Dame Helena Morrissey - Daily Telegraph
The City financier and mother of nine says Pilates, family meals and relaxing Baywatch binges safeguard her physical and mental wellbeing in the “happy chaos” of daily life
“I would love to have a radical shake-up in the idea that you have to work every hour you are given to be successful at your job,” declares Dame Helena Morrissey. As the mother of nine children (Fitz, Flo, Tuppy, Millie, Clara, Oki, Theo, Cecily and Bea, aged 27 to 10) and the Head of Personal Investing at Legal & General Investment Management - the UK's first £1 trillion investment fund – Morrissey is always striving for a healthier work-life balance, shoehorning Pilates classes and “brisk walks in my trainers” in between leading high-pressure meetings or fashioning Peter Pan outfits for school plays. She worries that today’s work culture of ‘presenteeism’, 24/7 emails and stress is eroding personal and family health.
“It is better than it was but there was a sense when I started in the City that you were not contributing if you were leaving the office at a reasonable time,” she continues. “Long hours are not good for anybody and not good for risk-management. People burn out. I worry all these efforts about wellbeing are being siloed, so businesses have a talk about mental health and wear green ribbons, then the next day you are under pressure not to slack off. I’d like to see a different approach to what represents a successful business, to include a healthier and happier workforce.”
The 53-year-old – who lives in Notting Hill with her husband Richard (a Buddhist meditation teacher and work-from-home dad) and their four youngest children – has already initiated positive progress in working norms, with her 30% Club campaign raising the number of women in FTSE100 boardrooms from 12.5 to 32.6 per cent. But when we chat over a bento box lunch (which she dubs “our little airline meal”) in a L&G meeting room overlooking the City, she insists wellbeing should be central to this wider reinvention of work culture.
“You ignore your health at your peril. And that is one of the biggest challenges for me: over-busyness, or over-tiredness. But if you don’t make time for your health then you end up not having the stamina or strength to take on the challenges. I regard health as the bedrock: you can’t really be good at your job or good at home if you are feeling fragile. I see health in all its forms - physical, mental, spiritual, by which I mean a sense of purpose and meaning in life, family, and financial, in the sense of reducing stress – as connected. It’s a bit like that saying: ‘You are only as happy as your unhappiest child.’”
As a comprehensive school student who went to Cambridge, a female pioneer in a male-dominated industry, and a pro-Brexit campaigner in the City, Morrissey is used to shattering the mould. Now she wants to see more job shares, flexible hours, and a redefinition of work as an activity, not a place. “We formally work in an agile way so most of my team work one day a week from home,” she explains. “A report said only 11 per cent of jobs that pay over £20,000 were advertised as flexible but you wish it was the default. I’d love to see more job shares, not just for women coming back to work, but because it is a smarter way to work: two brains are better than one and you gain complementary skills. We shouldn’t characterise these as things that suit women – it should be what works for men and women.”
Ring-fencing time for exercise and contemplation is essential for her own productivity. “I joke that my best ideas come in the shower or on the tube or when I have just woken up and I am feeling full of vim and vigour. I get the same mental space at Pilates, which I do three times a week. It sounds cliché at my age, but it has made me stronger and calmer. It involves weights so it is not as gentle as it sounds. I have had - and breastfed - nine children and it takes its toll. Everyone says you’re going to get osteoporosis – I don’t believe there is any ordained inevitability about that but I do want to do what’s right. I don’t have Duchess of Cambridge posture but it makes you conscious of yourself and gives you confidence.”
Morrissey is relaxed company, playfully pointing out how workers in the building opposite seem to forget that glass is transparent and nonchalantly get changed for the gym in full view of the City. But she admits she finds it hard to unwind. As a child she would study hard and then “collapse” in the school holidays and she carried the same intensity into the City. “We all have an amazing aptitude to push to the finishing line, like athletes, but it is to our cost in the long term. My husband is brilliant at telling me if I sometimes seem overwhelmed, which is inevitable and I don’t feel ashamed to admit that.”
This is why some headlines - Supermum, Queen of the City, The Woman Who Has It All – trouble her. “People probably don’t want to see me in my sweatshirts looking bedraggled but I would like to see more honesty about the dark times in our life or that time we decide to have a duvet day. I feel a strong sense of purpose in life but we all need an anchor so you don’t feel buffeted by the perfectionism of the modern world.”
Family time is one of those anchors for Morrissey. If she misses a family supper she feels “destabilised”. “Even if we play a game of croquet in the garden, all these chats come out over it. You talk. So if I find myself thinking: have I got time to do this? I say: Yes, I do.” At weekends she gets on her bike to take her daughters to horse-riding classes. Being outdoors brings back echoes of her childhood in Alverstoke, Hampshire, when she would run around the beach after school. “I still have the sense that if you are outside, you are free. To see broader expanses is very good for you mentally.”
Her relaxation routine during the working week involves watching Modern Family and Friends with her children. “We are really enjoying Baywatch too – the old ones,” she confesses. “I was thinking it was all beautiful bodies running around but there are fun stories and it is done in quite an innocent way compared to shows today. For a laugh – and this was my daughter’s idea – we all dressed up in red Baywatch swimsuits on our summer holiday. We went on a boat trip and the crew thought we were mad.”
To the befuddlement of parents nationwide, she insists having a large family has helped her mental wellbeing. “If you have a lot of children, a certain degree of chaos comes with that, so you learn that you can’t sweat the small stuff. We try to get the framework right and create good habits within that. People think I must be incredibly well-organised but sometimes you just have to let it go.”
Morrissey says her diet is “healthy but not fastidious.” She works best when she is fuelled but not too full; she is now a pescatarian as she finds meat slow to digest. On a typical morning she has yoghurt and fruit for breakfast. For lunch she often ventures to Pret. “I am a creature of habit so I like the crayfish and avocado salad and a bag of chocolate almonds as my pick me up.” In the evening her husband usually cooks Chinese, Mexican or Japanese food. “We eat about 6.30 and then watch TV together. I have a glass of wine - I’m not a puritan. But I like the community aspect of eating together. My children say their friends often eat in their bedrooms which seems a poor result for everybody.”
In her teens she suffered from anorexia – an experience which helped when one of her own children became overly concerned with their weight. “I remember the irrational feeling of standing on the scales weighing five stone and thinking: I am fat. In my case it was about not being comfortable growing up and now we have more pressure on young people to pursue this identikit Instagram face which does worry me. It is tempting as a parent to want to ‘fix’ the child but the person has to want to get better. I don’t have all the answers but being able to talk helps - with a parent, a sibling or someone outside the home. I have some children who are very good listeners and they are often the problem-solvers.”
Morrissey appeared in the headlines recently when Clarissa Farr, a former high mistress at St Paul's Girls' School, suggested the “personal beauty” of Morrissey and Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg made their leadership more “acceptable”. By apparently undermining their talent and hard-won success, the claim drew a swift backlash. “Sorry to be so disappointing in the flesh!” she laughs. “I was dragging the laundry basket and looking a bit hangdog and my husband said: ‘Well, you always have your beauty.’ I was confused because I hadn’t seen the news. I did feel annoyed because I was invited to give a so-called ‘inspirational talk’ at the school while she was there, so I thought: well, thanks for that. But my husband said, quite reassuringly: ‘The thing is, you are not even that attractive...’ So now I haven’t got brains or beauty?”
Given her lifelong efforts in promoting diversity, she finds the whole debate unhelpful. Although the lines between health, appearance and beauty can become blurred, she distinguishes between the energising benefits of good health, the sense of pride and competence transmitted through smart self-presentation (“at least looking like you’ve got it together”), and any negative fixation on beauty, which remains irrelevant to success. “The problem is a) we don’t want people thinking that if they don’t look a certain way they won’t achieve success, and b) we already have women in particular fretting about being too thin, too fat, too fashiony, too frumpy, too old, too young, and this just adds to it. We need to look away from the mirror and out to the world, rather than this naval-gazing stuff.”
It’s a more nuanced conclusion than some might have offered. “My husband started saying, ‘Well, lots of ugly people are very successful in business…’” she recalls in mock horror. “I said: ‘No! We’re not going down that route! All your ideas are wrong this morning.’”
A Good Time to be a Girl by Helena Morrissey (RRP £14.99). Buy now for £12.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
(C) Daily Telegraph
Link: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/dame-helena-morrissey-financier-mother-nine-can-feel-overwhelmed/