finances

If you build it they will come: The impact of making space in my professional life

When my personal development coach told me that the first steps towards having a happier working life and better work life balance were to a) figure out what I wanted to do most and b) clear out some space in my life for it to fit into, that seemed a bit back to front and almost too obvious.

Although I’ve always known that I want to apply clinical psychology to helping the most complex children and families, I felt a real lack of clarity about what I wanted to do. I think in retrospect this was because I’d originally envisaged nothing more creative than a career in CAMHS in the NHS. But even once I was outside the NHS I still felt this lack of vision for my ideal future, perhaps because I wanted to choose it from the options available to me, and I hadn’t explored what those might be very far beyond returning to the NHS or continuing what I was doing already (court expert witness work, with a side helping of trying to influence policy and practise by being involved with national committees, standards groups and supporting the next generation of CPs).

I had also internalised the idea that the right process was to build up my investment of time in what I wanted to do more, until that took off and allowed me to do less of the other stuff. I felt like clearing out space from my established work streams was of no value (or even a potential risk to my income) unless I had figured out what I wanted to do, or ideally created the alternative channels already. But slowly I realised that if all my time and energy was being consumed by my current workload, then there was no capacity to imagine anything better, to seek out any opportunities or plan any change, and I’d still be overloading myself and worrying about my work life balance in a year from now, or five, or ten.

So I decided to take a gamble and cut down my work commitments for a while and give myself thinking space to figure it out. Of course, being me, I took on the new part-time consulting role that was going to pay the bills whilst giving me time to think before I had managed to reduce my existing workload. So I had six months in which I had to overlap this new role with my all my ongoing court and committee work, before I was able to wind them down very much at all, and then a minor RTA to contend with (see previous blog). So I sure didn’t take the easy route to cutting down.

But the physical jolt was the final straw to help me to realise that I needed to change my work patterns and I have been able to spend more time with my family, and have now stepped down from almost all of my committee roles. This is an enormous change after 4 or 5 years on the BPS CYPF committee, nearly double that of being involved with CPLAAC, and more recently being part of the BPS/FJC standards group for psychology experts to the family court and the NICE guidance development group for attachment interventions, and a rep from the BPS to BAAF. I am now at the very tail end of the court work, with just three small pieces of work to complete (each an addendum to prior work or work that was delayed after I agreed to complete it) and a couple of single days in court.

Although my time is still very fraught for another couple of weeks and we will then segue into Christmas (meaning my winding down schedule will have taken me almost a year to achieve), I’ve managed to get onto some tasks I have been avoiding for a long time. I’ve started to work my way through the financial tangles that constantly stop things running smoothly – this is mainly the enormous pile of unpaid invoices where parties to court work have disputed their share, gone bust, or just not paid for years and years, but also includes the un-invoiced work that we have completed, expenses I have not claimed back from the company, and the administrative task of reconciling our records with the bank statements. My team have stepped up to help me and as I have made sense of it bit by bit it feels like that tangle is turning into a single logical thread I can follow and wind up as I go.

As I sort and put away the clutter that consumes my time and energy step by step, I am starting to feel less overwhelmed by running the business. As the volume of court work I undertake reduces, so does the emotional weight of the work. And as the burden I am carrying gets lighter, psychologically at least, some small gaps between the demands on my time and energy are already starting to appear. Into those gaps has come the beginnings of the vision I lacked of where I want to take my career in the future, and what kind of life I want.

I’m sure I’ll talk more about that next time. But for now I just wanted to share that it feels great to put down some of the load I have been carrying, to untangle the frustrating little issues that have been tying me up, and to create space for the stuff that I care about the most. With the help of a new business mentor I’ve been able to connect with the motivation that started me on this journey, and to finally work out where I want to go both personally and professionally. And that makes all the steps I have to take to get there much clearer.

I made the space, and sure enough, the goals of how I want to fill it have come to me.

Getting organised

If you haven’t realised it by now, I’m the kind of person that keeps a lot of plates spinning in my professional life. I end up getting excited about things and find it hard to say no, even when I don’t have the capacity to give things the time they deserve. Perhaps because of this overload, and my avoidance of putting a financial value on my work, I have always struggling to get on top of the finances of the business, keep up with invoicing, respond to queries and book things in with enough time to complete everything before the deadline. However, I have relentless standards for my own work, so I try to do everything to the best of my ability, even if it eats into my time out of work (or even my sleep).

Having so much on the go requires a lot of organisational skills, and I know that I sometimes fall short in this regard, so I am very reliant on having a good team around me and particularly a good PA. Thus it was a disaster for me (although fab news for her) when my admin decided to leave Lifepsychol earlier this year and go and bake cakes instead. Worse still, it came at a time that I had two new Assistant Psychologists without prior experience starting in post, and a whole lot of deadlines. I had also concluded that delegating the book keeping to the accountants was not cost effective, as they did not understand the ins and outs of the business, or have access to our files or close enough communication with me to resolve queries. I was starting to panic that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demands and everything would fall apart.

Thus it is great news that I have recruited a new admin/operational manager, who is helping me to get everything organised, and has taken on the finances of the company, along with some of the personnel functions. This has been a lifeline as it has really taken the pressure off me, and allowed me to start chipping away at a to-do-list that has been growing much faster than I have been able to check items off it. It is helpful that there is a central point of contact for the company who is there on a full-time basis, and that is making all our lines of communication easier, especially as I seem to be all over the country at the moment!

Today we signed up for Google Apps for Work to set up shared cloud storage for the company, and a more professional company email, calendar and task-list system. We are gradually working through the state of the finances, and catching up with invoicing. We even sorted out the materials in the cupboards, and re-homed the five boxes of left over questionnaires from the diabetes study, some materials that were ordered in error, and a massive collection of used lever-arch files.

This really pleases my inner OCD, as I really dislike the feeling of disorganisation and clutter in my physical or psychological space. I have high hopes that once we are organised things can tick over in a much more satisfying way.

I’ve also been offered one of 10 UK places to be supported by ImpactHub to scale up one aspect of my business over the next year, so I’ll write more about that in my next blog!