Graham Allcott 0:04

Hello and welcome to another episode of beyond busy.

Here's like a weird thing to say when no one's busy running around right now. This is the show where we talk productivity, work life balance, and how people define happiness and success. My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And this week, I'm talking to Mark Leruste. Mark was the country director for Movember, the charity campaign and he is now a speaker a podcast has a lot to say on living your values, living your authentic self and is really great thinker. So we talked about his journey with Movember. We talked about Instagram and marketing and putting yourself out there lots of stuff like that and I think this is a really good one for right now because it's I just I love the way mark thinks very top line strategic thoughtful and yeah, I think This is gonna be a really good one I think you'll get a lot out of it. So just before we get into the episode couple things I want to say firstly think productive are still running free webinars to help people who are struggling working from home so think productive comm forward slash w f h if you want to hear about that. We're also running all of our regular workshops still and we're running them all on zoom and actually on zoom and also whatever other tech you use in your business if it's not zoom, so you can find more about that I think productive calm. We've obviously seen a drop off in our own work. It's you know, month by month, it's it's actually been surprisingly steady up till now. But really, you know, starting to drop off at the moment. So yeah, if you are interested in productivity and helping your team then we can definitely help and we are poised to help so it's impressive calm if you want to find out more about that. Also, since the last one, I released this blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It's called Tales from Holland, autism, Corona and all of us. And it's just a set of thoughts around how my son who has autism has found the last few weeks, very soothing, and a really nice environment for growth actually, like really seeing his conversational skills coming on a lot. He seems really happy and relaxed and, you know, free of a lot of the usual anxiety or there are definitely obviously some anxieties. There's a lot of stuff that he can't do that he would normally do. But yeah, I had a huge response. Well, I posted on LinkedIn also on medium. And yeah, we'll put a link to that in the show notes. But I'd love you to check that out. Let me know what you think. It's just called Tales from Holland, autism, Corona and all of us and I'll put the link to that in the show notes. You can also find on medium and LinkedIn. Yeah, go check that out. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on it. And the other thing is, I've finally launched the new grammar. caught.com so you can go and find that Grandma katako. And one of the things that's part of that is, for the first time ever, I'm going to be doing a personalised weekly newsletter, which is going to go out on a Sunday, the idea of it is it's like the blues buster, Sunday night email. So it just has some positive thoughts for the week ahead. And just hopefully, is just me kind of sharing ideas and just having a bit of dialogue with people. So if you want to sign up for that, just go to grandma got calm. We'll put the link to that in the show notes. We might even try and put in a little widget to sign up to the mailing lists on get beyond busy.com as well. I'll talk to mark about that. But yeah, if you want to sign up for that, the idea is that I'll just be doing a kind of weekly email out I'll let you know what I'm up to. And also just share some some thoughts for the week ahead. I'd love to get some signups for it's brand new literally just launched it last week with the new grammarly.com site. So check that out. So let's get into the episodes. This was myself and Mark actually recorded our old lives back in January in Camden. And it just, it was a really great conversation. I really enjoyed the conversation. It feels like such a long time ago now. It's just it's a weird thing how time seems to just be moving at a very different pace in this current COVID world. So, yeah, it just feels like a lifetime ago but really pleased to get this one out. So you join us in Camden, we black to meeting room, here's my conversation with Mark the roost.

I have a complicated relationship with Holland. The complication is not the fault of Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague. I’m lucky to have friends in all those places and for the opportunities I’ve had to travel there over the years. I’ve never lived in Holland. Yet, because of my son, I reside there for parts of most days.

I don’t leave my values at the door when I go to work. There are four key principles that guide what I do - and more importantly, why I do it:

Kindness & Empathy

I believe in doing business in a way that treats people with respect. My motto within Think Productive for years has been “People first, work second. Always”. When you work in a way that puts people first, you build trust, loyalty, empathy and with it,the right team spirit. Screwing people over, or working in a transactional way is short-termist.

One of my big goals for 2020 was to get much better at marketing. It’s April and so far I’ve shifted from my flashy and slightly pretentious old website into this new one, set up my first ever personal mailing list (I know!) and started to think a bit harder about things like Instagram and vain notions of what “my audience” might want from “my content”.

I should start by saying I hate marketing, which is probably already obvious.

I’ve been really interested in nutrition for a few years now. Anyone who knows me will know I’m not a massive ‘foodie’ and fine dining is largely wasted on me, but there’s something obvious yet profound about the fact that our brains perform better when they’re well-fuelled.

I guess it hit home for me around three years ago, when I suffered a really nasty bout of depression. I have terrible genes when it comes to mental health, but this was my first time being medicated for it. Save for a few afternoons in bed that no one really knew about, I carried on running the business and nobody really knew what was going on in my brain (I was CEO at the time, and although I wasn’t doing a great job, I managed to just about keep the show on the road). Once the fog cleared and I decided to come off the happy pills, I wanted to give my brain the best chance of being clear, sane and energised.