While running by Lake Geneva, Dana Zelicha realised she had to change her life. ‘I was looking at the beautiful scene,’ she says, ‘and gazing at the swans and thinking: “What the hell am I doing with my life?” ’
As a marketing executive for a multinational tobacco company, Dana was spending her working days selling ‘toxic products’.
In Tel Aviv and then in Cape Town, she had been getting by on Red Bull and cigarettes. Then she was posted to Switzerland, and life slowed down.
‘I had to face myself,’ she says, with a wry smile. And she didn’t like what she saw.
What I’m seeing today in London is a glamorous dynamo. She talks fast. She smiles a lot. She is evangelical about the changes she has made in her life.
Mindfulness expert Dana Zelicha (pictured) revealed her tips for intentionally achieving your goals. She has previously worked with women in companies such as McKinsey Citibank
After that run by the shores of Lake Geneva, she gave up smoking. She cut down on her drinking. She looked round the office and saw that many of her colleagues were miserable.
‘They were just waiting for the day to end,’ she says. She had been ‘so focused on getting higher and higher and achieving more’ that she hadn’t noticed that she was, too.
Shortly afterwards, she discovered mindfulness and resigned.
This is the point in the story where the frazzled ex-executive usually goes off to make jam in a country cottage or run yoga retreats on a mountain, talking only to her llamas.
Dana did not do this. She came to London to do an MSc in Organisational Psychology at the London School of Economics and now works with businesses to help their staff develop and grow. She can, she says, help executives gain a ‘winning mindset’.
Dana’s method centres on setting out your intentions: for your day at work, your life, your next career steps, and then making sure that what you actually do backs up those intentions.
And she’s clear that it works. She gives her clients questionnaires to monitor their progress. ‘It is,’ she says, ‘about allowing people to flourish and thrive.’
She has worked with women in companies — including management consultants McKinsey Citibank and Zara — to help them cope with the challenges of work in an increasingly frantic world.
And perhaps most helpfully, taught them how to get a pay rise. Because after all, what most of us really want is more money.
The average salary in the UK is around £27,000 with the gender pay gap predicted to take 62 years to close (stock image)
The BBC might prefer it if we conveniently forgot that the top women at the Corporation seem to be paid an awful lot less than the top men, but it’s a story that’s so shocking in terms of figures that it keeps resurfacing.
The Corporation’s highest-paid star, Chris Evans, earns more than four times as much as its highest-paid woman, Claudia Winkleman. (He earns £2.2 million a year. She earns between £450,000 and £500,000.)
The recent annual report revealed that just a third of the Corporation’s top-earning ‘on-screen talent’ — presenters earning more than £150,000 — are women.
Some of its highest-profile female presenters, including Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis and Radio 4’s Sarah Montague, don’t even make it on to the list of top earners.
While the men were embarrassed by how much they earned, the women were embarrassed by how little. Most of us would, of course, be thrilled to earn anything like this. The average salary in this country, let’s remember, is around £27,000. But the gender pay gap is real. If things carry on at this rate, according to the Fawcett Society, it will take 62 years to close it.
If you’re a cleaner, a nurse or a bartender, you might just about earn the same as a man. But if you work in construction, you’re likely to earn about 45 per cent less. And if you’re a finance director or a manager, you can expect to earn 36.5 per cent less.
Female managers earn about £40,000 a year, compared with more than £71,000 for men.
Dana believes her acronym ‘PAYRISE’ can help with achieving goals such as a pay rise at work (file image)
If that isn’t enough to make you want to storm into your boss’s office and demand a pay rise right now, I don’t know what is.
But most of us don’t have the courage to storm anywhere and, even if we did, it isn’t usually a strategy that works.
The trick, says Dana, is to be rational and calm. She teaches courses in mindfulness, so she knows all about being calm.
‘I have a tool,’ she says. ‘It’s called PAYRISE’. An acronym which, at least, sounds hard to forget. She talks me through it.
‘You have to Pick your time,’ she adds. Research shows it’s best to talk to your boss when he or she is feeling relaxed, perhaps after lunch, or on a Friday afternoon.
Not, in other words, when they are just about to present their quarterly figures to the board. We are all less open to suggestions when we’re feeling stressed.
‘Before asking,’ she continues, ‘list your Accomplishments and reflect on them.’ Some of us are better at listing the things we’re bad at than the things we’re good at, but, says Dana, we need to take a cool look at all the positive things we achieve. If we don’t blow our own trumpet, we can be pretty damn sure that nobody else will.
And you have, she says, to look at your ‘limiting beliefs’. (The Y stands for ‘Yet’, she explains, which I can’t help thinking is cheating.)
She’s certainly right that we all have limiting beliefs. Sometimes, we don’t really believe we deserve to be paid more.
Sometimes, we think we do, but feel that there’s no point asking, because we won’t get it.
It’s a bit like that famous statistic about men and women applying for jobs. Men apply when they meet only 60 per cent of the criteria, according to the Harvard Business Review, but women only apply if they meet 100 per cent of them. You don’t need a man to do the maths.
Next, says Dana, you have to do your Research. ‘You have to network a little bit,’ she says, ‘and see what’s going on in the market in your area.’
You have to set your Intention. What do you want to get? ‘And also, what are your plans and goals for the company? What can you bring to the table?’ You have to remember that, in fact, it’s about what you can do for them — and not what they can do for you.
AT this point, says Dana, you have to See what’s going on. Are you feeling anxious? Unless you’re a robot, the answer is probably ‘yes’. What can you do to get yourself into the right frame of mind for the meeting?
Sure, a nice double vodka might hit the spot, or perhaps a Valium, but you need to be firing on all cylinders, while also doing your best to feel calm.
And then, says Dana, you take a deep breath and Enter the room. And you keep every part of your anatomy crossed. If the answer is ‘yes’, hooray! If it isn’t, then you work out whether it’s a definite ‘no’, or a ‘not now’ and wait for the best time to try again.
Whatever you do, don’t give up.