S1E5: From the middle

Episode Title: From the Middle — A Reflection on Season 1, Episodes 1–4

Description:

This episode is different.

No guest. No prepared script. Just Jonathan Frostick sitting with a microphone and reflecting honestly on the first four episodes of Life 2.0: The Second Act.

In this unedited, off-the-cuff conversation with himself, Jonathan revisits what he actually learned in writing about pressure, boundaries, calm and wealth — and why the act of writing it was often how he figured out what he believed, rather than reporting something he already knew.

He talks about what he didn't expect when he started the series. The discomfort of writing from inside a transition rather than the other side of one. The moment he realised his first thought during a cardiac event was about a meeting with his manager — and what that really reveals about identity, not just overwork. And the editorial correction he had to make early on, when he noticed the series was speaking primarily to people who had chosen to change, while quietly leaving behind those who had change imposed on them.

If you've been following the articles, this is the conversation behind them.

If you're new to Life 2.0, this is probably the best place to start.

In this episode:

• Why pressure erodes perspective slowly, not dramatically
• The difference between performing urgency and practising calm
• Why boundaries at a senior level are about cognitive clarity, not protecting your evenings
• What it means to write from the middle of a transition — and why it matters

Life 2.0: The Second Act is a podcast and newsletter for senior leaders and professionals thinking seriously about what comes next — whether by choice, by circumstance, or by instinct. Hosted by Jonathan Frostick, drawing on twenty years inside complex global organisations and the questions his own experience made unavoidable.

Find the full article archive at linkedin.com/jonathanfrostick

Life 2.0: The Second Act explores reinvention after success, burnout, disruption, health events, and major life transition. Conversations on leadership, identity, resilience, health and building a more intentional future beyond the first mountain of your career.

Follow and listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.

Connect with Jonathan Frostick on LinkedIn for additional reflections, articles, and insights on leadership, reinvention, and the second act.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey lifers. Hope you're well. I want to do something different this week. I wanted to record some reflections of the journey what I'm writing about, why I'm writing it. And I thought it'd be quite good to connect with you all as my audience personally. So I know I've been using AI to kind of create effectively kind of a hosted chat show podcast. It does work well, I think. It gets a lot of the key message across, which is driven from articles I've written over the last two or three years. And I quite like that format. But I recognise that it's not as personal as I'd like it to be sometimes. And sometimes it's good to have a bit of a back and forth, which is why I'm also going to be bringing on board a couple of guests. People are contacting me now. If you're interested in being a guest on the podcast, please do get in contact. I'd uh I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to kind of get something something sorted out. It'd be great. One of the big things I think where this started for me was around obviously me having a heart attack and having written what is now an infamous post on LinkedIn, and I'll be honest, it was quite overwhelming posting that on LinkedIn at the time. I didn't think anything of it, and it blew up. And one of the things that it focused on for me in that moment, I guess, was you know what actually happened. It was effectively complete identity collapse, I'd call it, having gone from being who I was, identifying with work, using that as my identity to the outside world, and being quite open and candid with you, self-confessed workaholic in a sense. I was, as it's been now confirmed, addicted, addicted to work. So addicted to the uh the dopamine hits you kind of get on problem solving and stuff, if there ever was such a thing. That's kind of where some of this headed for me. But also, then kind of you could sort of see on the journey over the last five years or so, lots of stop-starts, readjustments just vanishing. And that's because I I guess I found the whole thing overwhelming. Getting global media coverage was was a big thing. It wasn't intentional. I didn't know how to deal with that, I wasn't prepared for that, and also I wasn't well enough to manage that, which was in part a shame. You know, you kind of see some people have instances in their lives and they kind of bounce out of it and get book deals and TV shows and chat shows and everything else. But for me, I just I wasn't I wasn't well. I couldn't even walk 10 feet without getting out of breath post post-surgery. And you know, I was kind of in a you know, ability scooter for a while to do any kind of distance journey. It was a complete reset for me. And so as my identity being a strong man, I mean, I'm six foot one and pretty well built. It was, you know, knocked down to the ground completely, and then having to put myself back together, and that's taken it's taken some time, right? It's taken some years. So I think that key point was there. Identity declapsed everything that I use to identify with the outside well, I d outside world, sorry, and identify with myself, yeah, fundamentally changed quite literally in a heartbeat, though pun intended. This is definitely not scripted. And actually, my found that my career and my ambitions, I guess, had become the whole person. So my career effectively had consumed who I was. And one of the prelivent points I found was well when I spoke to someone in the media and they sort of said, Well, you know, so what do you do outside of work? And and honestly, I had no answer at all. No hobbies, nothing. I was just all in on work, obviously have a family, but it was just yeah, work first, work always, and you know, working, you know, living to work as opposed to working to live. So I guess for today, one of the observations I've touched on is kind of what season one was about or what it is about when I've written it. And you know, we kind of talked around pressure, so high pressure, and one of the things I recognize now, and I kind of champion with individuals, companies, and such internally, is what does that high pressure do and what impact does it have over time, right? Because there's two parts to it. I think physiologically, so your physiological self, so physically we work and we absorb stress, that's what we do. And you know, as as individuals, as human beings, we're not machines, so you do need to consider how do you de-stress. I mean, it's not as simple as that, but it kind of is. If you're absorbing high stress, high-intensity work, physically you're damaging yourself, you just can't see it. You know, that's that's the reality of it. There's there's no I've got no magic formula for saying doing this for X amount of hours per week will you know give you this outcome. It's it's deeper than that, it's more over a longer sustained period. And I see younger colleagues now, and you know, former and current who are doing amazing things, and I'm always sort of saying to them, look, you know, just just just manage yourself. Ultimately, if you're gonna work intensely, you do need to have effectively a pressure release valve, right? So you need to kind of take time out, step back a bit and recharge, regroup, get your head together and rest, physic, physically rest your body. So you can work when you're younger, especially, you know, work hard, train, socialize, but you're still going to be net negative in terms of the physiological impacts of your body and your health long term. And that's really where my thinking first went to. And also, whilst I had a you know a big event myself, you know, burnout, and we've I've had burnout before, some of you would have had burnout before as well. It's that quiet degradation of yourself, yeah. So burnout kind of creeps up with you, creeps up on you, sorry. And before you know it, you know, cognitively you're a bit foggy, you're tired, and you kind of put it down to being tired, but you're not you're burnt out, and you're burnt out because you haven't put the construct around yourself to manage yourself, and that's again something else that came out of a reflection, especially in the press. You'll see that my my opinion in today is that some people do tend to lean into victimhood, and I think you need to own, you know, you know, you need to own your own decisions. And I am aware, and I do know that companies, many companies, have in place robust process for employees, shall we say, individuals working and how they should work and healthy living and such, but you you ultimately as an individual, it's down to you to manage yourself. And actually, sometimes that is both positive and negative. So, you know, without again rabbit holding too much on this one, you know, you have the responsibility to ensure that you put your health first, and that's as simple as it gets. And ultimately, if you're in an environment where you can't do that over a prolonged or extended period of time, or for whatever you consider to be reasonable, then you have to make a change. And either you'll be making that change in terms of how you operate, or you're going to change where you work. It's it's that simple, you have to own it. So that's a big reflection I had on how I operate anyway, was I owned the responsibility for kind of getting it wrong. And that's really one of my key talks I do at the moment. I've just started off doing is how I got it wrong, where I got it wrong. And that's where you guys can learn from me, because I don't want you to go through what I've had to go through, which is currently, you know, three different surgeries I think we're at, medications, the erosion of my energy levels, you know, slightly. So I can't operate as I used to because physically I'm unable to do so. And that's really it's a frustration for me because intellectually, you know, I'm hardwired, but physically I'm restricted. So be aware of that. What else can we kind of go in on what I wanted to cover off today? So, you know, I think the key takeaway for that is you can ask yourself, are you performing under pressure? Which I thought I did. I was actually addicted to the pressure, but are you performing on it or are you quietly being consumed by it? Because I was all in, I was fully consumed by my career, my work, the pressure, how I operated, and it had ripple effect across my whole life. And one of the scary points around that was exactly when I had that heart attack. There was no lie. I literally thought, I'm having a heart attack. Oh my god, I've got a meeting tomorrow of my MD. Like, I've got to make you know, I need some key outcomes. That was straight where my head went, and that's not healthy. Yeah, it's not a healthy position to be in. Boundaries, kind of we touched on boundaries in season one as well. Will we do, or we will? And healthy boundaries is is something which I think everyone can get better at enforcing and managing. Boundaries isn't just a kind of outbound just saying no. Again, it's around how do you structure yourself. So, how do you just structure your approach to work? How do you structure your availability? How do you structure how you engage with others? It's not an aggressive boundaries aren't an aggressive thing, they're just a robust thing. It's it's like pushing up against a wall, right? So a brick wall you'll push up against, it's firm. That's a really good boundary, you know, as an analogy. A wooden fence can flex more, and hey, again, does the job, right? So a wooden fence flexes, you can be flexible. No one's saying that you shouldn't be, it's not a a strict, again, a strict model you can almost cookie-cutter across your entire life. But when there's no boundaries, and so in this example, again, there's no fence line, there's no brick wall, you allow people to step into your garden, as it were. And that's not something you want to have open because if people can step into your garden because there's no boundary, then they just do that because they can. And that's the key point, right? So because they can. So put boundaries in place, you know. Don't always be available if that's what you need. If you've got, and again, you know, look working at MD level, there's a certain amount of there's a certain amount of expectation on what you should do or how you should do that and your availability. But again, you're still able to manage your availability, you're still able to manage how you want to operate. But to anyone, starting out in your career, mid-career, you know, having reached the upper echelons of your career and in seniority, boundaries are key. And I suspect that a lot of the successful people we see around us have really good boundaries because they don't just allow someone to walk in on their garden ramp. You know, there's a gate, and either that gate's open or it's closed, or it can be locked. Yeah, I think one of the other things I wanted you guys to take away is that how you can operate and when you're doing that, so I'm quite zen now, I didn't used to be, and I call it zen is the only way I can I guess I can call it. I'm quite chilled out, and I'm quite chilled out because I'm comfortable with the decisions I'm making. It's rare I allow myself to get stressed at work, and that's not because I've you know I've got any kind of again formula, it's more a state of mind, it's more about practice. You know, I have to go in and when I do things and when I operate, and I've you know delivered some huge, huge programs of work and change, or I've introduced governance and controls for you know stuff over a billion dollars now, really. I'm there to bring calm, I'm there to settle. A lot of work I do with other people around me is with people. Yeah, so I'm a very much a people person, and that's where I get my strength. I lean into and work with people in order to secure and get the right outcomes. I'm not the expert at everything, and people look to me for that calm, and you can always tell when someone's calm or not, because you'll find an energy in the room, and it can be do two things. It can either you can either panic people or you can settle people, and ultimately we all we all perform better, in my opinion, when we're calm, controlled, and settled, and we feel like we've got a trusted person in the room if we're needing direction, right? And that's that's broadly what I do. I just get the right people in the room to make the right decisions, and I'm not trying to sound too senior there, but I am a senior operator. You know, I have to do fun. Funny enough, I'm actually doing more work now in terms of what I would have done 10-15 years ago in some of the con the constructs, but applying a I guess a more senior mindset to the just a way to let organizations re-org and augment themselves with the changes in technology with AI, especially. So, yeah, so it's it's around being calm and it takes practice. You're you're there in any level of your career, in any stage, take the panic out of the room. And you can always tell someone who's been recently promoted to a senior position because you know, a C-suite individual says something and they run around like a headless chicken, like it's just crazy, right? Just chill out, calm down. You know, you're there to bring the calm to others, not running around screaming. And actually, you should be demonstrating that to your C-suite as well. Yeah, you should be the calm or operator. Yes, you have the answer, it's fierce. No, you don't have the answer, you're gonna go and get it, and this is how it's you know, this is what you're gonna do about it, yeah. Oh, yeah, and always always get back with solutions. Don't ever say no, I don't know. I guess that's pretty much where we can go to in terms of the I guess the content of where I want to go to today on it. But one of the big things I wanted to speak to you about before I finish as well is kind of how I felt about writing and writing season one, especially as I write season two as well. I find that really explorative, so it's quite like therapy. For me, it's quite therapeutic. You know, I sit down and get stuff documented, write it down, it feels good. I never felt though, I'd kind of feel kind of a sense of uh an imposter feeling around writing from the inside of a transition rather than the other side, because so many people today come from oh, this happened to me, now I've done it, here's what you can do too. Bosh. And you know what? It's really not that simple. So I don't know whether they've gone through the change I've gone through to that level or depth, should I say, or whether they're just kind of making it up because it gets more hits and likes, and maybe that's what people want to hear is the answers. I'm still on my journey, I'm still finding out the answers. I think it's huge, I think it's a huge area, both for individuals and for companies. I'm still working my way through all of that because it's a head of a gear changer and it's a head of a mindset shift. And I'm writing from it because I think it gives, I guess, my audience, you guys, more value, right? I think that's ultimately more useful to you to come on the journey with me, as opposed to having a summarised five-minute write-up. This is what what went wrong, and this is what you do today. It's just I I can give you all of that, all of that stuff is available. Um, I'm gonna be doing some digital products, I've do a lot of stuff in presentations for corporations. But you know, come on the journey with me. Yeah, I'm still working all of this stuff out, and I think I've got so much to cover. I'm not gonna lie, there's so much depth there. I kind of also see that initially I was kind of looking around people who wanted to change. So people have made a changing decision, and a big thing again in the press and stuff, people were contacting me saying, Oh my god, your story, it's changed me, I've now done this. But I could also see that, and especially recently, there's change being imposed on other people, so not a decision, but an imposed change where someone's been made redundant, and there's restructures. I mean, in the organizations across the world today, big global orgs, not just in financial services, which is where I operate, there's a huge amount of restructuring going on. There are streams, I mean, Meta, I think Meta this week announced, or was it last week announced, you know, a huge amount of layoffs. I think was it like eight or ten thousand individuals to be made redundant? This is happening all the time. People being moved out, moved on, re-augmented, and finding themselves either in a role which they is different to them and alien to them, or they've they've come out of the process and gone, I don't have a, you know, I don't have a place to work. Right? So that's a huge piece, right? Second act is around people probably coming to the same, say, same, same outcome in terms of you know, reevaluating who you are, what you do, how you do it, but it's not just because of having a health and in a health event or something, it addresses many different doors and routes through to that point in your life where you are having to or choosing to make a change in terms of how you operate, right? And so for me, writing my Life 2.0 content is very much that. Some of this stuff has evolved as I've ridden it, and you'll see back in over the years I've gone hit and miss, and oh my god, I've got to have all the answers for everyone, and I don't have all the answers. And actually, it's perfectly normal and humane, and humane, perfectly human to have not have all of the answers, but I know a lot of stuff, I've done a lot of stuff, and I'm hoping that you guys benefit from that as well. And I think the key part I want you to take away is that when I write, and when you guys are reading this, you you're operating for a place where you actually are, not where you think you should be, right? So that whole thing again, we talked on imposter syndrome, and again, I'm not scripting any of this, this is all off of my all off the cuff. You're coming from where you are and not where you think you should be. You should never really measure yourself against outside measurements of success or positioning or seniority or progress. You are where you are because that's where you are, and it would probably likely bear because a combination of choice and decisions, but also events and yeah, events outside of your control and decisions which were made, which influenced and impacted you, which were outside of your control, right? So just draw that line, recognise where you are, and then kind of think about where do I want to get to, what am I thinking about, and what do I want to do with my life. I think also don't confuse, and one thing I've didn't done previously in previous years, and now where I've really baseline for life 2.0, is don't confuse activity with progress. I felt an urge, a need to be busy, to be doing something, to be driving something forward, to get it done, get it done, get it done. No, that's not progress, right? That's just chumping out content and trying to give answers for a question you don't even know when the question's not even fully defined. Life 2.0 doesn't do that. So this is where I'm coming from now is I'm I'm on that journey. I am making progress and I'm I'm really comfortable with where I am, and I want you guys to get comfortable with where you are. That's a key point, right? Get comfortable with where you are. Look at yourself, look yourself in the mirror, talk to yourself, write some notes down. I'm not a big fan of journaling, I do do it sometimes, but yeah, make those notes. Where are you now? Where do you want to get to, and define what's important to you? And I might give them generate some free material actually to support this so you can help document where you guys are. So I think see that season two, as we kind of do season one, and now I'm now into creating season two on my writing, and that will flow through in podcasts in due course, but it's less reflection, more application. So season two is where it really gets to. I kind of called it the operator's manual. Season one is the foundation to get you guys to think about who you are, where you are. Season two kind of looks into how do I, what should I do, what could I think about doing. That's where I think it's really gonna land. Anyway, I've kind of gone over the time I was gonna do. I really appreciate you guys. Thank you for listening, thank you for engaging. Please do follow me on LinkedIn, and my website will be up in the next week or two. I really want to engage more of you guys. And as I say, if you want to be on this, drop me a line on LinkedIn and let's make that happen. It'd be great to have you as a as a co host, and we can discuss perhaps a specific topic you want to close off. Thank you.