Running and podcasts and the personal MBA

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Recently I’ve started running. (First proper exercise in about 20 years!) Its only every other day and I’m doing very simple and gentle stuff. It’s actually a lot easier than I thought and the recent good weather has definitely helped.

I started using Runkeeper to help me track progress – this has been really beneficial. I’ve loaded up a (gentle) training schedule and its made things much more fun because it adds variety in the types of run and I can track my progress.

An added, and unexpected benefit is that the running is making time for me to listen to podcasts. I’ve got a mix across business, productivity, and technical. Sources vary from TED, the Guardian, the BBC, Harvard Business Review, and some smaller startups. I’m fairly ruthless when it comes to tone – unsubscribing from those podcasts that feature too much informal chat and laughing at their own jokes.

So, perhaps as part of a series, I’m making a note of the podcasts that have a resonance. A colleague at work often talks of the ‘personal MBA’ and I think that the podcasts that chime are part of my own personal MBA.

To start the ball rolling, I enjoyed a podcast from the Harvard Business Review Ideacast series entitled ‘Building a Company Everybody Loves’.
http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2013/04/building-a-company-everyone-lo.html

At about 3 minutes in, the conversation turns to the gender issues at work, and describes a situation that I think is common – one in which men are playing a role at work rather than being themselves:

“…many men have said they role play their way through the week in the hope that they can rediscover their humanity at the weekend.
Well, guess what? You can’t rediscover your humanity in 48 hours at the weekend. Whether you like it or not, you will spend the bulk of your adult waking life at work. It better be a place where you can be yourself.”

A simple lesson; be yourself at work rather than pretending to be someone else…

One Comment Add yours

  1. foo says:

    I’d take the “at work” bit out of the last paragraph, personally 🙂

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