Keynote and Panel Moderation - BDO - World International Men’s Day 2024

This was a fantastic event for the leading professional services firm, BDO, for International Mens Day 2024. The event explored the idea of balancing success between life and work. I delivered a keynote and then co-hosted a fantastic panel discussion with the wellbeing sponsor, Chris Grove. In my keynote, I covered the following themes:

• What is success?

• How success interacts with our wellbeing.

• Looking the success through different lenses is helpful alongside broadening our measures of success.

• Understanding that we all have many different aspects of our identity and that we can look at what success means across all of them.

• What do we want to be remembered for if we look back at our lives at the age of 80?

• Our definitions of success can and will change over time.

The panel was made up of a number of BDO people across a range of functions and seniority. It was inspiring to hear Nick Poulter, Dalton Brooks MCICM(grad), Nikhil Lalsodagar and Abdullah Mir (Abs) be open, vulnerable and share their broad definitions of success. Here are some takeways from my awesome co host:

• How we define "Success" changes over time. It is unique to each of us and reflective of the journey we are on right now

• Find people you feel psychologically safe with, be bold and share your thoughts and feelings - you'll be surprised to find you are not alone

• Identify your own wellbeing "non-negotiables", and share these with your personal network: through sharing, we hold ourselves accountable to action

• Sometimes it might take you longer to achieve your goals compared to others. Everyone's journey is different - don't measure your success with someone else's ruler

• Failure is an opportunity to learn

• Increasingly, strong leaders are defined by their willingness to demonstrate vulnerability; to be open about the challenges they may have experienced and overcome

• Support is out there - speak up and you will be heard....