Today's guest, Ness Stonnill, founded Job Pair, an organisation that helps individuals and businesses make flexible work (including part-time, job sharing and working from home) possible.
This podcast is a topical one for Coronavirus times as we go into detail about how to work from home successfully.
Ness openly shares her story that led to the founding of Job Pair. She had worked in high pressure senior executive marketing roles in Adelaide and Sydney that eventually caused her to burn out. This manifested as extreme exhaustion and auto-immune disorders. Ness embarked on a long road to recovery that encompassed working on both her physical and mental health. A couple of things that really resonated with Ness were Autogenic Therapy, a self-healing therapy, and discovering Brene Brown (in particular Brown's book “The Gifts of Imperfection”) who she credits with helping change her mindset. Looking inwards and focussing on wellbeing enabled Ness to imagine how she wanted her working life to look - flexible and productive - with this concept she created Job Pair.
Ness and I chat about many things, including:
- The benefits of working from home;
- how to address the challenges of working from home;
- what successfully working from home looks like; and
- how to manage distractions.
Being required to work from home during Coronavirus will likely force us to adapt, it will open people's minds to how working flexibly can be productive and, importantly, we think a change in mind set will present opportunities for women (and men) to combine meaningful work and family in a much more sustainable way that enhances wellbeing.
I hope you take something really helpful from my chat with Ness.
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