Episodes

  • Announcing: the Change Academy

    Announcing: the Change Academy
    May 27 2020

    After a nearly two year hiatus, I am back with an exciting announcement! I have a new podcast called Change Academy and in this short episode of Workplace Hero, I explain what the new show is all about and play you a snippet from Episode #1 of Change Academy.
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    12 mins
  • How To Self Promote, without being human spam w/ Justin Jackson

    How To Self Promote, without being human spam w/ Justin Jackson
    Jun 16 2018

    I'm going to come right out and say it. The reason I chose the topic of Self Promotion for this episode is that I have something to sell you.

    The product is called Weighless and Weighless is a fat loss program. So, as you can probably guess, with the millions on other fat loss programs out there advertising themselves, it is difficult being heard above the noise. So, in our endeavour to rise above all the noise, we have been forced to become self-promotion ninjas.
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    20 mins
  • Work Expands (or contracts) to the Time Allowed

    Work Expands (or contracts) to the Time Allowed
    Feb 16 2018

    Parkinson's Law is a book by C. Northcote Parkinson. And this book is best known for its opening line: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Now, do you recognise it? I bet you do. Honestly, I didn’t know it had a name until I started writing this episode.

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    13 mins
  • Goal Setting and the End of Season 1

    Goal Setting and the End of Season 1
    Sep 8 2017
    Top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in most fields all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation and it helps you to organize your time and your resources. -- Goal Setting Hello my cubicle convictions, open space schemers, corner office objectives, home den dutiful and coffee shop schemas. My name is Brock Armstrong and I am not the workplace hero. If there is a Workplace Hero around these parts, it is you my friend. And I will explain why, in a few minutes. Right now, I want to give you some data. The first Workplace Hero podcast episode was released on March 5, 2017. Here is a snippet of the Facebook live video I did to celebrate. Since then, I have released 30 episodes (including this one) which have received a total of about 12,000 downloads, ranging between 647 downloads for Katy Bowman’s “To Sit or Not To Sit” episode and 250 downloads for the “What Happens at Work Stays at Work” episode. When I started the podcast, I of course had high hopes of thousands of downloads and advertiser’s banging down my virtual door but at the same time I really had no idea if anyone would listen or care (aside from my mom). And as you can see, this podcast is by no means a wild, runaway success but it is also by some measures and stats I have seen passed around on the podcast forums, performing better than 95% of the podcasts on the Apple Podcasts app. Even more important than that though, this podcast has been a blast to produce. It really has scratched an itch that I have had for a while. I have worked as a tech and/or producer on 13 different podcasts and all but two or three of them have been interview style podcasts. You know, where two people sit down and have an organic conversation (usually over Skype) and then it was my job to try to make it sound good and make sense. Well, I have always been more interested in creating a more produced, scripted, researched and polished podcast. This is likely due to my background in music and my occasional dips into broadcast radio. Workplace Hero is that podcast. I love the artistry that I can bring to it. The time I take to add sound effects and drum beats and music soothes my soul. Truly. Now, I know I am rambling a bit but I do have a point here… so let me get to it. When I decided to commit to this podcast, I was worried that it would be harder, more time consuming, slower to take off than I had anticipated and I didn’t want to prematurely pull the plug on it before I had a chance to really experience what it was like to be a solo podcaster. I didn’t want to get 5 episodes in, realize that my mom is the only one commenting on the blog posts (which she kinda is) and that I am only getting 200 downloads per episode (remember that I have worked on shows that get 100,000 + downloads per episode so that is my frame of reference) and end the adventure before the podcast really had a chance to grow, build an audience and become part of my daily life. So I remembered (incorrectly, I might add) something I had read that Tim Ferriss said when he started his podcast. I incorrectly remembered him writing that he decided to do 30 episodes to see if he liked liked podcasting. What he actually wrote was “ I decided to try long-form audio for six episodes. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would throw in the towel and walk.” https://tim.blog/2016/04/11/tim-ferriss-podcast-business/ Well, despite what Tim actually wrote, I decided my number was 30. I was not allowed to stop, pull the plug, take a week off or break stride for 30 episodes. Once I reached 30, then I had a decision to make. Until then, it was business as usual. A business that is losing me money and time every week but also a business that I enjoy and hope is helping people in some small way, each week. Today, I am happy to say that I made it to 30. Six months later, here I am sitting down to write the 30th episode. —Fan Fare— It literally says in my script the words fan fare. That’s how I roll. Anyway, whether or not my goal was set deliberately through calculation and research or was set due to a misremembered quote from the 4-Hour Workweek guy, I am very glad that I set that goal. There were certainly times along the way that if the goal had not been there - and publicly stated (which is crucial) - I am sure I would have wimped out. Over at MindTools.com they ask the question: why set goals? Well, top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in most fields all set goals. Setting goals gives you long-term vision and short-term motivation and it helps you to organize your time and your resources. By setting sharp, clearly defined goals you will see and be able to measure forward progress in what might previously have seemed like a long and occasionally pointless grind. You will also raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your own ability and competence in achieving the goals that you've set. This certainly was true for...
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    20 mins
  • Are You Addicted to Workohol?

    Are You Addicted to Workohol?
    Sep 1 2017

    Society tells us that working harder and working more hours is good, but if you have listened to this podcast for a while you know that it is actually damaging you, hard on your fellow employees and even detrimental your company's success.

    So, let me ask you this. “What is the difference between a hard worker and a workaholic?"
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    20 mins
  • Work Zones w/ Vanessa and Adam Lambert

    Work Zones w/ Vanessa and Adam Lambert
    Aug 25 2017
    Today’s topic is a fun one. Partially because it is something that I am sure that we can all agree on but mostly because for the first time in quite a while we have a guest hero! Guest heroes, actually. Vanessa and Adam Lambert from Bee The Wellness. We’ll here from them in just a bit but first, let’s talk about a thing known as Work Zones. And no, I am not ta lking about that section of the highway where you see a bunch of pylons and folks in brightly coloured outfits standing around with shovels in their hands while enormous machinery digs a new ditch No, I am talking about spaces around your home, your office or where ever you get your work done, where you can vary your stance, extend your gaze, vary your movement, and even other biomarkers like your body temperature, to keep from getting what Adam will refer to later as “cabin fever” while you are at work. Hello, my cubicle contrasters, open space sundry, corner office opposite, home den dissimilar, and coffee shop specialized. My name is Brock Armstrong, and after you listen to enough of these podcast episodes, I hope to replace the voice in your head - “put your phone down and get back to work - when was the last time you got up from your desk - shouldn’t you have left work by now - always take the stairs.” Is that creepy? Maybe a little… anyway… Today’s topic is a fun one. Partially because it is something that I am sure that we can all agree on but mostly because for the first time in quite a while we have a guest hero! Guest heroes, actually. Vanessa and Adam Lambert from Bee The Wellness. We’ll here from them in just a bit but first, let’s talk about a thing known as Work Zones. And no, I am not ta lking about that section of the highway where you see a bunch of pylons and folks in brightly coloured outfits standing around with shovels in their hands while enormous machinery digs a new ditch No, I am talking about spaces around your home, your office or where ever you get your work done, where you can vary your stance, extend your gaze, vary your movement, and even other biomarkers like your body temperature, to keep from getting what Adam will refer to later as “cabin fever” while you are at work. Before I continue, let’s step into the email zone for a minute… heh. I would love it if you signed up for the Workplace Hero email newsletter over at workplacehero.me. The sign up form is on the righthand side of the page. Because I believe so strongly in the idea of Inbox Zero, I promise that you will only receive an email once per week, and it will be short, to the point and easy to delete. Plus, just for signing up, you will receive a coupon code for 10% off at the online health and fitness store, GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com. Over there they have a huge array of supplements, gear, plans, coaches and clothing that will help keep you healthy and fit. So sign up for the newsletter at workplacehero.me and get your discount code for GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com now. Ok. Let’s meet our guest heroes. AdamHi We are Adam and Vanessa Lambert owners of Bee The Wellness. We have been in the health and fitness business for nearly 20 years and as holistic wellness coaches we focus on the complete picture, including strength and conditioning, nutrition, mindfulness, and adventure. Since creating Bee The Wellness we have helped thousands of people adopt a healthier lifestyle as well create expanded lives through our remote coaching programs and retreats. They also have a great podcast that you can find on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Bee (that’s with two Es) The Wellness or go to beethewellness.com and give it a try. A good episode to start with would be the one where they interviewed me! Ha ha… as if you don’t get enough of me already. Anyway. When I asked Vanessa and Adam what issues they saw cropping up in their clients as a direct result of their workspaces, this is what they told me. VanessaAs the majority of our work for Bee The Wellness takes place out of our house or on the road and includes a ton of computer time we have identified three issues that cause us the most grief and negatively impact our productivity. 1. Eye strain - Frequent laptop and mobile device sessions can have our gaze fixed at one distance for hours if we don’t take action.2. Lack of movement - When you get out of bed and then you are at work all day you miss out on several opportunities to move. Think walking to your car, walking up the stairs in your office, and running whatever errands you have to do. Adam3. Boredom/ fatigue - Similar to #2 being in the same space morning noon and night can seriously affect our ability to stay focused. It’s like having cabin fever and can sneak up pretty quickly if you don’t get a change of scenery. To combat these issues we create work zones and rotate between them throughout the day. These zones help us to stay productive and check a few items off of ...
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    13 mins
  • What Happens at Work Stays at Work

    What Happens at Work Stays at Work
    Aug 18 2017
    Close your eyes for a second and dig deep into your psyche. I want you to be truly honest with yourself. Can you do that for me? Ok. Do you truly believe that one day you will actually go home from work with a completely clear desk? No projects left incomplete, no phone calls left to make, no emails to follow up on, no documents to edit, and no meetings to book? The honest to dog truth is that there will always be work left undone at the end of your busy day. Admitting this gives us three options: We can go home, but take the work with us and then spend our evening doing it (or actively suppressing the urge to do it). This ensures maximum tension at home, unrestful rest, and then returning to work the next day tired and resentful.Drag your ass home, leave the work on your desk, then spend the evening fretting over what you left behind. Same results ensue involving the tension and fitful sleep. And when you get back to work next day, you’ll be tired and resentful—and the work will not have been done either.Take a deep cleansing breath, leave the work behind gracefully, truly forget about it, and enjoy a relaxing evening. No tension, lots of rejuvenating rest, plus you return the next day ready to tackle what’s waiting for you. Newsletter Before we dive deeper down this magical list of alternatives, I want encourage you to sign up for the Workplace Hero email newsletter over at workplacehero.me. The sign up form is on the righthand side of the page. Please know that because I believe strongly in the idea of Inbox Zero, you will only receive an email once per week, and it will be short, to the point and easy to delete. Best of all, just for signing up, you will receive a coupon code for 10% off at the online health and fitness store, GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com. Over there they have a huge array of supplements, gear, plans, coaches and clothing that will help keep you healthy and fit. So sign up for the newsletter at workplacehero.me and get your discount code for GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com now. Now back to leaving it all behind OR what happens at work, stays at work. Here are some techniques that I found at Lifehacker.com and crew.co that will help you achieve the last and best of the three options I mentioned. Like a cool down after a hard workout, treat your trip home as positive time to wind down and start the process of relaxation. Play some of your favourite music, or listen to your favourite podcast. I would suggest not catching up on the news or scrolling through social media. Choose something you really like and enjoy and that won’t remind you of work or bum you out about how truly crappy humans can be to each other. There’s a perception that more work equals more productivity, but that’s not always the case. So you never take a sick day, or a vacation, and you are always ‘on-call.’ You also put in about 70 hours a week, so that will pay off eventually I’m sure…oh wait, except it doesn’t. The Economist looked at the data from OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries found that the more productive workers were actually those that spent less time in the office. Lifehacker takes it one step further and puts an actual number on how many hours we work before we begin to see diminished results (hint: it’s about 30 hours a week). If there was ever a reason to leave work at work, this data should be it. You are actually making yourself more productive! This one is more of a psychological one - match your journey time with the time you need to relax. If that means taking the long, scenic route, so be it. If it means stopping at a park on along the way, that’s just fine. Your family and friends will prefer you half an hour later but in a calm and pleasant mood rather than half an hour earlier but in a foul one. Never be in a hurry to get home. If you do, every hold-up, every traffic jam, every pedestrian trying to cross the street in front of you, every late train, or missed bus will be a source of additional stress. Try to take it easy, and I don’t mean you have to drive under the speed limit. Simply treat your commute home as your time—a period just for you. All day at work, you’re at other peoples’ beck and call. Now it’s time to to relax and be yourself. If you need to rant and/or vent, do it before you leave work or do it along the way. Curse the world in the privacy of your own vehicle or yell at the wind as you ride your bike home. Go to the noisiest part of the subway platform and rant where no one can hear you. Just don’t walk in the door when you arrive home and launch directly into a rant. Who wants to bring a cocktail and slippers to that? Take a minute at the end of the day to write down your accomplishments because it’s easy to get bogged down in everything that you still have to do that you forget everything that you have already done. What good is working if you never take pride in those accomplishments that you put...
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    13 mins
  • The Frustration of Chronic Lateness

    The Frustration of Chronic Lateness
    Aug 11 2017
    For a good percentage of us work-a-day-grumblers, three little words habitually accompany our entrance to work, a meeting, a luncheon or even getting home from work: “Sorry, I’m late.” Does this sound like you? Hello cubicle cutoff, open space overdue, corner office out of luck, home den delayed and coffee shop sluggish. My name is Brock Armstrong and I am… not the Workplace Hero. We’re on that trajectory together, you and I. You can think of me as your very chatty co-pilot. Before we get started, if you enjoy this podcast and the tips and strategies it contains, I encourage you to visit SkywalkerFitness.ca. That is the wellness coaching business that I run. Whether you are wanting to slim down, run a 10k or a marathon, race in a triathlon, pack on some muscle, clean up your diet, or get ripped, I will create a plan for you. No cookie cutter programs allowed. Just 100% tailored programs that fit around your life’s commitments. And for being a Workplace Hero, I will give you a special deal on your first 3 months of coaching. Head over to SkywalkerFitness.ca and send me a note mentioning this podcast episode so I can start building you the perfect program to meet your wellness goals. Let me set the stage for you - It’s Monday morning. In a surprise turn of events, you wake up feeling great! You had a fun weekend of good sleep, good food, fresh air and exercise, and aside from the one drink-drink you had with dinner on Saturday night, you adhered to your long term plan extremely well. Sadly, something goes wonky with the kids, or you take a little too long chatting with that cute barista, or doing your morning journalling, or spacing out on your coffee cup, and you find yourself running late. “Not again!” you think to yourself. “I hate being late!” For a good percentage of us work-a-day-grumblers, three little words habitually accompany our entrance to work, a meeting, a luncheon or even getting home from work: “Sorry, I’m late.” Does this sound like you? A ton of studies have looked into why some of us are chronically late. The truth is that there are many reasons why people just can’t get somewhere on time. But there seems to be one common thread running through the behaviour of chronically late individuals that may be a universal reason for their perpetual tardiness—and it is a surprising one: People are late because they don’t want to be early. Most of us know people who are always on time because they hate being late. I fall smack dab into this category; in fact, I’m freakishly scared of being late. I often arrive places embarrassingly early, which sometimes prompts me to hide out somewhere around the corner, playing with my phone, just so people don’t notice just how early I actually got there. Because people like me hate to be tardy, we always appear to be on time (even if it is because we hid in a stairwell playing Kwazy Kupcakes on our phone for 20 minutes). But just as we hate to be late, another cohort hates to be early. And if you ask them, these anti-early birds say that they really want to be punctual—they just prefer to be right on time than to be early. Wanting to avoid being early, then, is a strong motivation for why many people who are chronically late and honestly it is hard to reconcile these two competing ideals. So why does this second group hate to be early? There are many reasons but here are a few that I found at PsychologyToday.com: 1. It’s inefficient. Being early requires having to sit around with nothing to do (or play with your phone). The waiting time is just short enough that you can’t get into any other project; as soon as you do, the time is up. 2. They hate the uneasiness of being early. They feel awkward and uncomfortable waiting. They might even feel as if others are watching and judging them, whether this is true or not. Arriving a few minutes early makes you feel proud and confident, but arriving too early can make you feel foolish. You fear others might think that you have no life aside from this event, and you don’t want people to think that your time isn’t valuable either. 3. There is an opportunity cost associated with getting somewhere early. Just as someone else’s time is valuable and you want to respect it by being punctual, so too is your time valuable and you'd rather use it productively than wait around inefficiently. This is a behaviour I saw time and time again with a CEO friend of mine. He was so obsessed with not wasting a moment of his time that he would see a 3-minute window as a chance to get another call done which inevitably took longer than 3 minutes and would start a cascade of lateness for the remainder of the day. 4. Sometimes you do not want to be early to be polite. You may not want to disturb someone by getting there too soon—say, a friend’s dinner party—so you would actually rather get there a little late. In an article at the Huffington Post called: This Is Why You're Late All The ...
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    15 mins