Lisa Leong wants you to forget work-life balance and cultivate work-life cohesion instead

I occupy a weird little pocket of the workforce because my work is all about well work, between what I do as a consultant and what I do on here on this podcast. My time in the office or the home office is spent thinking about how can we work better. It's like that movie Inception, but instead of dreams within dreams, it's about work about work about and there's no Leonardo DiCaprio. Sadly, it can be a bit confusing and even a bit isolating,

So my curiosity is around a lot of words and frameworks like work life balance, where my question is this a help or does this hinder us in any way? I feel like work life balance hinders me. And the reason why it hinders me is because I just get confused. I'm like, well, which part is work and which part

And there is.

New research on heart coherence which add its essence is you may have heard of the heart rate variability if you're a sporting person and you know so you can monitor your health by looking at your heart rate variance. And actually heart rate variance is about variability, like you actually want it to be a living, breathing thing and you want to have a lot of flexibility in it. And so I found it helpful to think of work life coherence as being a equivalent to a check in.

So would you ask yourself that every morning, like do I feel like I have work life coherence? Is that what that looks like?

Yes, I have a morning routine which goes for about ten hours, and.

I want to ask about that.

Yes, yeah, well okay, so it was ten hours in COVID lockdowns, but now that we have to do things outside.

Actually it's not ten hours anymore. It's like one hour.

But part of it is like generally and gratitude, And when I am doing my journaling and gratitude, I do actually check in nearly every day with how is this feeling? Am I getting this coherence right?

Does this feel right?

I want to ask something because like selfishly, it relates to me what I find. Even though I don't do standard nine to five hour day, I still struggle sometimes with the guilt about not doing that. Like this morning, for example, I don't have my daughter with me at the moment. She's with me fifty percent of the time. And when I don't have Frankie, I start work quite early.

I think it's very natural to have feelings of especially when you're a hard worker, you know, to have that sense of am I using every minute of the day. I spoke to someone Rob Cross. Have you spoken to him? So? He does great research on well being and work, and he spoke about collaboration overload, and one of the things he spoke about was he has this factor of accomplishment.

Thank you for that two minute therapy session, Lisa, that's very appreciated. Now let's talk about routines, because you do have a I was going to say complex, but it's not. Yes, it's a it's a multi part morning routine which you have made habitual. So can you talk about what that is and also importantly how you actually made those habits stick?

Okay, so I think can I just have it's not it's certainly not a disclaimer, but it's just this is absolutely individual. And the reason why I put that is because when I wrote an article on my routines, I start ridiculously early, and the news item became everyone needs to start really early the morning routines, and it literally went that was that was because obviously nobody read the article.

They just read the first part.

Ha, I just read their headline. Didn't matter how you read an article.

You just read the headline and then you've got it and then it all away. It's like, get up at five am, otherwise you're terrible. And I thought, oh, wow, that's certainly not what I said. So follow your circadia in rhythm. So the most important thing is understand yourself and no, are you an early starter or not? I am, So I tend to start my morning routine, say at five am. That is naturally when I get up, so I'm not actually sitting in an alarm or I'll wake up before an alarm, So I start.

At five am.

When I started this, I think the most important thing about habits is start small. So atomic habits or tiny habits or micro habits, whatever you want to call it. And what we mean by starting small is literally do one thing and build it out from the time you wake up. So you wake up and you put your feet on the floor as you are waking up, what is the next thing that you're going to do, and then that's called habit stacking. So first of all, bring awareness to what you usually do when you wake up

What how how have you done that?

No, I was joking. I was joking, but.

I'm turning fifty and I really do want to be a feeling like I am not going backwards as last year I started. Somebody told me that, you know, you start, you see your life and you're ripening one end and then you're rotting, oh down the other end, and then it set me on this very negative kind of mindset of am I rotting?

Am I rotting? Now?

And so I've decided that I'm going to anti rot and so I've I've actually changed a bit of my morning routine, Amantha. So I am doing a bit of personal training too, like not training people, but getting personally trained, so that came out weird. So and because I actually had a back injury from too much zoom stuff, right, I don't And the doctor said, you you know, you have ligament muscle ligament, and I call it a ligament sandwich and you've got no filling because I have no muscle.

Are there any gadgets or software or tools that you're using to track your progress other than obvious things like output with weights for example.

Oh, with the personal training, okay, with.

The physical side of not wanting to rotch.

I guess I have my sleep tracking device, which is a ring.

So your aura ring, Yes, yep, you are a I've got mine on at the moment and it's told me it needs a battery charge this morning.

Yes, yes, I'm strict with that.

I use that a lot to monitor my sleep, which I say is, you know, it's pretty much much my fundamental block.

And then I have been.

Using my Symptoms, which is a food tracker. But what you do is you put in all the food and then you put in all your symptoms, so you know, am I have I got a headache today? Or you know which part of my body is feeling a bit? And you know, do I have a frog in my throat this morning from eating a lot of cream yesterday?

And then.

So then I monitor it and then I go, oh wow, I really should stop doing that.

And then what else? So what else do I do? What else do I do?

Oh?

Well, with the time blocking my calendar, then I have a pretty good feel for what was the balance in my day and what was the effect on everything as well?

Because you color code? Is that right?

Oh yeah?

Can you tell me about that?

Okay, so if you look at my calendar you could be frightened because every hour is accounted for. Say it looks scary, however the color codes make it okay. So blue is actually kind of space in my calendar, but because I've scheduled it in, it's just got a block of space. And so the block of space could be transit and I commute by e bike, So all of those beautiful blue blocks in my diary are actually me enjoying my bike ride as I'm going between events or

So that's an example.

And then different projects might have different colors or they I am running out of colors, and my Google calendar, I must say, so.

We have a few duplicates.

That's funny. I use color coding so I time block, but not as extreme as you so, but I do love using colors just so I can look at the week and get a set as to am I like putting enough energy into the things that matter to me? So I use it as a bit of a check for that, and also just thinking about what kind of energy am I going to need for the day. So the main activities that don't go to the default color, which is a sort of a soft pastor purple is

So, and it means that meetings don't go in there over the top of a space that I really need. Yes, yes, And it's about how do you prioritize things as well. So let's say you've decided, okay, so I really do you know health is the most important thing, family is the most important thing. Then I will go into my diary and make sure that they go in first, and then everything actually goes around that.

So in my anti.

Rotting phase, I you know, doctor appointments are really important and don't they just get you know, delayed when you're not prioritizing health. So they go in first, and then around that at you know, then I'll start scheduling other things because I mean I can because I have control over my diary. So there is an autonomy thing. I mean, one of my questions is, you know, how much autonomy do you have? And I still believe, and this is what I call a compassionate challenge, that you probably have

Especially Okay, we will be back with Lisa soon hearing about her shutdown richel that she does with her whole family and so how she figured out what she was really passionate about and wanted to pursue in her career. And also, if you're enjoying this episode, maybe you might want to share it with a friend that you think it would be useful for. So to do that, just go to the little share icon wherever you are listening to this podcast from click on it and share it

At dinner time when we all sit together, we do a practice that I heard from Penny Lacasso, our friend in common, and she did it with her son. And it's called rose, bud thorne. And so you nominate at the end of each day. What is something that happened which was really good. That's the rose, what's something you're.

Looking forward to? The bud?

And the thorn is something less than good that happened in your day that you want to share. And when I first suggested it to my now teenage daughter, I was wondering whether she would want to do it at all, but she loves it, and she often when we sit down, she'll say rosebud Thorn and then we'll each nominate it. And it's a really nice way to catch up and rather than saying how's your day?

Good? Hello? Any want that mother, I'm run in front of you. I'll see you on TikTok.

One of the things you talk about in your book this working life, is not letting your work identity define you. And I could really relate to the struggle that you found with this because I have definitely let my work identity define me. So I wanted to know how did you stop this from happening.

When I studied at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, so this was two thousand and three, I was trained as a lawyer and so I was coming quite late to radio.

I did the radio program, so I would have been.

Saying about thirty two years of age, and the head of radio, Steve O'Hearn, just gave us this amazing.

Piece of advice.

He said, who will you be when the on air light switches off? So the on air light represents when you're recording or when you're broadcasting on air, And we were all doing the commercial radio program at afters and so you know, we were going to be setting off into the world to become radio DJs. And in radio particularly, you know, you can become your persona. An example of

Bit hooked into that.

And so it was a really precient cautionary reminder and so I just always kept that with me. So it's very grounding to think, you know, this is a role. I'm doing this for now, and then you know, one day I may pass the baton onto another and for this time, I'm going to be really present and then really enjoy it. But I'm not going to make it become my whole identity so that I'm leth Or Lisa on SAFM, you know.

Or.

Whatever my current role is.

So it's just reminding myself about that, and I always hear it in my head.

Now. Something that people often ask when when someone is struggling with you know, what, what even is my identity? What should I be doing for work? Is they say, well, what are your passions about? And I love the life flow exercise that you describe in the book to uncover what you're passionate about. Can you can you describe that exercise and what that was like for you?

Yeah, So the life flow exercise came to me initially as a happiness graph, and I completely thought I made this up myself, Amantha. But then I've fed out more good things that I had innovated, something that actually was in existence before and during and after I came up with the happiness graph. Many people call it the lifeline exercise, and in the book we call it the life flow exercise because it was kind of more about ebbs and

Peak, what made it a peak. Who was I with?

What was I doing? Was I experiencing? And then saying with the troughs, maybe even thinking about what was going on in that era at that time, and then really looking for those themes.

The reason why it's.

Useful is because then you with this hindsight, you can start to see, oh, I see a pattern for what makes something a peak or flow experience for me? I can see in the troughs that you know something is coming out. I'll give you an example. So I was in law.

I was loving what I was doing.

It was in London. I was an e commerce lawyer. But the Internet bubble burst, so I got sort of stuck in these airless rooms and it became very demoralizing. So I said to myself, look, money isn't everything. I need to go for something which is more meaningful to me, maybe talking about that passion side that you had intimated just before. And then so I've redesigned myself. I became a hospital radio presenter.

I decided that, oh my gosh, this is it. I've got to become a radio DJ.

And we skipped forward to you know, when I got into Afters and it was definitely a peak experience. Now here's the thing. Actually, when I was starting to do commercial radio, I would be on the air for six hours and I would actually come out and sometimes I would cry, what wow? And this was my dream job? And so doing the Happiness Scratch helped me to identify

So if there's other people there, that's all fine.

This might get a bit smelly, yeah exactly.

And you know I don't like even I don't like talking to myself.

Even I get sick in my own voice.

How very humble of you. Now when we're talking about purpose, I think something that relates to purpose is values, And I'd love to know how did you figure out what your values were?

I think my personal values probably have changed a lot over time, and in fact, my twenty one year old self would value not doing values. So you know, all this introspection and existential crisis of course comes.

Later in life. So I mean over time.

I think you stress tests your values through life, right, And so even doing something like a lifeflow exercise, when I was looking at my peaks and troughs, it became apparent Oh okay, so this is probably a pretty core value.

So one of them is freedom. And what do I mean by freedom?

What comes out in different ways, but certainly at work it's quite a lot of autonomy.

And even when I.

Was working in large institutions, you know, like the ABC or big law firms, which I loved, even then I had crafted a role or I definitely blossomed in roles where I had a fair degree of autonomy. Even when I was a first year lawyer. You know, I would be client facing and I would actually already have quite a bit of autonomy. So I think understanding that that is a core value and that when I feel constrained, I'm not my best self.

But how do you.

Figure out your values? And I mean I asked this from a place of I feel like I think about values a lot, but sometimes I really struggle to land on what are my values and what makes me unique? Like I hear a value like freedom, and the psychologist in me thinks, well, yeah, autonomy is a fundamental motivator for every huge human being. So how did you figure out your specific values? Was there a test? Was there a process that you went through?

Yeah?

So there are different ways to come up with values. And we really love the approach of Greta Bradman, who is our expert in the book on Values, And I think I love her.

Approach because it's really practical.

And so values I think come out of prioritization as well. So as you say, you know, you can look at a list of values, and Greta used as a list, so she has, you know, a list of fifty odd values. And I found it helpful to go through that general list and the first thing to do is just to strike out the ones that you're like, oh, that's not me. So, you know, looking at some of the values, I don't know whether I think hedonism is a value, wealth is a value.

Then we've got.

Freedom pretty general, but some are more applicable than others. So go with the ones that are definitely not used, so you strike them out first. Now to the list of fifty, then you may have forty. So you keep on going through this process. And what I love about it is it's not about getting the right answer, because it's more about what does this mean? And what am I thinking about when I read the word freedom or wealth or whatever the word is, You know, what does

On for size.

And then you get your list and then what you're aiming at is to try and hone it down to five values. And I feel like it's a really good opportunity to have a chat with someone who knows you well and maybe sort of say, oh, if I was going to personalize this value, what might that look like? I mean, one value I've been playing around with, Amantha is creativity and curiosity. So I am innately curious. That

So I like the start means.

Trying on for size, and then, like all things, I think the rule is to hold these things lightly Amantha.

Now you mentioned that collaboration is something that you love, and I want to know when you first start a project with someone else or a group of people, what's the first thing that you want to know about that person or people.

When I'm working with someone, I go to superpowers pretty quickly. So my fundamental philosophy is that, you know, I look for the best in people, and that people want to do a good job, and they want to be in flow and they want to be feeling like they're doing their best work and reaching their highest potential. And the way in there is to be quite explicit about superpowers

So is a superpower just like a strength.

Yeah, it's a strength, but it's so unique to you that it becomes a superpower.

So what's an example of that for you?

Uh?

A superpower for me is probably this finding the sunshine in others. Underpinning that is this innate curiosity and you know, empathy.

What about you?

Well, what about me? What's one of my superpowers? Well? I did just want to ask, and maybe, uh, this is because curiosity is the value of mine as well. How did you uncover that that that's your superpower?

So the life flow exercise helps a little bit with reflection on you know, when I'm at my best, what am I tipping in? And then that attitude of if every day is a lab day when have I used my superpower and what has been the result? And if the result is wow, that was such a joyful experience,

So that's how we would share those superpowers. Did that make sense?

It did? It did. It's funny when I think of you, I feel like one of your superpowers is being like a little energizer bunny, and like adding that as an ingredient to a project, like just the energy that you bring I think makes you quite unique. The level of energy. Does that resonate with you? Yes?

And that's a really interesting point because you can also do superpowers for projects. And in one of my last projects, we helped each other develop our superpowers as a kind of team exercise and getting to know you.

We knew each other.

A little bit, and because I was leading the project, they gave me the superpower of atomic north Star and so that is like that power. They're little power punch and the north Star because I was kind of leading it. So that's an example of how you can personalize the

It's quite fun.

That's awesome. And now I didn't want to evade your question before what are my superpowers? I reckon, I've got a couple that come to mind, and let me know if this resonates with you. So I reckon, I'm highly enthusiastic, like if I'm into something, and that's where I focus my energy. Like when I'm into something, I'm very very enthusiastic, and I think that I feel like that would be a superpower. I feel like that enthusiasm becomes contagious and

Can I throw something into the pot as well, let's do Yes, you're enthusiastic, and you also execute like you get it done and you do it with focus. You don't overpromise and under deliver.

So what is that?

So it's sort of like you're an enthusiastic, enthusiastic executor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I think that comes from being quite extreme in terms of conscientiousness as a personality trait. Yeah, which funnily enough makes me a very good employee, even though I haven't had a boss for like fifteen years. Anyway, if anyone wants to hire me, I think i'd be really good now for people that want to connect with you in some way, whether that be get your new book or listen to your podcast with the ABC. It's not a podcast, it's a shot that became a podcast.

So the book.

We have a website this weekinglfebook dot com and all the latest is on there. And then I'm on LinkedIn, and I'm on Instagram, and I'm on Facebook, and I generally am under Lisa s Leong or Lisa Leong.

I think you can find me brilliant, not Lisa Lapong. That was one of your nicknames.

I have so many, don't I yes, Lisa Laplong. Luckily I left that in London with the tax office who registered me under that name.

Believe it or not. Official tax receipts under Lisa Lapong. I have them somewhere in my room. I don't know where they are though.

I think I'm just I'm going to be calling you Lapong from now. I can't go back to Lisa.

Some people from London call me Lapong.

Well, Lapong. It's been such a joy chatting to you, doing a full length interview because you've been on before and short form. This has just been super, super fun. Definitely a rose for me. Thank you so much for listening to my chat with Lisa. I hope you've got some good little tips from it that will help you with your work and how you think about work. Now.