Here are some great TED resources that will help you with the following problems:

• Not sure if you actually love your work any more? Perhaps your why is actually a “why bother” at the moment?

• You get really nervous before presentations, job interviews or appearing on Q&A style adversarial panel discussions

• You feel pressured to settle on one thing, but keep creating new career ideas and options – formerly known as a Renaissance woman or polymath

Simon Sinek
How Great Leaders Inspire Action

Simon Sinek is a marketer so he knows a thing or two about inspiring action. He talks about the golden circle – of why, how and what, with why being the most important – and how important and influential that is in leadership.

When you think about it purely from a leadership perspective – great leaders create change and inspire follower-ship. They don’t tell people how to do things, they tell them why they should do things and only then what it is they need to do. Pure and simple – this is strategic. Focus on the why, then the what, then leave the team to work out how to execute.

Your ability to define your why is what makes you a credible expert, it’s what draws people to your ideas and it’s what will help get you out of bed, determined to do good work, despite setbacks, criticism and tough times. It makes you resilient, focused and determined. It’s a powerful catalyst for ambition.

This process of focusing on the why is powerful – and when you can define your why really clearly it makes it really easy to follow you.  Simon even has a process to help explain how to find your why which is great for a business, but I reckon it could be good for an individual too.

Ideal for anyone trying to find their own why as anyone wanting to influence others. Why not apply the same principles to your work, your career or those Boards and committees you sit on?

Amy Cuddy
Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are

I think this talk would be better named as Your Body Language Shapes How you Behave.  We’ve all known for years that our body language was a form of “tell”. It gives away how we are feeling I.e. folding your arms across your body makes us look as though we are defensive or hiding something, hands on hips is seen as more confident and the list goes on.
Well this is actually a chick and egg scenario – where researchers are examining which comes first.
It’s a it like the research on smiling where it turns out that smiling, even if you aren’t happy, triggers a happiness response in you. Yep, that’s right, smiling makes you feel happy! Go figure.
So Harvard Physchologist, Amy Cuddy, has taken this sphere of research one step further with an examination of how posture and poses that are traditionally confident might not just look confident gut also have an active component and trigger confidence.
In fact, in a nutshell – some poses such as standing with your hands on your hips, hands behind your head, typically seen as masculine confidence poses actually trigger a chemical cascade in your body that actually do make you feel more confident and calm.
She and her team looked at a range of poses and noted that when people sat or stood in these “power poses” their testosterone (the dominance hormone that triggers decisiveness, action and risk taking) increased by 20% and their cortisol levels (stress hormones) decreased by 25%.
And the reverse is true as well – stand in a low power pose and your testosterone drops and your cortisol decreases.
This is critical for women in business where confidence, dominance and the appearance of confidence is such an influential issue when heading into the leadership arena.

Sit up straight sunshine!   Change your body, change your mind.

Essential viewing for all teenagers, university graduates and anyone faced with a presentation or job interview.

Emilie Wapnick
Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling

If you’re (still) struggling with that question of what it is you want to be when you grow up, and you’re beyond 25 years old then never fear.  Maybe you are actually normal. In fact, as we are seeing with Generation Y and Millennials – it’s likely they will have multiple careers over the span of a life time with the knowledge and understanding that skills are transferable and mindset is flexible. You can be, do or achieve anything you really set your mind to.  Plus most of the roles our younger generation will be doing in 10 years time, haven’t even been thought of yet, so this is a good thing.

Emilie addresses the issue of people who are good at many things – the “multipotentialite”, and as one such person myself I felt immediately at home with her talk.  For most of my working career I’ve found things that I could do that interested my intellect (and paid the bills) then other things I could do as well, that helped me create a more rounded professional life.

• Designing educational training produces plus teaching aerobics

• Running associations plus teaching yoga

I’ve also made several significant career jumps, transitioning from one industry to another with relative ease. I do have one proviso though – I’ve thought, perhaps unnecessarily, that I had it wrong. But maybe not, according to Emilie.

Possibly because our parents and their parents careers tended to be far more linear and long lived, we have the tendency to devalue the other interests that we have on the side.  Yet those other things we do are frequently the things that feed the soul, feed a passion or keep us sane.

So if you have had multiple roles and found yourself to be great at several if not all of them, never fear, this is simply a new way of looking at work. The future of work is likely to be far more malleable and flexible as we move away from traditional technical roles which could possibly be outsourced or taken over by machines.