Articulating Talent

Wellbeing for life and work | Life Coach Perth

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Writing and a Good life

In a wine cellar with several casks, on a pillar in the cellar is a metal plaque portraying wine barrels and two monks
Ancient philosophy can be a useful today as it was in ancient times

Thrift comes too late when you reach the dregs of the barrel”

Hesiod

A philosophical approach to work life balance for solopreneurs is often characterised by thrift. Whatever thrift maybe, it is essential to ponder it and it’s antonyms. Writing about your idea of thrift is a resolute first step towards realising your own vision of the good life that is actually good. It will move you forward in the project of freeing yourself for yourself.

What are you freeing yourself from? Enslavement – by the ideas and beliefs that have been deformed through your particular life experiences, or growing up in particular community at a particular time in your culture’s history. And of course, your vices. We are all enslaved one way or another, and taking on a philosophical way of life is a conscious move towards freedom. This sense of freedom is a significant component for the development of work life balance and can be a central undertaking in life coaching.

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Liberty through philosophy exercises

Person on a rock looking out over a series of valleys and hills in a setting sun
Exercises are essential for getting in touch with nature, ours and the planets

The aim of Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius is for readers to work their way through the 124 letters, creating a Stoic freedom, bringing an experience of joy and well-being in their life, regardless of circumstances. The totality of Seneca’s ambition is not something we can aspire to after developments in philosophy across the last 300 – 500 years. Even so, working with Seneca’s Stoic creed can still facilitate a sense of freedom for us. It can still heal what is amiss in our life. And Seneca can still provide a framework of belief and values to guide us through the insecurities of living with short contracts, casualisation and the ongoing expansion of the gig economy as we struggle with our solopreneur life.

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La La Land: a Career Story

Younge men on skateboards riding down the path at Santa Monica
Does your resume show how well you fit in with local cultural and industry expectations?

Career transitions can occur when economic conditions change regardless of our skill set and the organisations competing for those skills. Transitioning from the career structure of being a core professional to only being able land portfolio career gigs can be a common trigger for career advice in Perth. The film La La Land provides a good example of these two career structures.It also captures the central dilemmas faced by people trying to realise a good life founded on the creative authenticity required to successfully create your own business. The film charts the relationship and career trajectory of musician Seb and actor Mia. It is set in Tinsel Town, and its two big industries — film and music — are offstage characters.

Every city has its own distinct culture, which we learn to live in whether we grow up there or move later in life. Similarly, every city has a unique ecology of employment that everyone has to navigate to create a successful career. Career advice in Perth, with its distinctive private sector ecology, can support unexpected career transitions that impact on your pathway to successfully achieving solopreneur goals within Perth’s limitations and opportunities.

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Freedom is the centrepiece of an art of living

A fork with cake and cream with chocolate cake with a scoop of icecream in the background
A passion for cake?

Do you want more freedom? If so what sort of freedom are you seeking, and how will it assist you to be more at home with your side hustle? Seneca’s Letters on ethics begins with the directive to free ourselves. This theme is the core of Seneca’s philosophy, and is the central aim of his program in the Letters.
So what sort of Stoic freedom is at the centre of Seneca’s art of living?
The freeing of ourselves so we live life rather than spending our short time on this planet as slaves and time servers.
For Seneca, the Stoics and other ancient practitioners, philosophy was not just a therapy for healing what is amiss in your life, it was also the truest and perhaps only pathway to the most important freedom.

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Starting with Seneca’s Letters

A small bundle of old letters bound with dark string near some postcards

If we chose Seneca’s Letters as resilience resource for our professional life, we join a tradition that legions of people have subscribed over nearly two millennia. Reading his philosophical books, essays and his plays is been a time honoured way of refining and exercising our facility for practical reason. The Stoic school of philosophy Seneca identified with, operated for 600 years in Ancient Greece and Rome. However, since the 1800’s, many of the people who read Seneca did so without an accurate grasp of how the Stoic model of philosophy he employed differed from contemporary understandings of what is meant by Philosophy.

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