Becoming a Fully Connected Leader with Mel Kettle

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

So one of my clients rang me recently and he left a message and he said, I’ll call you tomorrow morning, but I won’t call you before 10 because I know you’ll be at the beach. Because I tell them that all the time. And so I think you need to be communicating, particularly when you’re in business for yourself, you need to set the ground rules. This is how I work. This is the way that we work around here. These are the hours that we work. And yes, we can have some flexibility if it’s really important, but we need to negotiate that together.

And welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media. And this is the show where we bring experts and leaders from the Sunshine Coast to share some inspiration to help you in your business on the Sunshine Coast, whatever it is you do. And one of those experts we’ve got here today is a communication specialist, Mel Kettle. Mel, thanks for joining me here on the show. Thanks so much for inviting me, Ben.

Even though I think I invited myself. So thanks for agreeing. You did. We met at our recent studio kind of open morning that we had with the Caloundra Chamber of Commerce here. And you told me a little bit about what you do and you said that you’d love to come on the show. I learnt more about what you do and what you wrote about in your book, which we’ll talk about here today as well, fully connected. And I think it’s just going to be a fascinating chat for the listeners and watchers of the, of the Coast and Commerce podcast. But tell me a bit about who you are.

What got you into what you do today and into this passion for communication and leadership? Yeah, thanks. So my background is marketing and communication and I’ve been doing that for my whole career, which is over 30 years. Gosh, I can’t believe it’s been that long. That’s something to celebrate. Yeah, thanks. And these days I tend to focus on two areas. I focus on self leadership and on communication. And I really believe that you can’t be a good communicator.

So you can’t communicate with influence so that you motivate, you educate and inspire if you don’t lead yourself first. So by that, and I know we’ll talk about this, but it’s things like how self -aware are you? Do you know what motivates you and other people? And do you prioritise self -care? If you don’t do those things, it’s going to be really hard to communicate effectively. I started my career running conferences and events and then moved into the state government doing communication campaigns and then

18 years ago in 2006, I decided I’d had an absolute gut full of working for other people and it was time to do my own thing. So hung out my shingle and here we are. Moved to the coast three years ago and it’s the best move I’ve ever made. Excellent. Where were you before that three years ago moved to the coast? So we moved from Brisbane and before that I lived in Sydney and I lived in Vancouver and I lived in a bunch of other places. Excellent and slowly moved up Sydney, Brisbane. Now you’re in the best place in the world. I think so. We’re not leaving.

Every time a real estate agent calls us to say, would you be interested in getting a quote for your house? I’m like, no, take me off your list. We’re never selling. Excellent. Cool. Well, an asset to the coast. Thanks for being here. And, you know, I think that idea of, you know, good communication and good leadership and developing as leaders is something that is relevant to anyone in business, whether you are considering yourself a leader in the work you do in business on the Sunshine Coast.

or whether you’re aspiring to be a leader, but everyone’s a leader in a sense, aren’t they? I really believe everyone is a leader, whether you’re leading your family or whether you’re leading in a people management role in the work that you do, or whether you’re a leader in your community. And the way that I define a leader is if somebody asks you for your advice about something, then in their eyes, you’re a leader in that thing. Yeah. And so we need to get away from this false perception.

that leaders are middle -aged white men and no offence to the middle -aged white men who are listening to this. But when I type leader into image search engines, I see a lot of photos of middle -aged white men. And so it’s no wonder that that’s the perception of what a leader is and looks like. You can have children who are leaders. You just have to look at any playgrounds around the country and you will see people, children who have people looking up to them in some capacity.

So leadership starts young and we need to recognise that we’ve all got the skills and qualities that it takes. And not only have we got the skills and qualities that it takes, but it’s something that we can get better at as well. We can actively improve as leaders, right? Yeah, leadership can be learned. You know, you hear people saying, so -and -so is a born leader and maybe they were, but that’s not true for the majority of us. The majority of us have to learn the skills to be seen as

somebody that others can be influenced by or that others want to follow. And, you know, I’ll also say that not everyone is a leader in everything. You can be a leader in one really tiny area and that is equally as good as being a leader of a company that has 50 ,000 or more staff. And when you think about the potential leader who’s listening or watching this Posted in Commerce podcast episode,

What would you say to them? You know, what’s the common things that maybe is holding them back from being the leader that they could be? it’s confidence. Yeah. It’s belief in yourself. It’s confidence. It’s courage to make hard, difficult decisions and hard decisions and big decisions. And it’s also often that perception of, well, a leader doesn’t look like me or a leader doesn’t do what I do. And usually that’s just rubbish. I think to add to that as well, that it might be that belief that you’re not

that you’re not a leader or that you don’t need to lead that you can follow. But like you’ve just said there, I think that there’s leadership possibilities and options for anyone, whatever you’re doing. There are, and leaders need followers. So, and I feel like we need to, often we forget that it’s really important to have followers because you can’t be a leader if you don’t have people who listen to you and who follow your guidance, your advice, the way that you do things.

And so there’s nothing wrong with being a follower in some or all or the majority of your day. Yeah. There’s three things that you write about in your book that I guess make up that leader, that fully connected leader using the term, the title of your book here as well. Can you talk us through those three things? Yeah. So the three things are self -awareness, self -motivation and self -care. When it comes to self -awareness, having a level of self -awareness means that you

understand your values, your priorities, your beliefs, your strengths, your weaknesses, you know what you stand for. Another really core part of being self -aware is not only knowing how you see yourself, but it’s being really clear on how other people see you. What’s your perception or what’s the perception that people have of you? And a lot of people, and I’m sure we’ve all worked with…

with people, leaders or not, who believe they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, let me tell you, and they’re not in your mind and in the minds of many others. So really a true leader knows not only who they are, but how other people see them in a way that’s accurate. When it comes to self -motivation, we need to know who we are and what we stand for. And a lot of people talk about knowing your purpose and knowing your why.

Yes, that’s important, but if you don’t know your why, please don’t beat yourself up about it. Sometimes knowing your why is just enough to get you through a day, let alone a life. And, but knowing what motivates you, what drives you, what are the intrinsic things that drive you? What are the things from within you that make you want to be a better person? And what are the things that are outside of you, such as things like how much money you earn or how much, or your status at work or your

position in the community, how much do those things drive you? And when it comes to motivation, the extrinsic things like the money and the status and the position in the community will only get you so far. If you don’t have self belief and feelings of self worth, then that’s what genuinely drives and motivates most people. So it’s having that understanding about yourself. And then the third thing is prioritizing self care. When you’re self aware,

you are far more aware of what you need to be doing when it comes to self care. And self care is things like the obvious things, getting enough sleep, eating the right food for your body and for your activities, getting enough exercise and movement. But it’s also things like having healthy boundaries, doing things that bring you joy, spending time with people who lift you up, doing work that fulfils you on a regular basis rather than doing work where you go in every day and you think, God, why am I doing this?

So thanks for that kind of understanding of those three things. I do want to dive into each one of these in a little bit more detail here, mostly because I want people to not only understand that these are not just kind of hippie woke buzzwords, right? These words you do hear and you have heard for years, but these are things that can make a real difference in an individual’s life, whether you’re a leader in an organisation or otherwise. And I think one of the key things is

is I guess understanding, you know, where potentially as people, we might be self -sabotaging ourselves as well. So, you know, I think when we’re proactive about those three things that you talked about around self -awareness and self -motivation and self -care, then you can potentially fight that. But do you see that sometimes, that idea of self -sabotage coming up? all the time. And not only other people, I do it to myself because…

We so often we do self -sabotage. You know, you have this great goal and you think I’m not worthy of that. Why would anybody give me money to do that? Why would anybody believe that I’m good enough for that? Why would people listen to me? Why would my opinion matter? And so we self -sabotage all the time. One of the ways we can stop self -sabotaging so much is to believe when other people believe in us. I remember one of, I was given a work opportunity many years ago.

And my boss said to me, I said, I don’t understand why you hired me for this job. I feel like there were better candidates. I’m not good enough. I don’t have the right experience, blah, blah, blah. And she said to me, Mel, I believe in you. I know you can do a really good job. Why can’t you believe in you? And if you won’t believe in you, just know that I believe in you. And that was a real turning point for me because she said there’s no way that I would have risked my reputation.

by offering you this role if I didn’t think you were worthy. And so, so often we say things to ourselves that we would never say to other people. And that’s what diminishes our ability and our capability and our self -belief. Yeah, right. And often I think, you know, people believe more of us than we believe of ourselves, right? Like you said, they’re that employer. And, you know, I know this myself, like even, you know, my wife and my family, for example, like,

they think that I can do anything, but then I think, you know, well, I’m not good enough to do that, you know, because I think we think that we’re often so much more kind to other people than we are to ourselves. Yep. If you were to speak to other people the way that you often speak to yourself, and I’m not saying you specifically, but humans in general, if your nasty inner voice were to verbalise the things that it says to you, but to other people, you would have no friends and you would have people looking at you going,

Who the hell are you to say that to me? And yet we say negative things to ourselves all the time, whether it’s conscious or subconscious. So that first thing of self -awareness, I think is one of the things that we can practise there is the idea of being aware of how we’re talking to ourselves, you know, how we’re positioning ourselves to ourselves. And that’s such an important concept of how do you position yourself to yourself?

particularly in a world where there’s so much comparisonitis and imposter syndrome, we should really only be comparing ourselves to ourselves. So if you’re striving towards a goal or if you’re wanting to do something differently in life, don’t compare yourself to other people who have achieved what you want. Compare yourself to where you were a week ago, a month ago, six months ago, five years ago, 10 years ago.

because then you can really see how much you’ve grown and developed. And I’ll also say that personal growth and development is really hard. Don’t expect it to be easy because it’s not. It requires, to become fully self -aware requires a lot of often very confronting thoughts and concepts and realisations about yourself, about things that you…

believe or things that you’ve done in the past that you really don’t like. And that’s okay because acknowledging that you’ve done things that you don’t like about yourself is a really good way of recognizing that you want to do better in the future. And I think self -awareness as well, you get, can sometimes be linked to ego. This idea of like, if you’re incredibly self -aware, you think, well, that means that they’re self -confident or, you know, that they just know their place in the world or, you know, they’re really

you know, have a big ego, right? But that’s it’s much more than that. Like you just said there, I think self -awareness is also being aware of the things that you need to improve on. And yes, it is. And a lot of people with egos, their ego is so inflated that they don’t take the time to look at where they’ve come from. Like they just believe.

They have a false sense of belief about themselves and their ego is so big that they can’t believe other people don’t feel the same way about them that they do. Now, you need a bit of ego. Like in the book, I talk about how ego is a bit like fire and you need a little bit of oxygen to, it’s like the oxygen in a fire. You need a bit of oxygen to flame, you know, to spark the match, but you don’t want so much oxygen that you have a raging forest fire.

You just need a little bit. So a little bit of ego is healthy because it means that you push yourself out of your comfort zone and you make difficult decisions and you do things that somebody with no ego just wouldn’t do. They’d be hiding in a corner somewhere, but you don’t want so much of it that it wipes everything else out. I’m interested. How would you help someone understand their level of self -awareness? You know, or maybe if they think they’re really self -aware, but they’re not.

because it’s sometimes, unless someone points it out to you, which is a very hard thing to do, to have someone point it out to you. But how would you help someone self assess their level of self -awareness? Does that make sense? Yeah, so there’s a whole lot of different exercises that you can do. And one of my favorites is to ask your closest friends, what are three words you would use to describe me? And if you’re feeling really brave, then you can go onto Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram and say, what are three words that you would use to describe me and make it a bit more public.

and see what comes back. Are the words that people use to describe you the words that you would use to describe yourself or are they completely different? Yeah, it’s very interesting, particularly when it’s, when that reveals information that you maybe didn’t think about yourself. Yeah, and it’s something that I did probably about seven or eight years ago and

It was very comforting because I’d done a lot of work on my own self -awareness and my own self -development and self -growth. And so I was ready to, for whatever came back and probably 90 % of what came back didn’t surprise me because that was how I saw myself. But there were 10 % of people who said things that I just thought, I’ve never seen myself that way. And then, but some of those people didn’t know me very well.

What was really interesting is the people who said things that I wasn’t expecting either had known me since I was a really small child or but were relatives and didn’t know me as much as an adult or they had only known me for a few weeks or a couple of months and knew me sort of more on a peripheral surface level as opposed to having deep conversations. Yeah. And there’s definitely some tools that you can use to kind of get this level of self -awareness assessed, right?

There’s a few years ago I went through a process called the Flippin profile. Have you ever done a Flippin? I think the guy invented it. Last name is Flippin. So, but anyway, it’s quite a comprehensive process where there is a fairly lengthy kind of survey ranking in various things between one to 10 ranking me, but it’s, you know, filled out by people either, and you specifically ask people to fill it out who know you personally.

who know you professionally and who know you, you know, more like friendships. So like, you know, like my wife filled it out, you know, I had my team, someone on my team fill it out. Or a couple of people on my team who know me more professionally had someone who was more like a client fill it out. And I had a long time friend like that I’ve known since childhood fill it out. So you get this really well rounded kind of idea of who you are. And it’s really surprising to me how different some of those views of

of my different traits and qualities. And then obviously you fill it out yourself as well and it kind of gives you a comparative analysis. It’s a very cool process. So whatever that process looks like, I think it’s worthwhile people, you know, undertaking something. I find all of those things just so interesting because it’s really confronting to do anything like that where you’re asking other people for their thoughts about you.

And if you don’t want to go that deep, then another exercise that I really like is how do you identify what you’re good at and what you’re not good at? And particularly how do you identify your strengths? And I find that when I used to interview people for jobs back when I was an employee, I would always say, what are your strengths? And fascinated me what came back. Now there’s lots of different things you can do to identify your strengths as gallop strengths, as other tools, but

One of the things that I like to do is just sit down and write down all of the things that you’ve achieved over the last, I don’t know, week to 12 months. And they can be really big or they can be really tiny. And look to see how did you feel when you achieved those and what skill set was required for you to get through those or for you to have that achievement. And that can be, and then you can group them and it can just be a really helpful way of identifying things that you’re good at that you might not automatically think you’re good at doing.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, let’s talk about self motivation because the second, I guess, thing to kind of practice to be a connected leader, self motivation. Is it just about setting goals? No, it partly is. Like I’m a planner from way back. Not everybody is a goal setter. Sometimes it can be it’s knowing what you want and it’s knowing what are your priorities and what drives you. So

Have a think about your life and what are the most important things in your life and how do the decisions that you make impact on those things? So when I ask so so Ben, what are the most important things in your life? What are the things that you prioritize? You’re asking me I’m asking you that question. gosh, I’m on the spot. look, I think like development, personal development, self development, family. Yeah, very big for me and Satisfaction. Yeah. Yeah, that’s weird.

Yeah, I think I know what I mean by that. Yeah. So, so for me, it’s health, it’s and it’s relationships. And it’s obviously work because I run my own business, but they’re very and my work is very, as yours would be, very predicated on relationships because work today is. And I remember someone said to me once, what are your most important priorities? And I said, well, one of mine is health. And they said, so how much sleep do you get? And I went, four to five hours a night. And how much alcohol do you drink?

do you have any alcohol free days? And I went, no, not really. And they said, and how many vegetables and fruit would you eat? And I went, probably not enough. And they said, so are you really focusing on your health? And I just went, okay. So then I just thought, okay, well, I can’t, I need to practise what I preach a bit more. But have a think about what is it that drives you? Because when you know what drives you and it, and, and

This is what drives you is linked to your values and your values tend to stay the same throughout the course of your life, but your priorities that are linked to those values can change. So one of my values is security and particularly financial security and that has changed. It was very different when I was in my 20s when financial security to me was having enough money to be able to have a house or a roof over my head, which at the time was rented.

But also enough money to travel and to see the world because curiosity is another value of mine. Now I’m in my 50s and financial security looks very different. I have a house and a home, but I look now at what do I need for my future? What does retirement look like? How long will I live and how much do I need for that? And so I make decisions around that value based on my current priority, which is things like, for example, how much money do I contribute to my super?

hell of a lot more than in my 20s, that’s for sure. And a hell of a lot more as a portion of my income compared to in my 20s. Because in my 20s, retirement was that mythical thing in the future. But now I’m in my 50s, it’s much closer and it’s much more confronting. So have a think about and that motivates me. So that motivates me to work, that motivates me to make decisions based on living longer so I can have a high quality of life. So think about what

What is it that motivates you at home and at work? And I mean, this idea of self motivation, I think is, is a good, like theory is it’s a good concept to understand. I think everyone kind of probably listening understands the value in being self motivated. What are the practical ways that we can improve our level of self motivation or be more direct with, with our

I guess, action taking with our self motivation. So one of the things that that I do and my my husband and I just celebrated our 20th anniversary a few weeks ago. Thank you. I believe we’ve hit 20 years and we when we first met, he was seeing a life coach and he said to me before we’d even had our second date, he said to me one of the parts of this life coaching program I’m doing is that I can bring my partner and we do four sessions together and we

map out what’s important to us and we map out our future together. And I’m like, we’ve had one date. Slow down. But then I thought, well, this is important to you. And you seem to think that we have a future. So who am I to deny that at this stage? I’ll give it a go. And so we sat down and we talked about our values and our priorities and what’s important to us. And we mapped out this life plan and we looked at six different categories we looked at.

And we looked at them individually and then we looked at them together to see where the crossovers were, where were the shared values and priorities. And we looked at health and finances and education and work and career and a few other different things. And so what was really interesting to me is that we had lots of alignment, but we also, when we’ve had difficult times in our relationship and you don’t get to 20 years without having some challenges,

We’ve gone back to that and gone, okay, this is our focus. This is our sort of, this is what we want together. What do we need to do to get back on track in the area that we’ve struggled with or the area that we’ve got a bit of misalignment with? And so that for us made a massive difference because we were motivated together to achieve the same things. And so that meant when he was made redundant from a job that obviously had a big impact on our financial.

goal and so we just had to make some changes. I say we just had to, that was pretty fricking difficult let me tell you. And then when I quit my job and started my business we had to make some changes and then when we had some health things we had to make some changes. But it’s, that plan has been our, has sort of underpinned a lot of things and a lot of the decisions that we’ve made, the majority of the decisions that we’ve made as individuals and as a couple.

I think that’s a really, it’s just a really good practical exercise for anyone to do. And I know it’s something that I’ve done myself and I try and do every year as well as, and you know, I split a piece of paper up into four quadrants, you know, so I’ll see if I can get this right. It’s health, wealth, family or relationships and self, right? It’s kind of how I split the page up. And I’ve been doing something like this for a few years, but…

I think I got it from some kind of coach at some point, but anyway, and just taking that time to like sit down, you know, get out of the office, get out of the home and just do that and kind of just write down like, what am I wanting to do in these spaces, whether it be in this year or whether it be in longer term, just to get it out of my head and down on paper because it kind of makes you think more specifically about those things. But what’s really clear to me as we’re talking here Mel is,

that that becomes that self motivation. Because then you’ve got a bit like a roadmap, a bit like a, you know, this is where I’m heading. This is what I’m agreeing to myself that I want to want to do. But also as we’re talking as well, I know at least once I’ve done this with my wife, but not for a while. So you’ve reminded me that we should do it again. So we, we obviously did it 20 years ago. And when we moved to Caloundra, we sat down and we did it again. And

You know, we’ve achieved almost everything that we had on that 20 year plan. And so now we’re sitting down and going, OK, so do we want to set one for another 20 years when we’ll be in our mid 70s or do we want to do 10 years or five years? But one of the things that’s really important is when you have this plan and it’s like when you have a strategy at work, you can’t just write it and then shove it in a box or in the bottom drawer or somewhere on your computer never to be seen again. You really need to review it on a regular basis. So

We did our 20 year plan and then we did a one year. Every year we sit down and we do right. So here’s what we want, here’s where we’re at now. What do we need to do this year? And then what do we need to do each quarter or each month or each week? And so if you’ve got health goals or if you’ve got financial goals, for example, then how much money do you need to save or how much do you need to put into super? Or if you’re saving for a holiday one year, what does that look like in practical terms? How much?

And the year that I was saving for a house, this was before I met Sean, I worked out how much money I needed for a deposit. And so I just created a second bank account and had my pay split into two accounts. So it can be, what are the practical things that you need to do? And how do you involve your whole family? Like, how do you, because when you’re in a relationship or when you, if you, you know, if you’ve got a partner or kids or get them all involved as well, because the more you can,

encourage your children in particular to be involved in the family activities, then it really helps set them up for their future as well. Yeah, I love it. Self motivation, practical ways to develop better and keep yourself accountable to that self motivation as well. And just before we move off that topic, I do a quarterly, I run a quarterly, I guess, life planning workshop for half a day or for a couple of hours every quarter. So I’ll give you the link to put in the show notes.

For anyone that’s interested, I do an annual one and I do quarterly ones and yeah, anyone’s welcome. Cool, excellent. Let’s talk about self -care. So we’ve talked about self -awareness, self -motivation, but then self -care. And I think, you know, when we’re talking about leadership, sometimes people don’t immediately think about things like self -care, which feels a little bit more woo and a little bit more, well, that’s just about me. But, you know, where would you say that there’s, is there a definition or a difference between self -care being

Selfish or selfless, you know, like how would you describe self care? Self care is essential to having a good life. And I know I won’t be the only person who’s been told over the years, you’re so selfish or self care is just a selfish thing. It’s not. If I don’t prioritise my self care in ways that work for me, then I am not a good person to be around. And self care for me means having

really clear boundaries in place for my home life and for my work life. It involves making sure I get enough sleep. So probably about five years ago, I was really overweight, drinking a lot of alcohol, pretty unhealthy, never exercising, not really sleeping. And I looked at why I was living this life that wasn’t really what I wanted.

I was travelling a ridiculous amount for work, which is why the other things all kind of happened. And I thought, well, the travel’s not going to stop because that leads to income. But what I can do is maybe not drink half a bottle of wine alone in my hotel room at night. Maybe I can stop having late dinners and going out and getting to bed before midnight. And maybe I can start just

putting some good sleep habits in. And so I thought, what’s the easiest one or which one of these will have the biggest impact on my life? And I realised it was sleep. And so I just started, I made some massive sleep changes. And instead of going to bed at midnight, I now go to bed at 9 .30, lights off at 10. And I have a routine to get me to bed so that I can get my eight hour sleep that I know I need. Even though for many years I didn’t even get close to that.

which means that in the morning I can wake up, I’m feeling refreshed, I’m much more likely to do exercise, I’m much more likely to have a healthy breakfast, much less likely to drink 17 cups of coffee and get to the evening and go, let’s just get take away or let’s just have cheese on toast or let’s just have another glass of wine. So they’ve made a massive difference to me. The other thing was looking at my life and going, and particularly after we moved to Coloundra, we moved in 2021.

partway through COVID and I remember thinking, I quite like this life of not being in a hotel room 100 nights a year. I like my bed, I like my home, I love my husband, let’s spend more time with these things. And so I made some really big business decisions that involved not traveling and not getting on a plane for work more than once a month and not having meetings before 10 a because

we moved to Caloundra so I could walk on the beach every day and I need my eight hour sleep. So I get up at seven, seven thirty, go to the beach, go for a walk, have a coffee, get home by nine. It takes me time to then have some breakfast, sit at my desk and be ready for that first meeting. So they’re just things that I’ve put in place and they won’t work for you necessarily, but they work for me. And it’s looking at what is going to make me

happier and healthier. And when I’m happier and healthier, I serve my clients better. Yeah. What would you say to that leader listening who is thinking, you know, I’m a leader here, I’m building a business, I’ve got people that depend on me, you know, I’ve got to be hustling, I’ve got to be working hard, I’ve got to put other people’s needs first, my clients, my staff, my whatever.

I haven’t got time for self care Mel. What do you say to that? You do have time for self care. You do have time for self care. I feel like you need to work out what are your core priorities at work and with your life in general. One of the things when I had a client in my early years of being in business who would call me on Sundays and expect me to be available at his beck and call. And he was a great client. I worked with him for a long time. He paid me a lot of money.

I really valued the relationship and the work I did for him. But I felt it was really unfair that he expected me to answer the phone on Sundays. And so I said to him one day, I’m really value this relationship, but I would really appreciate it if you didn’t call me on Sundays. And he said, Sunday is a great time for me because it’s when I plan my week ahead. I never expect you to answer the phone.

And I just thought, wow, there’s a lesson there for me. And so I said, that’s really good to know. And I just also put some, because I think that we need to remember as well, when we start to say no to our clients in a loving and kind and respectful way, they respect that more. Like it’s no.

I say no to lots of things these days and when I say yes to something, it’s valued so much more than when I used to say yes to everything. Because I’m very clear on my boundaries and I communicate them all the time. So one of my clients rang me recently and he left a message and he said, I’ll call you tomorrow morning, but I won’t call you before 10 because I know you’ll be at the beach. Because I tell them that all the time. And so I think you need to be communicating, particularly when you’re in business for yourself.

you need to set the ground rules. This is how I work. This is the way that we work around here. These are the hours that we work. And yes, we can have some flexibility if it’s really important, but we need to negotiate that together. And now with my clients, I mean, I work in a very different way to how I worked when I started, but one of the things that I implemented when I started, when I was doing very in -house operational support from a marketing and comms perspective,

there’d be lots of deadlines and I’d say to my clients, if you missed a deadline, then you’ll get a surcharge because that means I have to put other things on hold or work longer hours or work out of hours in order to achieve what you need me to do. If you give me enough notice and I know that I’ll be working on that weekend, I can build that into my quoting at the beginning. But if you just say, sorry, I know we have to get this.

to the printer on Monday morning at nine o ‘clock and it’s five o ‘clock on Friday and you’re just getting the 200 page draft that you need to review, that’s not fair. And you need to set boundaries, but that is not the time to set that boundary. You need to have them in place before that. Yeah. And to prioritise self -care is what’s going to get you there. Absolutely. Yeah. When that becomes a non -negotiable. Exactly. And, you know, it’s explaining to people, it’s saying, I take a two hour lunch break because three times a week, because I’m training for a marathon.

or I’m not by the way, in case you’re wondering and I will never, but I have friends who do. Or I take this or I leave at two o ‘clock every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday because I need to pick my kid up from school. Or I don’t get in the office until 10 because I didn’t do some, I have some personal stuff going on on this particular day. And so that’s just my start time. And the more…

Particularly if you work with clients, if you work in a consulting way, if you work in a business where you have deep relationships with the people you work with, start out the way you need to continue and they will respect that. Yeah, and be unapologetic about it. Absolutely. Just say, this is the way I work and have those conversations before you sign them as a client because then there’s no surprises. You know, I say to my clients, I don’t do meetings on Mondays. I don’t…

usually answer the phone before 10am. If we pre -arrange something and or if that’s like the best time for you then obviously there’ll be exceptions to that because healthy boundaries have flexibility when it’s when it works for you. Yeah well I mean it’s the it’s the old analogy of putting on your your oxygen mask you know before the child right yeah but I mean because the reality is is particularly for leaders you know in business if you burn out if you if you if you

can’t keep going the way you’re going because of the way that you’re going. It’s not going to be good for anyone. No, it won’t be. And it won’t be good for the people in your organisation who expect you to show them the way, but it also won’t be good for your other relationships, for your, you know, with your family, with your friends, with the other people in your community who you’ve got relationships with. Yeah. Love it. So just to wrap up here, can you tell us really quickly about your book? Why did you write this book? Fully Connected?

How Great Leaders Prioritise Themselves, Reclaim Their Energy and Find Joy by Mel Kettle. So tell me, like, who should pick up this book? Why did you write it? Just give us a quick spiel. I wrote it because I was working with a lot of leadership teams and marketing communications teams and they were all exhausted and burnt out. And early in my career, I started running around events and I ran conferences and I burned out because I was working 80 hours a week, drinking a lot, not sleeping enough, travelling all the time.

My number one priority was my boss and my work and that was unhealthy for everybody. I didn’t know how to say no to anything and I don’t want other people to go through what I went through. So I had the idea for that book in 2019 and it came out about two years ago and it should have come out earlier but I didn’t want it to be seen as a COVID book because burnout and overwork and overwhelm and not prioritising ourselves.

is something that has happened since the beginning of time. A lot of the women, a lot of the people I work with are women in their 40s and 50s. You add peri -menopause into the mix, very confusing time of life. And you feel like you’re going a bit crazy. And so you second guess yourself and you gaslight yourself a lot. And so the book’s for them as well. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Well, obviously if you’re interested in what we’ve talked about here today,

I mean, look, anyone in business, I think, should be taking on board those three things that we talked about around self -awareness, self -motivation and self -care. So hopefully we’ve shared some practical ways that people can do that. But I know you do some coaching and consulting and speaking and you have workshops around this stuff. Where’s the best place for people to connect more with you, maybe get your help on things? Yeah, the best place is through my website melkettle .com. But if you Google me, I own the first half a dozen pages of Google with my name.

It’s very handy that there’s not too many other people with it in the world. And so, yeah, so reach out through my website or through LinkedIn or through Instagram. If you just put Mel Kettle into all those search engines, you’ll find me. Excellent. Mel, it’s been great to be fully connected here today with you. Thanks for sharing your insights into into being that fully connected leader through those three things. And yeah, it’s great to be connected. And, you know, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Ben.

Thanks, Ben. Yeah, we’ll keep that in. That’s a good ending. Thanks for watching, guys. This has been the Coast and Commerce podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, I want you to share it with someone in business on the Sunshine Coast who you think would benefit from becoming more self -aware, self -motivated and having better self -care. And for now, that’s it for this episode. We’ll see you in the next episode of the Coast and Commerce podcast. See ya.