After she stopped striving for perfection, Rebecca Anderton-Davies found a new way to live… and now she’s sharing her methods. Photo / Getty Images
After she stopped striving for perfection, Rebecca Anderton-Davies found a new way to live… and now she’s sharing her methods.
When Rebecca Anderton-Davies set her sights on a career in investment banking, she was clear about the sacrifices she’d have to make. Progressing up the career ladder to become managing director by the age of 37 required 15-hour days and weekend working, but she loved the stimulating work, the thrill of the trading floor and the financial rewards.
“I was good at navigating a big, complex organisation, and getting stuff done within it,” says Anderton-Davies, sitting back in the glossy, open-plan living space of her home in South West London.
“I loved the certainty of my income and the earning trajectory that lay ahead of me.”
She and her husband Nick, who works for a think tank, started a family when she was in her thirties (their boys are now 4 and 2). They agreed he would be lead parent – with added help from a nanny – while she focused on her career.
This was the era of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and it seemed to confirm that the only way to get ahead as a woman was to try harder, assert better and demand more. “I loved that book. It absolutely influenced me,” she recalls.
But in 2014, Anderton-Davies’s high-speed life was derailed. She was hit by a white van while cycling to work and broke her collarbone. As she recovered, she found herself reassessing her hectic life.
“The trading floor can be a high-stress environment, and I was in a place where I was feeling that stress and holding on too tightly to my career as a result. It was the only thing giving me positive feedback about what I could achieve, and so when I misstepped – forgot to loop in the right senior person to a client escalation or pissed off the head of trading at a huge client – it felt so calamitous that I was often paralysed by fear.”
As part of her rehabilitation from the accident, she took up yoga and decided to share her progress on Instagram. She couldn’t even touch her toes at the start, and her compelling “before” and “after” photos quickly attracted thousands of followers. It led to a yoga book about self-practice for people who think they are too busy and stressed to fit it in. This week, Anderton-Davies is publishing her second book, Shifting the Dials. Written during lockdown when she had a toddler at home and was also pregnant, it sets out a new formula for avoiding burnout.
It isn’t about reinforcing the idea that you can have it all. Anderton-Davies points out that the World Health Organisation now officially recognises burnout as a workplace phenomenon. And for her, the idea of work-life balance is a “toxic mental model” that leaves us more prone to combustion and burnout.
“There’s no easy version of what we’re all trying to do, which is be happy and be more fulfilled,” she says. “The world is hectic and when you add parenting, multiple jobs, cost of living crisis and all of that stuff, it’s hard. I don’t think there are enough hours in the day for anyone.”
The only way to do it, she says, is by “shifting the dials”. The Dials philosophy is one she lives by, and has decided to share.
The broad idea is that you have a dashboard aligned to your values, and on that are your dials, be they work, hobbies, family, socialising. The levels on your dials are then turned up and down according to what’s happening in your life.
Living this way means Anderton-Davies never feels guilty when work means she skips a big social engagement, or, like right now, she doesn’t get on her yoga mat for weeks on end.
“I don’t think I’m saying anything new, but this is about giving language and mental models to people for what they’re already doing, which will allow them to be a bit more intentional and deliberate [in how they operate].”
Right now, for example, she says her children are never dialled down too low – she spends 1 hour and 45 minutes a day with them, which includes meal times. Their books and games are spread out in the family living room.
She fits drop-offs and dinner around the office and logging in on her laptop at night. But friends, socialising and yoga are turned right down to close to zero. “That’s OK, because I know it won’t be like that forever,” she says.
Her daily schedule is carefully planned out. She rises at 6.30am and – having chosen a house with the train station directly in front – has a 30-minute commute to Goldman’s offices in Blackfriars, allowing time to take in a podcast, catch up on emails and have a brisk walk as she crosses the bridge.
She leaves work about 4.30pm: “So I can do a couple of hours with the kids, then I’ll often work in the evenings.”
Bed is 10.30pm, though somehow she also manages to read and watch all the latest shows; she’s working her way through Succession and The Last of Us and recommends The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson as a “life-changing book”. Often the television will be on while she works in the evening: “I’ve worked on a trading floor for 15 years. I like noise to do work.”
There’s no doubt that she manages in no small part thanks to her full-time, live-in nanny. However, “she’s going away for a month tomorrow to go travelling, because that’s important to her”, says Anderton-Davies, who will not get a stand-in while the nanny is away. “Being able to afford that sort of childcare is a massive privilege and it shouldn’t be. Everyone should be able to get the support they need.”
Nick works more flexible hours than she does, and he also does the cooking: “I make a mean cheese sandwich for the kids.” But that’s about the limit.
Out the back of the house is astroturf. There are no plants in the house: “I can keep cats and children alive. I cannot keep a plant alive. With respect for gardeners, I cannot have any more things to look after right now.”
As easy as it would be to dismiss Anderton-Davies as someone living a rarefied existence, particularly in a cost of living crisis, she says she’s proven that you can have a formidable career while pursuing other passions successfully, and most importantly, not burning out.
“Women, in particular, have to give themselves permission to have a life outside of their responsibilities,” says Anderton-Davies.
She says her side-hustle has “caused some ripples” at work, and at an early stage, well-meaning advisers had advised her to take down the Instagram account, but she found the outlet helped her to weather the demands of work better. “Instead I drew some boundaries around what I would show online and did the hardest thing possible – I gave myself permission to do my life and my work this way. My way.”
When she started her career, nobody around her spoke about the other aspects of their lives.
“When you get into it you realise there are a lot of people doing it like this, but no one is public about it,” she says. “People prioritise work or their families. They’re doing all these dials and adjusting when it’s needed.”
She says she has also become a role model for younger employees, by being visible in having a life outside of the long hours. Surely some of the old guard at Goldman might not have such a forward-thinking take? Not so. Having given one senior partner the “two-minute” version of the Dials recently, “he walked past me the other day and said ‘I’ve been telling everyone about the Dials, it works so well!’”
Shifting The Dials by Rebecca Anderton-Davies is published by Yellow Kite, April 27
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