Was ‘presenteeism’ mentioned?

Yes.

I’ve had jobs in recent years where I’dve been quite happy to do some work but I simply wasn’t asked to do anything and there wasn’t anything to do. I did create a few bits and pieces but as nothing was really required it just got put in a drawer. I realised that to ask for more work would’ve upset the game which a lot of people were playing, so spent my days on t’internet and having interesting chats with colleagues..

It’s no wonder the economy’s in the doldrums!

Thanks BadlyWiredDog – some useful observations there… I’m aware of all of it, but still very useful to see it in writing… amazing what you can pick up about people from STW over time!
I’m in a bit of a trap in terms of being very good at what I do, when the circumstances are right, but they’re rarely right. I’ve been contracting for 4 years which was much better, but I’m struggling to find another contract.

I’ve kind of been being coached by a friend of mine for 12 years now. He points out as per Mr Moofo that if I was expecting to find fulfilment in financial services marketing then I was probably mistaken :-) If I get the job in MK it’ll be a new sector and one which is much more meaningful, which will be a big change for me.

I love my coaching work, it comes naturally to want to help people and my clients’ feedback is positive. The financials are uncertain on that though. My plan is to continue coaching at evenings and weekends to get a better feel for the ££ and then hopefully go 100%

Some useful insights though – thank you

trainee Life Coach

Executive coaching, not life coaching. Not the same thing at all.

What I’m doing has a formal, assessed qualification and is focussed on helping people resolve work problems, whether it’s career choice or specific problems in being effective at work. Often hired and employed by the employer to support a team member, or once I’m more experienced, coaching a whole team to work together more effectively.

And being able to coach other people does not mean you can coach yourself… but i do know STW is normally a pretty good place for helping me to consider alternatives I hadn’t considered myself.

And I think you’re right as it happens, I can’t afford to live in London anymore and it’s not the place I fell in love with aged 18. The massive paycut (c30%) will still leave me better off overall. I never expected to see living in MK as more attractive than London! That’s how much things have changed… :-)

STW classifieds and Ebay are great. When you get yourself organised and sell all the stuff you’ve not used for years, you realise you’re sitting on a few £000s worth of stuff, which is nice :-)

But there’s loads of other places in Britain that could do with that ambition and energy; it’s about time people tried their luck in other parts of the country

I have a theory that pumping the London market is a gambit designed to do exactly that – get loads of taxes in from stamp duty and capital gains whilst giving businesses and people the incentive to move out – a rebalancing of the UK economy without having to spend anything. HSBC have already announced they’re moving the retail bank to Birmingham on account of commercial rents being so high and employees needing to be paid so much to afford to live…

Meanwhile all the European youth who can’t get jobs at home are pouring into London, willing to work for low wages (even in the professional jobs) and live in shared accommodation which replaces the more established indigenous who’re leaving. In time London will be a hollowed out shell of superrich and badly paid middle classes and the all the working class who keep the city running being bussed in from outside (Police, Ambulance, even Doctors at this rate).

So it used to be a city for the ambitious and you could succeed – many have. But now the outlook is lousy IMO… you still work all hours under massive pressure but for very little reward.

I think you may have had a pop at me once before when I said I worked in marketing? It’s gets a bit boring after a while, especially when the thread is about asking for some help…

Wait and see the ad I’m about to put in the classifieds :-)

Don’t get me started on people hoarding houses…

You can live a totally bike focussed life here. You can live car free.

This is appealing. Whilst the ‘sport’ aspect of cycle commuting in London can be fun, and certainly the cycling culture which has grown massively in the last few years, riding in the peace and quiet would be very welcome…

If you don’t mind me asking, which company have you chosen to provide your training/qualification?

AoEC – academy of executive coaching. Recommended to me by a friend who’s an HR Director and trained with them himself. he said they’re well recognised.

Everything you say below re the ££ is what my research with current coaches (I have quite a few friends working in that area) is also telling me. If you’re great and working at corporate level the ££ is very good, but generally it can be very uncertain.

I’m also conscious that UK economy isn’t really that strong (whatever the headline figures say) and the chance of corporates or individuals having money to spend on coaching may not be that high for quite a few years yet. Doing it on the side in addition to a secure perm income is therefore attractive as a way to exploring the financial reality

The Practitioner Diploma has this level of accreditation:

EMCC Qualification
Practitioner level
Equivalent to UG degree / NVQ5

ICF Qualification
Represents 60 Accredited Coach Specific Training Hours (ACSTH). The ICF requires 60 Coach Specific Training Hours when applying by Portfolio Method for individual coach accreditation for ACC (Associate Certified Coach).

Middlesex University / Professional Development Foundation
20 level 6 credits through Middlesex University

Association for Coaching
AC Recognised course

I used to be like this at work – always giving it 100%, full energy, full of ambition and getting frustrated if I wasn’t excellent every time. And then I broke and got signed off with stress. That taught me a lesson.
Things got a lot better when I took it easier – more of my energy went into getting the work done – I chilled out, became more effective and my earnings got a lot better as a result.

Road, MTB, climbing… I think you’re being too ambitious for yourself and expecting too much. Think about how you’d respond if your boss or clients pushed you so hard all the time – you’d tell them to sod off eventually, and that, I suspect is what you’re body’s saying to your head right now.

I did the same to myself for years – climbing, skydiving, mountaineering, MTB, running and now road. I’ve pared it all right down now to just road + core strength sessions and yoga. At 42 I can still keep up with the 30 year olds in my club – I’m not really much slower but it’s a lot less effort

Pootling is fun anyway. I ride s/s for commuting as it tops out at 20mph. I enjoy the ride much more as a result

Possibly the greatest thread title ever?

Possibly the bug’s not fully gone. maybe take it easy and go for gentle miles rather than pushing it and risk weakening your immune system.

I’ve had a few sessions off the bike from broken bones – currently just starting back now. I find the first few rides you’re week as a kitten and you’re shocked how much fitness you’ve lost and depressed about how long it’ll take to come back.

But if you keep the miles up and just remember your head’s more ambitious than your legs can deliver you suddenly find that just as you get used to riding slowly the fitness comes back far more quickly than you expected. Bit like riding up a hill which is supersteep at the bottom but the gradient eases off as you go – and overall it takes nothing as long as you expected when you first started.

Maybe you’re too keen to get fast again everytime you lose anything and then go off too hard and limit your body’s recovery?

(and if you read that last paragraph and think “my god this guy is f***ed up”, you’re probably very correct. )

No, but have a quiet word with your ‘ambitious self’ he’s holding you back and it sounds like your overdoing it. When I was getting PBs in running I only did one fast session a week – at track when I would turn myself inside out. Other runs were all slow and steady

The Jeremy Hunt spoonerism was much better :-)
Mind you, I don’t know why we make such a thing of R4 presenters swearing – Mary Whitehouse died years ago!

Don’t know about their cycling kit but I have a few Ted Baker shirts – they’ve been worn loads and are still in top notch condition. Ok they were £60 a pop but still going strong after 8 years means they’re cheaper than buying cheaper shirts and having to replace them. Their classic styling means you can do this without looking badly out of date too.

If I wanted some casual riding kit I’d be looking at this stuff but I quite like lycra :-)

Yeah, sorry brooess

No worries. tbh I overthink things so your challenge was actually quite useful!

It’s only 30 mins away from London and if the work’s enjoyable and I can ride my bike in sunshine then I’ve got all the basics of what I want anyway.

London’s changed a lot in the last 5 years – it’s not what it was. Overrun by foreign money which is tearing communities apart.

Rent will be oh, so much cheaper though

Well one of the benefits would be that the amount i’ve had to save as a deposit, which would still leave me paying £1k/month for a small 2-bed flat in the outer reaches of London, would allow me to buy a nicer/bigger place in MK and be mortgage free in around 10 years… and that’s a massive saving over the long term.

I walked away from a ‘Marketing’ job. Been a lot happier since.

I’m afraid (well certainly in Agency land) most marketing is complete and utter Bjorklets, so everybody creates an artificial sense of urgency and importance which means working late because of a media deadline which in reality if it didn’t happen nobody would actually care.

Agencies rely on young and ambitious people. Almost everyone bails out in their early 30’s when they realise they’re being screwed just for the sake of some ‘glamour’. Shame. I worked in a small agency of 25 people 15 years ago and we had so much fun and were such a strong team… I’ve never enjoyed work that much since.

new job is still a marketing job but for something I believe in and a team of people who come across as also believing in something socially positive. Being out of ‘London’ marketing culture helps I suspect

You’re thinking of changing your job, that’s all. Seriously, these are not “major” life changes.

Rachel

Well… moving house, leaving the place which has been home for 15 years which was my dream place to be growing up, and the friends I have here… (not being rude, but these feel like big things to leave behind)

Keep it coming – some useful insights as always :-)

no experience of Shimano road pedals but my Look Keo are 10 years old and still going strong. Used to be used year round and been on my winter bike only for the last 5 years. Never even greased them!

I still listen to whole albums, albeit not always non-stop.

New Richard Hawley is as great as always. I’ve been listening to a lot of Eels recently – their live at the Albert Hall deserves listening to in full.
As it happens just been listening to Wonderstuff Eight-Legged-Groove Machine on Spotify from beginning to end.

What I don’t do anymore is just sit and listen like I used to when I was a kid – I’m always doing something else – either on t’internet, at work or on the train/tube

Welcome to Condor :-)

Are you the kind of guy who tells your friends off for going on holiday by air travel because of global warming?

Well – excessive air travel doesn’t help does it?… but the answer is no. If friends ask for my advice then I’m happy to offer it but I don’t go around preaching at them. I doubt I’d have any friends left!

The OP asked for an opinion from STW, so I’ve given him my opinion. I didn’t send him an email and harangue him with my thoughts on his morality…

Please, your macro-ecconomic karma argument holds about as much water as a Callander, CRC are not going to go bust or deprive their employees for want of £50 that one customer’s circumstances, and reading of the Ts&Cs essentially entitle him to, The OP of course is also a little part of the “post 2008” economy and that money has some value to him also…

Or should He willingly hurl fist fulls of him money at large retailers, all for the economic greater good?

The Paradox of Thrift

Paradox of Thrift states that individuals try to save more during an economic recession, which essentially leads to a fall in economic growth.

Not entirely my own macro-economic argument to be fair – one from John Maynard Keynes, a fairly well-known economist :-)

it’s human psychology to pay attention to things which seem more relevant to us – they’re more of a threat – Paris is closer, is a European city, a place many of us have been to, it was people ‘just like me, out on a Friday after a week at work’…

Similar psychology to the way we held a memorial last year for the 52 people who were killed in the 2005 London bombings but we don’t hold a memorial every 11 days for the same number of people killed on the roads, or hold a memorial for the 9,000 early deaths from pollution in London – these are ‘hidden’ events, happening slowly over time to ‘other people’

I’m neither for nor against the way we express our reaction to what happens at times like this and am not criticising anyone for how they’ve chosen to respond, more interested in the lack of logic in human thinking…

Tosh. CRC is a business and can clearly afford to “take the hit” of 5% on this particular product… There’s no issue of “morality” here.

Well everyone’s entitled to their opinion but if you paid a bit more attention I think you’ll find that post-2008 most people are heading away from the ‘take what I can and sod the others’ mentality, it’s rather fallen out of fashion now we see the long term impact of it.

You may have noticed that salaries are going nowhere – that’s because in the private sector at least, customers (whether consumers or businesspeople) are squeezing, squeezing and squeezing. Worth remembering that when you squeeze a business over bike parts – it means someone else, somewhere, gets less… sometimes with quiet serious consequences when businesses make people redundant or go bust.

It’s one thing to do your online research and buy at the lowest price you can. it’s another to deliberately exploit terms and conditions for your own gain…

Pure greed at play in this thread. Suing and what not. Jeez just chill out it’s only a photo.

If he has copyright it’s also theft…

I think cars encourage anti-social behaviour a) it’s very easy to be anti-social with a car b)when you get in you shut yourself off from the outside world – makes it harder to have empathy…

Good man. Glad it was spotted and you were told.
As per those threads re discounted bikes, some people think ‘cheeky’ is perfectly acceptable without actually thinking about what it does to someone else’s livelyhood

Mods – the OP and slimjim78 must be the same person, surely.

Quite. When did we start thinking that taking as much profit off a business was a good thing? If you have £2.5k you’re not short of ££ after all

:lol:

I’ve changed my mind. Jim, send the frame back!

cmon, it’s a fair comment :-)

ok, let’s turn this around and take a slightly different perspective on this:

1. If you send your frame back and get the cheaper one, they’ll likely be selling the one which is currently yours at the new, lower price seeing as how they’re discounting it. That means a little less profit for the business, and a little less in the pot for payrises for the employees (prob not earning a huge amount if working in a bike shop) or for investing in future growth which would generate a few more jobs in area of the UK which ain’t that well off, overall

2. At work, you do things usually at a certain speed. One day, you manage to be super-efficient and do something at twice the speed. Your boss now expects you to do everything at twice the speed but won’t be paying you any more or reducing your overall working hours (ie: halving the price of your labour). Feeling good or feeling exploited?

I honestly don’t know how we’ve become such a bunch of calculating consumers – we know the price of everything and the value of nothing and then wonder why wages have gone nowhere for 10 years and the economy’s stagnant…

With smartphones, t’internet and apps combined the ability to collect, process and use data is far greater than I think any of us realise – I mean, who actually reads the T&Cs or even pays attention to the info the app says it will need access to when we first install it?

I suspect very few of us have any understanding of how much of our data is being collected and used – mainly for commercial purposes rather than anything sinister. Interesting though that more and more people are downloading adblockers now – retargeting (those ads that follow your around the internet) are leaving people creeped out and more and more aware of just how much of our data is being collected and then used for something or other

As long as we “labour” under the false belief that the current health system is sustainable, junior doctors will continue to be shafted. Tories, labour…irrelevant. You can’t buck reality.

And save the crocodile tears. As a society we a not prepared to value their contribution properly. We are as guilty as the Incompetent politicians. No hiding…

this^^

There’s a few things we currently have in the UK which were promised a few years ago when times were different, and now things have changed are no longer sustainable.

1. Ever-increasing living standards
2. Very-well paid pensions
3. Secure employment
4. Free-at-the-point-of-delivery healthcare – for everyone and for every condition.

IMO we need politicians who’re willing to say to the electorate, we’re not as wealthy as we used to be, we have a deeply unhealthy population (c 66% overweight or obese) and an ageing population and some of the things we have now are no longer sustainable. But we can give you a choice – esp with healthcare

1. Accept that with an older and less healthy population, costs to deliver healthcare are having to go up and therefore we have to increase your taxes ie: you pay more
2. Accept private provision of some of your services
3. Keep the NHS for those who can’t afford to pay for their own provision and incentivise e.g. tax breaks private care for those who can pay.

Problem is, our politicians aren’t bold enough to say this. And tbh I think anyone who did would get voted straight out again, we’re a bit like kids who think everything comes for free…

We need a mature and dogma-free debate about this before the NHS collapses. I’m not confident we’re going to have it though…

At the very least I think someone needs to tell us how much our treatment costs us so we start to understand it has to be paid for somehow. I had my wrist pinned and plated in July after falling off my bike. No idea how much I cost the NHS/taxpayer in doctor’s fees, drugs, hospital etc etc £10k, £20k, £100k?? If I don’t know how can I appreciate it or even start to understand how much the NHS costs to run?

Google ‘chief exec email addresses’ and get one of the senior customer services people on it.
I did this after one silly junior customer services told me there was no-one more senior than her in the dept to escalate my query to her. The query being that I’d been paying them monthly for several months for broadband they’d never delivered.

Ian Livingston – the chief exec at the time emailed me on a Saturday saying the situation ‘really was not very good’ and got a senior complaints person to call me later that day. I still had to negotiate my way out of a contract they’d never delivered on which I told them was well out of order (I told them I considered them in breach of contract) ie: I lost the 3 months worth I’d spent but they agreed to terminate the rest of the contract without expecting me to pay it).

They’ll not be getting my business ever again.

I can recommend Virgin as if you’re on fibre they don’t have to rely on Openreach (who are useless). Currently with Zen and their customer service is topnotch.

You forgot about living in a surveillance state.

Don’t think I didn’t hear you say that :-)

By the looks of Lemmy at Glasto, he’s not a long way behind. That’ll be a sad day. He’s an icon of living life your own way.

It’s a debt we’re leaving for the next generation to pay.

It seems the plan is to flood the country with immigrants, get them to do the work and pay off our debt.

Unless, of course they realise this is the deal and go elsewhere…

*NB: this is not some anti-immigrant rant! As our working-age population shrinks and the % of the pop that is living off the taxpayer rather than paying taxes increases, immigration is one way of growing the working-age population who generate tax to pay for the older generation’s care and to pay off the debt

I think more and more (MOAR!) people are coming round to the idea that less is usually more.

In Western World I think so. In China, doesn’t look like it so far.

Problem is though, if the rich world stops consuming at the rate we have been, whilst the planet might avoid being destroyed, the economy will fall apart – UK at least is massively dependent on house-price and debt-driven consumer consumption. China will have to sell its stuff to itself if we’re not buying it, too

I mean, does no-one, from conception, through design to implementation actually look at this and ask the question “why?”
What would it take for the contractors and builders actually installing this rubbish to step back and say “we’re not putting this in cos it’s shit”. Or are they not paid to question their orders?

I don’t work in anything related to cycling infrastructure but have you ever tried this at work? In the culture I work in you have to be damn careful about doing this. I was ‘managed out’ once from a major insurance company who’s advertising suggests they’re nice people. I don’t know quite what I did, but I clearly upset someone senior for suggesting (positively) that we may want to consider doing things differently. The stress and hole that now exists in my CV remind me to be very careful about doing that again…

My job is one that will slowly disappear over the next decade or two as digital payment methods take over from cash transactions.

Don’t bet on that. I’ve just been working on payments in one of the UK banks and despite millions and millions and millions having been spent on card infrastructure and promotion over the last 25 years, you’d be surprised that c50% of UK spend is still on cash – there’s lots of people still prefer it for various reasons. The stuff you read in the press is PR…