask deceptively simple but, actually, quite demanding questions like:

“please pretend I’m your 12 year old brother and tell me what a mortgage is”

...or “should judges wear wigs”? Amazingly, 25 years on, people still remember these questions. My daughter, Frances, was recently reminded of this by someone she met in the playground.

But two things happened which, after about 15 years, took me down.

The first was that I spent too much of my time on developing the business, e.g. by marketing, because this was fun, while handing too much work over to great assistants who quickly became partners and made the clients their own.. Secondly I took on an increasing management burden, eventually ending up as the firm’s youngest senior partner, and then, after pulling off a big merger with a large US firm, becoming managing partner of the U.K. office. I even got to serve as the expanded firm’s representative on the international board. I spent a large part of my time on aeroplanes and travelling. It was very stimulating and I learnt much that underpinned a later board career. I even got sent briefly to Harvard Business School. But it all led to my career taking a plunge because one of the most important values of the US led merged firm was to be a killer biller. I had handed my billing over to others in the misty past. My freedom became restricted by business leaders I had, by my merger design, volunteered to serve.

I had to make a choice.

Either I started building up my revenue again and make a return to doing the client work that I’d outgrown. Or I eased myself out of the law. I discussed leaving with my colleagues but we found a great work/work compromise for me which was that I would do half the week as a regional managing partner and be free for the other half to do what I wanted . I took a big pay cut and looked for non-executive board positions. Luckily these trickled in and gave me a good work/work balance. And I was flattered that my partners wanted me to stay as the manager even though on a half time basis.

I answered an advert in The Times and was eventually selected to do a job I’ve kept ever since.

This job, which involved travelling, was to be one of a small group of advisers to a wealthy international family that owns properties and companies. Another advert was for people to join the board of London University. I served there until recently and specialised through sub-committee work in various diverse subjects. These were to become important to the developing mix. For example, my work on the investment sub-committee tied in with what I was learning in the family office job and was a reason for later being appointed as chairman of an investment management company. Some of the new jobs built on my time as a property lawyer… e.g. being on the boards of a firm of chartered surveyors and even another law firm.

By the way, that law firm went bust so there arose another work/work balance: between my successes and some big failures.

I began to become consciously aware of the advantages of work/work balance and dreamt up a strategy where there would be three more significant types of balance in the mix. The first was that I’d make sure that

I was always doing some unpaid work for charities even if the job was as demanding as a paid job. Secondly, I’d try and get some work in the arts. And, thirdly, I’d develop my hobbies in a way that honestly reflected the flamboyant part of me.

The first piece of the balance jigsaw was the easiest. I’d been lucky to be well paid as a law firm partner and to have some of the skills wanted when charities tried to attract useful people who could afford to give their time without needing reward. I started with an international wheelchair design enterprise and a cultural centre. Then there was the university I mentioned. This was followed by the Freud Museum. One of my motives for taking that one on was that my wife is a psychotherapist and I wanted to try to understand the background better.

Sometimes you met contacts on these boards who asked you to do other things. For example, one of my colleagues on the university board persuaded me to take on the trusteeship of a modern dance company. I really knew absolutely nothing about modern dance, but it has proved to be a fascinating immersion into the arts scene. In fact it helped me apply with some confidence for a recent job on the board of a company managing classical and modern music performers and composers. That one particularly ticked a box because our two boys are professional musicians.

And the new job pays modestly.

I don’t want to give anybody the impression that I sailed into these jobs. I have had dozens and dozens of failed applications and in fact log them alongside my list of places visited, films and plays seen and dreams dreamt.

The biggest failure is having my attempts to get into film, broadcasting or newspaper media comprehensively rejected. This is a closed world and I always fail to make the cut.

However, doing something which is related to the arts is an important part of the work/work balance and I am very contented to be learning about the dance and music scene. So that’s the second work/work balance box getting a nice big tick.

As regards film, that takes me into the third balance strategy, which is to take hobbies seriously and do them as if they were work, but to derive great pleasure in the process. I’ve co-made some short films and one was shown on the edges of a couple of festivals.

The most time consuming hobby is swimming. I tried to do this every day. Years ago I discovered a swimming guru who specialised in long-distance butterfly. He pulled this off with an impressively

relaxed elegance. I took lessons from him and went on to swim a one and a half mile section of a Swiss lake. On one of my sessions in a local pool I was spotted by a photographer and filmed. This led me to get the photographer started on this style of swimming and she one day returned the compliment by showing me how to make a decent short film. We made a few together. One of them was shown on the edges of the Venice Biennale a couple of years back. And then in the cosmodrome at Womad.

Last year I tried acting. I got myself cast as a fraudulent bisexual accountant in John Mortimer’s Naked Justice. Learning pages of lines gave the expression “work” a new twist. Plus I was seriously nervous for the first time in years. Covid hovered throughout. Performance at The Gatehouse was cancelled for two years running. Part of me was relieved when, eventually, we settled on doing it as a radio play. It was never broadcast. Failure again, but not my fault this time.

Another time consuming and increasingly stimulating hobby is gardening. We are lucky enough to have quite a large plot and I am interested in getting as much stuff as I can off skips and dividing the site into viewing areas where my clutter is displayed alongside a couple of pieces of striking sculpture made by a friend. One of the pieces was commissioned by my 40 year law firm when we eventually parted company. I handed in my notice the morning after I’d turned 60 and jacked in the three-day-week arrangement. The sculpture is one of a pair by my friend Jane.

It’s called “Tango” and represents the dance with my new law firm masters, after the merger, which eventually lead to my extinction as a lawyer.

Anyway, after seven years of close attention, the garden was included in the national garden scheme. That was in June this year. We raised a bob or two for charity. It was pleasurable work but some hard labour was involved. Come to think of it that’s also how I regard my daily dose of two newspapers. I’m obsessive about getting through them. Sure, no reasonable person would describe this as work but I’m not always reasonable. And, to show my dedication to this neurotic behaviour, I contribute frequently to the letters columns and other miscellany.

There is one big part of my life which is a wonderful part of the work work balance. It’s when my wife and I look after our two grandsons, Frances’s boys, Ira and Razzie, every Tuesday. It’s bloody hard but great fun. Maybe the best work/work balance of all.

Join me on Thursday 20th October at 12:30-1:30pm BST for a very special Better Bolder Braver Marketing Masterclass with my Dad and bring your questions, Work/Work experiences and an open mind...

Work/Work Balance with Steven Fogel - Join the Live Conversation Here