Ask people who the most important person in a company is and a large majority will tell you it’s the CEO.

But ask CEOs from the world’s leading companies and many will give you a different answer – it’s the customer, of course!

How customers think about your brand – or more accurately, how they feel about it – is now recognised as the greatest predictor of future business growth.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Act (formerly known as the Trade Practices Act) governs how Australian businesses deal with their competitors, suppliers and customers.

That is, pretty much every aspect of commercial life. It therefore pays to have at least a working understanding of this area of law.

For many of us, it’s the most anticipated event of the work calendar. The annual office Christmas party. The firm’s way of saying ‘thanks for all the hard work: Let your hair down on us’.

But should you?  

Some live to regret it. In fact, more than a few careers have ended on that fateful night in December.

Workplace stress is the inevitable outcome of having to get a lot done within a limited time-frame, while being accountable for your performance. Up to a point, this keeps people motivated.

However, if stress levels are too high, it ultimately detracts from performance.

The Australian Government has been widely praised for its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It has won plaudits for both the public health measures implemented to combat the virus, as well as policy measures intended to limit the economic fall out.

The centrepiece of the government’s economic response is the JobKeeper Payment.

You are, to a large extent, the sum of your habits.

A habit can be defined as something you have become so accustomed to doing that you now do it almost without thinking. Research suggests that as much as 40% of our behaviours every day are habitual.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of a good night’s sleep. In his 2019 bestseller Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Matthew Walker writes that sleep “enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions [and also] recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite.

By some estimates, your career will take up around 80,000 hours of your adult life—and, whichever way you look at it, that’s an enormous amount of time. Little wonder then that most of us are preoccupied with figuring out the right career: how can we invest our own 80,000 hours in a way that feels meaningful, leads us toward our goals, and taps into our natural interests and talents?

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to these questions.

The perils of workplace stress
Some degree of stress is natural and even beneficial: it keeps us on task, helps us determine what our priorities are, and contributes to a healthy sense of motivation. However, it’s all too easy for stress to get out of hand.

Should you take the job, or should you wait and see if something better comes along? Should you move house now, or maybe next year, when it could be more affordable? Should you spend your holidays in England, Australia, or Japan? Life is full of such conundrums, each of them requiring us to make decisions that will affect the things that are most important to us: our careers, our relationships, our finances, our creative pursuits, and more.