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Goal Setting

leadership wellbeing Sep 02, 2022

I plan my year in quarters.

I have big annual goals and I break those down into smaller ones every 3 months. From those quarterly goals I work out what I need to do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis in order to achieve those goals.

2008 was the last year that I completed annual performance appraisals within the organisation I was working in.

I am deeply passionate about making things as simple and streamlined as possible. I genuinely believe annual goal setting is a thing of the past for so many reasons. Some companies still have 3-5 year strategies and annual goals, but if we look at the pace of change that is happening in our world today and in our workplace, we realise that it’s not as effective. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good to have ideas and vision long term, but we have to look at what is going on in real time.

If the last couple of years has taught us anything it’s that we have no control...

Boundaries: More Than Saying No

leadership wellbeing Aug 26, 2022

This topic comes up all the time and I hear people often say “I’m rubbish with boundaries because I can’t say no”

Why do you struggle so much with boundaries and why do you think they are just about saying no?

Particularly for women, we have had it ingrained into us that if we have boundaries, then we are selfish. If we are not always available for other people, then we are selfish.

In my corporate days when I became firm with my boundaries, I would get told I wasn’t a team player, I was being selfish, that I wasn’t helpful enough, that I was cold hearted, or I wasn’t committed enough. What I came to realise was that was their issue, whilst some were personal attacks on me, most were because people weren’t used to women setting boundaries. If one of the men said ‘give me an hour’ or ‘I don’t start work till 10am on a Wednesday’, that was accepted. But not if a woman...

The Great Resignation and Quietly Quitting, OR The Great Reflection, Boundaries and Balance?

burnout coaching leadership wellbeing Aug 08, 2022

When we hear about the Great Resignation and Quietly Quitting, we seem to think of our people as disengaged, unhappy or no longer committed to their roles, but, what if this is exactly the balance that we’ve been needing to create in the workplace for a long time?

When I first started my career, I worked my contracted hours. I worked in retail and I was either working when the store was open, or my contracted hours. I didn’t have a laptop or mobile phone to allow me to work from home, I worked at work. And when I wasn’t at work, I wasn’t working.

As my career developed I started to work additional (unpaid) hours, staying for longer in the workplace, but even then, when I left the workplace, I was no longer working.

I changed sector, worked in growing organisations and only in 2011 was I issued a work laptop and phone. Between 2006 and 2011, although I’d asked for the tech to allow me to work from anywhere at anytime, it wasn’t...

Don't Let The Critics Count

leadership wellbeing Aug 05, 2022

It can be really hard to not take criticism personally. The more visible we are and the more we use our voices, the more criticism we can face and this can be really challenging.

Very early on in my corporate career I was criticised for the speed in which I worked. A number of my colleagues would tell me to slow down as I was making them look bad.

That resulted in me dealing with a lot of backstabbing and bitching and in some cases people were trying to stitch me up and gaslight me.

This made me look deep into myself and wonder what it was that I was doing wrong, what could I change? How could I modify how I was speaking and behaving so as not to upset people.

In my late teens/early 20’s I didn’t have the understanding as to what it really meant to stand out in my own power, to believe in myself. If you have a lot of people telling you the same thing, particularly when you are growing and developing as a leader and in your...

Be Seen, Be Heard, Be You

burnout hr leadership wellbeing Jul 22, 2022

In 2014 I left corporate and started my consultancy, The Chrysalis Crew. At the time I knew that the organisation would be much bigger than me. In terms of the purpose and the work that we were doing.

Many people at the time asked me why I didn’t call that company Kelly Swingler, but I knew the company was much bigger than me.

I had this period when I first started the business of being able to hide behind the Chrysalis brand name and logo. This kept me quite small. It wasn’t until I started to recruit a team that they said I was the face of the organisation. The reality is, that I was. People wanted to ‘buy’ me. But at the time all I wanted was to hide.

If we think about some of the big brands; we can associate them to a person.

I didn’t realise this as quickly as I should.

Years went on, I then became comfortable being on stage, I’d recovered from my corporate hangover and burnout...

Respect Your Boundaries And Others Will Too

burnout leadership wellbeing Jul 15, 2022

The challenges that many clients face is that they think that boundaries are all about saying NO. Whilst saying no is a part of that, we also know that boundaries are about protecting our energy, time, space, our intentions and goals.

In order to achieve your goals, dreams and ambitions, it’s important to maintain your boundaries. If you don’t, you can end up worn out, burnt out, struggling and not having enough time to get everything done.

When those boundaries aren’t in place, it’s our goals that fall by the wayside. We extend the time frame on our goals or even forget about them completely. We then start to feel like we’re not achieving, with imposter syndrome and self doubt creeping in.

I also see that we create boundaries, but only try them once and life happens and we give up. Then we find it more difficult later on and think that boundaries don’t actually work, or wonder why people aren’t...

Is It Time To Start Performance Managing Your Top Performers?

burnout coaching leadership Jul 14, 2022

“Lazy bastards don’t burn out”

I was part of a panel discussion last week talking about burnout and Lucyna Milanowska made this comment, “lazy bastards don’t burn out” and she’s right. I wrote an article years ago about who is looking after your top performers and said a similar thing, because it’s true. The ones who do the minimum, will not reach burnout.

A month or so ago I interviewed Denise Duffield-Thomas for my podcast and she’s a self-confessed lazy perfectionist, prone to burnout. When she talks about being lazy, she wants to make the biggest impact with the least amount of effort, and so she’s always looking for the quickest and easiest way to get her to her goal. We talked about the importance of boundaries, and when she pushes to hard and becomes exhausted, she’s prone to burnout, and this is a multi-millionaire with a lot of help and support, who also likes to do a number...

HR, WTF Are You Trying To Prove?

burnout hr leadership Jul 08, 2022

I was going to post a different article with you today, but this feels like the words that I need to share today. And I’m mad, frustrated, heartbroken, sad and overwhelmed by the messages I’ve received this week and the conversations I’ve had, so here goes.

Yesterday I shared that it was 9 years since I had the first of two operations in 48 hours as a result of the physical impact of my burnout in 2013, the burnout that almost killed me, and the burnout that I refused to admit to, working from my hospital bed because I didn’t want to let anyone down, I didn’t want to seem like I had failed, I ‘needed’ to be there for my team. And whilst I was recovering and numbing from the daytime TV I’d been consuming as I lay on the sofa, the day that my sons came home from school and I said to them ‘don’t worry Mum will be back at work soon’ because for me my ability to work or not seemed to prove how healthy I was,...

What's your definition of success?

burnout leadership wellbeing Jul 01, 2022

I have just delivered my annual Power Up event in London and I wanted to share some of the learnings that have come from that event.

When I envisioned my event and came up with the idea originally, it would now be very easy for me (a few days after) to see it as a failure in comparison to what I had in my mind.

It was during a coaching session with my own coach last June, where I was in the process of bringing forward Kelly Swingler as a brand. I was stepping away from my old consultancy that I started in 2014 and over the last year I have really put myself out there, flying the Kelly Swingler flag and brand. During my coaching session I said I wanted to reach as many women as possible, in person, in a room, being able to help women step into their core power.

My coach asked me to do a visualisation exercise, where we went into a brief meditation, to visualise ‘this thing’. I knew it was something that had to happen in person and as...

Mind The Gap

burnout leadership wellbeing Jun 24, 2022

Mind the gap is the title of my next book and is now available on pre-order.

This book is the most difficult one I’ve written to date. This will be my 5th book and is released on the 13th July.

With the other 4 books, they have been commissioned by publishers in the first instance. So the publishers have asked me to write a book, they’ve given me the word count, the layout and a rough idea of what’s to be in the book. They’ve also edited it and published it for me.

But with this book, I had some challenges initially. The title had been going around in my head for months, but I had no idea what I was going to write about, I just wrote down ‘Mind the Gap’ in my notebook.

I started to write it and contacted a publisher and I was so excited because I not only had this book in mind, I also had 4 more. I knew the order they were going to be in and why, everything was in place and I was over the moon when...

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