My Rethink Moment

I’m a curious individual – I love knowing about stuff and working in communications means I get to hear about a huge range of topics and meet people much brighter than me. I’m passionate about the power of effective messaging and storytelling, creating conversations and rallying people around a shared purpose. My role enables me to do this.

Like a lot of us, the pandemic (and the massive stresses created by it) was a catalyst for me asking myself what work really means to me. I was in a role I used to love, with a great team and a lot of benefits – but I’d lost myself completely to my career and had stopped being happy or healthy. I chose to make a big change, to move to a very different organisation, because it meant regaining a degree of control and, ultimately, happiness.

The old paradigms do not apply in the talent market of the future. What employers thought of as a career until very recently will not appeal to Gen Z and the entire psychological contract needs to be reimagined. But this isn’t just about Gen Z – it applies to millions of people already in work and demanding positive change: more choice, more flexibility, more humanity, more purpose.

Personally, retraining my brain to embrace a level of physical exercise rather than being scared of it. Professionally, building a new team and supporting them to be their best selves at work.

I’m a big big fan of a futurologist called Gerd Leonhard who produces excellent content on YouTube about really diverse issues such as AI, digitisation, the future of the human experience. His thinking always gets me thinking.