Most Mondays: How to Find Peace & Joy at Work, Most of the Time, or What’s the Point?
That is the title of my next book. I’m writing it, live, here on Substack.
Preface
My life changed irreversibly one Sunday afternoon in 2022 in an isolation room during chemotherapy in 10 North, the name given to the haematology unit on the tenth floor of Belfast City Hospital. It was an afternoon of despair. I could not see how I was going to get through the remaining weeks of treatment in isolation, leading up to my stem cell transplant for Mantle Cell Lymphoma. The therapy had been ongoing for months. I had had major setbacks, suspected TB and three weeks out from chemotherapy, when I was rushed to a cardio-thoracic unit at Victoria Hospital because there were four litres of fluid in my left lung and the lung wall was seriously infected. I was terrified of the surgery and had channelled Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now - my saviour throughout - to accept and surrender to the surgery in that moment. But that was comparatively easy, as that moment would pass relatively quickly. But the prospect of facing two or three more weeks of isolation with no visitors and daily multiple blood transfusions following six days of toxic chemotherapy - The Nordic Protocol - brought me to my nadir of anguish. Tolle’s invitation to accept and surrender felt beyond me. ‘Twas all right, for Tolle, what with his overnight catharsis at 29. Feck Tolle, I thought. The rest of us have to struggle with change. But I knew he was right. I had to surrender to the weeks ahead and accept and live in that moment of despair that Sunday afternoon. But what was I supposed to do? Tolle says: accept and act; if you can’t act, accept. So I picked up my phone and started calling everyone I knew who was in trouble—a friend whose child was at death’s door; another whose sibling had died in an accident, and others. The despair passed and so did the Sunday afternoon and weeks, and I am now in my third year of remission from cancer, my third year free from despair about life and what it can bring because I have a process to deal with it, and my third year convinced that unless there’s peace and joy at work because we spend most of our time at it, there’s no point and that peace and joy are possible in every moment that we accept. It’s not easy, but it works. And it’s not taught at school.
Carpe diem…
Ciarán Fenton, Derryallen, Co. Tyrone
January 2026
Table of contents
Endorsements
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction and context
What’s your problem today?
How can this book help you solve that problem?
How I found peace & joy at work instead of pain
How I came to write this book
The structure of the book
Chapter 1: You – How to manage your relationship with yourself
Introduction to principles, tools and models
Feel/Need/Do
Seven career principles
Your career is a unique micro-business
You are not a human capital asset
Parent/Adult/Child mode
Formative years’ decisions and your timeline
Soft career balance sheet
Soft career profit and loss account
Chapter 2: Your career – how to manage the business of your career
Introduction
Your career equity
Your curriculum vitae
Your reputation
Your seven career options
Chapter 3: Your personal purpose, strategy and behaviour
Your career purpose (P)
Your career strategy (S)
Your career behaviour plan (B)
Your career-ism
Managing your career arc
Chapter 4: How to sell yourself at an interview, and your ideas at work
Introduction
There’s no sale without a need
Demonstrate rather than assert
Close the gap
Chapter 5: How to manage a job search
Your seven-step job search plan
Leads
Opportunities
Pipeline
Covering letter
Interview process
Due diligence & contract negotiation
Chapter 6: How to manage your first hundred days in a new role
Introduction
Communicate your purpose
Listen
Demonstrate, don’t assert
Under promise, over deliver
Make small changes in your behaviour
Use Feel/Need/Do with your first Amber/Red relationship
Chapter 7: How to manage your relationships at work
Introduction
Your Relationship Grid
Green Relationships
Amber Relationships
Red Relationships
The 10/20/70 rule of change
Chapter 8: How to manage emails, texts and use of language
Introduction
Emails & Texts
Learn from Lincoln: don’t send that email in anger
Distancing language
Chapter 9: How to manage upwards
Introduction
How to use RAPID for managing your boss
Ask your boss for help – you may get it
Chapter 10: Key relationships at work
You
Family & Friends
Society
Your employer client’s PSB
Colleagues
Reports
The main board
The senior leadership team – the C-Suite
Your boss
Chapter 11: How to lead
Introduction
Creating an environment in which people thrive
Stakeholder needs
Decision-making
Challenging behaviour
Small change soft contracts
Chapter 12: Conclusion
Appendices
About the author
About the publisher
Index
Introduction and context
What’s your problem at work now?
What’s your problem at work now? Is it that you feel that you hate your job, boss or colleagues? Is it that you are frustrated by your career path, progress or direction? Or is it that something has happened - you’ve been fired, made redundant, or came second at an interview - or someone has done/said/written something to make you feel angry, humiliated or stressed? Or are you happy at work and would like it to be even better? Or is that it has more to do with your life outside of work, which is affecting your work, like mental or physical ill-health, relationship issues or grief? I could go on.
When I say now, I mean now, literally this moment. Not what you felt yesterday or last week, but now. Why now? Because there is only now, and now is all there is. If you type that phrase into AI this is what you get:
The phrase “there is only now and now is all there is” reflects the philosophical idea that the past and future are mental constructs, while the present moment is the only reality we actually experience, a concept central to mindfulness and spiritual teachings by figures like Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle, emphasizing living fully in the present rather than dwelling on what’s gone or worrying about what’s to come. It highlights that all our actions, thoughts, and experiences happen in this singular, eternal “now,” which is the only true point of existence.
I recommend that you read Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now (Yellow Kite, 2001) alongside this book because any problem you experience at work or about your work will be experienced in the Now, as Tolle calls it, and nowhere else. The sooner you connect with that principle, the sooner you will find the pace and joy that elude you.
How can this book help you?
Most Mondays, because people dread them. Peace because work is a constant battle. Joy, because joy at work sounds like a sick joke, but isn’t. Work because we must. Most of the Time, because we can’t have it all. And What’s the Point? Because what is the point if we can’t find peace and joy in what we do most of the time, especially if you get life-changing phone calls - news of death, illness, or global catastrophe?
Is it possible to find peace and joy in an environment you can’t control? With people you can’t stand? Doing things you must? Often under extreme stress. What if it were possible to be frequently unhappy at work but at peace with that unhappiness; to find more joy in it than you ever thought possible and to reduce the myriad stresses involved in finding, living and, to use the old cliché, holding down a job?
What steps would you need to take in the dog-eat-dog world of work to find that place in yourself? Whatever stage you are at in your career - starting, mid or end - this book sets out those steps for you - the principles, tools and models to manage your relationships with yourself, employers/clients, and colleagues. The book will give step-by-step advice for most situations encountered at work and in any sector.
How I found peace & joy at work instead of pain
This book will make no sense to you unless you understand how I have eaten my own dog food, found peace and joy in my work after years of tribulation, most Mondays, and earned the privilege of advising you.
I was born with a cowl around my head - then a signifier of a lucky baby, but not for me - on August 12 1960, in Fermoy, Co. Cork, Ireland, the sixth of seven children into what Ailish McFadden calls, in her book Eve in Ireland: Controlling and Silencing Irish Women, 1922–1972 (Liffey Press, 2025), the Taliban years in Ireland. I was educated during primary school by Presentation nuns, so-called, apparently, because of the presentation of the Virgin Mary, by the Christian brothers, many of whom were unchristian and by national school teachers, who formed the backbone of the nascent state’s understandable post-1921 obsession with the education of Ireland’s population, which had been denied one.
In 1972, my parents, like many others under the yoke of the church, believed their child had a vocation from God and they sent me, aged 12, to a monastery, a boarding school named Mount St. Joseph’s in Tullow, Co. Carlow - now a golf resort - to be trained to be a teaching brother - a kind of monk. In 1976, I ran away - by that I mean I refused to return, but it felt like running away - and moved to Patrician College, Ballyfin, Co. Laois, the boarding school my brothers attended, and now the best hotel in Europe according to reviews and hangout of the Kardashians et al. Standards have slipped. Between 1977 and 1982, I studied at University College Cork. I wanted to study English and History, but, by then being chronically compliant, I let myself be talked into majoring in law and accounting, with minors in management and marketing.
After university, I reluctantly - now a theme - took a job as a trainee cost and management accountant at Golden Vale Group in Charleville, Co. Cork, now part of the global food giant Kerry Group Plc. I hated every minute of it then, but over three years, I learned basic accounting skills, which I still value, especially the importance of bank reconciliations. When I did my first bank rec, I proudly showed it to my boss. His name was Tom Lehane, only a few years older than I. ‘Tis not done. Ciarán, he said. ‘Tis says, I. It’s only a few grand out. What’s that in hundreds of thousands? It must be reconciled to the penny, he said. Those few grand could be the net of many large and small posting errors. Did it again, he ordered. I did, probably through the night. All-nighters were common. He was right. A scary number of posting errors, some very large, in the system netted out to a few grand. Thank you, Tom. My first question to any CFO now is, the bank rec done to the penny? I often wonder what the bank reconciliation at The Post Office1 looked like during the scandal.
[Finish autobiographical section…]
How I came to write this book
I say my next book, because The Modern In-house Lawyer (Globe Law & Business, 2023) was my first. It’s a niche title for lawyers-as-leaders on leading and on finding peace and joy at work. I’m a leadership consultant. I help CEOs be the leaders they can be. I stumbled into the world of lawyers, highly trained in everything but leadership, peace and joy. I found I could help them. I liked the work.
I wrote much of The Modern In-house Lawyer in Belfast City Hospital during chemotherapy. It wasn’t the book I wanted to write. This was. But my current publisher was willing to publish it. I was so grateful. I was desperate to distract myself. My publisher can’t consider publishing this book because it doesn’t fit their list. I’m hoping another publisher or agent will notice this draft and consider it for their list.
The structure of this book
[Complete]
Chapter 1: You – How to manage your relationship with yourself
1. Introduction
This chapter covers the principles, tools and models that I use in my one-to-one sessions and in my workshops with senior leaders about managing one’s relationship with oneself. All your relationships at work start with you. [Query: raise ET issue of duality of this]. You are the first party in every relationship. Get that relationship right and you have a strong chance of managing your relationships with others successfully. Get it wrong and you become a major part of your relationship problems. I find that the most popular tool in my programmes in managing their relationship with themselves is ‘Feel/Need/Do’, so I start with that approach. They know intuitively that – as Eckhart Tolle writes in The Power of Now2 – their identity is not bound up their thinking: “You are not your thoughts.” However, due to pressure of their work, they often conflate thinking with their identity. So, I find they like reconnecting with their feelings. One client said to me that the Feel/Need/Do approach changed his life. He said that over the last 20 years he didn’t do feelings. He felt that he had, in his words, to suck up emotional pain. He regretted that he had waited so long to deal with his suppressed feelings. He listed the benefits of the approach, which included lower stress levels; he took on less work; he noticed more often when he felt short tempered; he took more breaks – I suspect he delegated more; he said that he improved his business relationships by telling people about the Feel/Need/Do process and his experiences of applying that approach in his relationships at work.
Introduction to principles, tools and models
Feel/Need/Do
Seven career principles
Your career is a unique micro-business
You are not a human capital asset
Parent/Adult/Child mode
Formative years’ decisions and your timeline
Soft career balance sheet
Soft career profit and loss account
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Yellow Kite, 2001.