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Excess Baggage — Why Nobody Checks Their Home Life at the Office Door

Wellbeing at Work: How life outside work shapes performance, and what employers can do early

Dana Gambrill argues that people carry their home lives into work every day, a lesson from a corporate career as an IT executive and now as founder of Paper Kite People. Most workplaces still expect staff to leave their personal lives at the door, but he says it cannot be done: when life is going well people turn up present and effective, and when it is not, the weight comes to work with them. His Navigating Human program gives employers a way to help before staff reach breaking point, looking across eight areas of life such as sleep, fitness and nutrition. He explains what managers can notice early and what support works when it arrives before a crisis. Listeners leave seeing why life outside work shows up in performance at work, and what a workplace can do about it.

About Dana Gambrill

Dana Gambrill, podcast guest

Founder

Founder Paper Kite Wellness CollectiveNavigating Human 8-area life lens mentoring programADF Joint Health Command mental health workEx-IT executive Smart cities, DXC and IBM Consulting

Dana Gambrill is the founder of Paper Kite Wellness Collective and Paper Kite People, based in Canberra, Australia. Paper Kite helps people build the stamina to handle everyday life and the resilience to rise when things go wrong, working with them before they break rather than as a clinical service.

Before Paper Kite, Dana was an IT executive who applied technology to real-world outcomes, including smart cities work and consulting with DXC Technology and IBM Consulting. Much of that work was in the military space. With the Australian Defence Force's Joint Health Command he looked at why serving members and their families were not using the mental health services provided to them, and found that people want to speak to someone who has been through it. He also spoke before Australia's Royal Commission on defence and veteran suicide, on the high-risk window from the moment someone knows they will leave military service to 12 to 18 months after they leave.

At Paper Kite, Dana developed Navigating Human, a life lens program across eight areas of life, such as fitness, sleep and nutrition, in which mentors who have come through their own challenges help people see which parts of life are working and which are not.

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