We are delighted to announce that our Founder and Lead Coach, Carolyn Parry is launching her new book shortly. Called "Change Your Story, escape from a job you hate and create a career you love - on purpose", it is designed to help those who are feeling lost, or stuck in a career rut, and uninspired by their work, particularly if it is meaningless, unfulfilling, and eroding their soul. 

Change Your Story uses a combination of inspiring stories, actionable exercises, and practical psychology/neuroscience-informed resources, this engaging and research-proven step-by-step career management guide and toolkit is designed to give readers the light-bulb moments they need to identify their future direction and get there confidently, discover what skills they need to future-proof their career, align their unique values, key strengths, talents and skills to maximise their potential and create a long term purpose-driven career they love. Working through the book will help the reader to experience greater impact, stability, happiness, success, and well-being, no matter how much the world of work changes.

You can find out more about the book and the launch here: https://www.careeralchemy.co.uk/create-your-story---the-book.html

Why stay unfulfilled and unhappy at work when this book can help you start to Change Your Story today?

What would you do with an extra day off per week?That's the question I asked on LinkedIn a few days ago as I shared the BBC article on the four day working week trial which outlines how popular and beneficial the move has been.
In the article, Faye, one of the staff at Citizens Advice in Gateshead who took part in the scheme explained how helped her.  She talks about the extra day giving her time to "recover and recuperate". It's little surprise that we all feel the need for that. As a more familiar post-pandemic normality began, it brought one slight problem.

The average British worker spends around 84,000 hours across their lifetime at work. The only thing we spend more time doing is sleeping (source: the Associate of Accounting Technicians).

According to experts and researchers in employee engagement, Gallup, every workplace has three different types of people.

At Career Alchemy, we call them stars, sleepwalkers, and saboteurs...

If you are feeling out of sorts with work and life, this article by Marianne Power in the Telegraph features practical advice and help from our founder, Carolyn Parry and other experts on how to make the most of the autumn and create a life you love.

It includes tips on how to develop a second income stream, explore the reality of changing location and more. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/why-should-make-resolutions-autumn-not-new-year/

The COVID_19 pandemic has given millions around the globe an unforeseen chance to pause and reflect on their lives. Many had already been feeling the quiet stirring of discontent with their lives - a feeling which has been heightened as millions already in work experience furloughing and redundancy as the UK pauses and values rebalance from "me" to "we". At the same time, a complete generation of young people are left worried and confused about their futures. So what's the solution?

Career Alchemy Founder and Lead Coach, Carolyn Parry was a recent guest on The New Normal, a podcast run by Chris Webb and Helen Armitage of Sheffield Hallam University.

In the podcast, Carolyn talks about the way the world of work is necessarily changing, how society at large has been able to reconnect with what really matters to us and led us to appreciate how little we actually need to be happy. She talks about the shift in business values away from the intense spotlight on profit for shareholders towards a more balanced focus on solving the wicked problems the world faces and developing staff regardless of background, the new ways of working and how this creates a change to level up across the regions of the UK, how Coronavirus is speeding up trends towards automation, how retail is changing, and new opportunities within the gig economy, 

She highlights the democratisation of learning and how we should all be life long learners so we can protect our futures, how we will continue to see greater virtual collaboration and less competition across organisations: as we work together to solve common problems using new tools for distributed working which leads to the question of education and how it needs to repurpose itself to ensure our young people are able to find a clear why to help them create fulfilling and sustainable futures.

You can listen to the podcast here:

It's clear that faster is better if we want to to do simple things like catch a train or a plane, book a hotel, or look up something on Wikipedia, but when it comes to things which hold greater significance and meaning, faster will cause the wheels to overheat and come off.