The Life Portfolio: Are You Investing in the Right Things?

This is the transcript of The Refreshing Leadership Podcast episode: The Life Portfolio: Are You Investing in the Right Things?, published on 12th October 2026.

Welcome to Refreshing Leadership with me, Maya Gudka. If I was to show you an investment portfolio where 80% of everything was sitting in one place, was allocated to one type of investment, you’d probably have some natural questions around concentration risk. But what if I showed you a life where somebody’s identity, their sense of success, energy was all sitting in one place, like maybe their work, or it could be their children or their appearance, or a particular social group of friends.

Would we be quite so comfortable with that? Today I want us to adopt the lens of the investment portfolio. And I do want to be clear before we go any further, I am not saying let’s start treating our lives like an investment portfolio. That would be very reductive, but I love the idea of taking an interesting concept from one discipline, that is finance and economics, and asking if we could look at something completely different, like our whole lives, through that lens.

We’re going to look at a few different concepts that will help us figure out where we may need some refresh. And if you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, I really encourage you to go back and have a listen to that, because I will refer to it a few times.

Resource allocation

The first concept is where are you allocating your resources? I don’t just mean where are you putting your money. Money is important, but where are you putting your time, your energy, your attention, your thoughts, and ambition? Where is all that going?

Because we have control over that but we might be running on default. So we can’t always control the return we’re getting at any particular time. I definitely feel that in my 40s I can put a lot of attention into my strength training work and my fitness, but I can’t necessarily control when I get certain results.

I still haven’t got my pull-up, for example. I can only control the time and energy I put into it. So I think it’s useful, this lens, because it separates the energy allocation or the resource allocation from the returns. And we have control over those allocations. And if you did the exercise last week of time tracking, this will be really easy. Time logs are super interesting for that.

Concentration risk

The next concept is concentration risk. And again, this is very interesting in executive coaching - have you put so much of yourself into one thing that if it goes badly, you’re disproportionately exposed? So for my senior leaders, work is often an obvious example, because work can become an identity, not just where you spend your time.

I definitely think for me personally, this was the case a few years ago, probably when I was in much more of a build phase. And that’s why I quite like seeing something like the garden in my time log and how much time it took up, because I will wake up now and be wondering how my tree is doing, especially when it was the drought. That was the kind of first thing that was on my mind, and I quite like that. I think that’s better than worrying about certain things related to work. So being able to diversify there can be helpful.

But here are some of the things that you could potentially be overly concentrated in:

• Your status - that’s all fine, but let’s say you then have something in your industry go wrong and you have reputational risk

• Your income

• Your achievements - and we see that especially in high achievers, where they perhaps have a bad run or things haven’t gone quite how they wanted, and then it can hit them badly

Having a really grounding family, for example, can be a buffer. If you’re a founder of a startup and things get really tricky, having the safety of that can really help balance things out.

Compounding

The next one is one that you will have heard me talk about, and that is compounding.

There may be areas in your life right now which are compounding. It could be the exercise - nothing terribly exciting happening in that, but you do it for five years and you’ve basically rebuilt your musculoskeletal system. Likewise, your primary partner, your marriage. My husband made a few jokes this summer, and it was like, “Wow, this person knows me inside out. They can totally predict how I’m going to be thinking and feeling in this situation, and they can turn it into some really fun jokes.”

Another one for me is the podcast. We’ve been listed as a top executive coaching podcast, and we’re now in that higher bracket of downloads where we’re in the thousands per month. That took a long time and has compounded by being consistent, by putting the work out there.

But it could be that you have some areas that you really do care about, but you’re not investing enough, regularly enough, to allow that compounding to happen. So where are those areas? For me, organising was one of them. That’s why I’m investing small, regular time each day to deep organising.

From a work perspective, having seen my time log, there is stuff that I should be doing for my business that I’m not doing right now. And that’s a little bit of a wake-up call.

Optionality

The final one is optionality. The concept here is having the opportunity - in investment terms, having the cash available such that if an opportunity arises to invest in something or there’s a change in the markets, you’re not so fully committed that you can’t take advantage of it.

Now, I love this concept, and my August was a bit of an example of that. Because I’d cleared it of work, when some juicy work came up that I was very keen to be involved with, I had the space and time to be able to commit to that. So I had optionality, and I think it put me in a better position. We can’t always clear our diaries for an entire month, but we can find ways of making capacity, creating space, and ultimately not filling every single aspect of our lives so full that we don’t have any bandwidth to respond to opportunity. The summer before, I was able to go on a last-minute trip to India with my family, again, because I’d created the space for it.

I’m going to try and have a slightly more relaxed autumn. It’s not entirely within my control because I can’t control my kids and their sporting diaries and their social calendars. But where I have some control, I have already been relatively firm, including having to say no to something that was a little bit difficult to say no to, just so that I am not adding to the rushing around that I know will make me feel extra busy.

And I know that by having space instead, that’s going to create the optionality for me when I then do want to do other things or when things cross my path, either work or otherwise. So I’m really being very intentional about building that in, having learnt and seen what’s possible in the summer.

Have a think for yourselves where you might have that. So it may be that you’re so at capacity with work and family that you don’t have the option to then take advantage of certain social things that come up, for example. So how can you build in some optionality there?

This episode has moved us from the time tracking, actually seeing how we spend our time, to then analysing it through the lens of a portfolio. And I hope that has been fun and has offered you some takes on where you may have some opportunities to just slightly rebalance things, rejig things - and that could have a huge impact for you.

If you do manage to make any changes as a result of this, please let me know. I would love to hear about it. You can drop me a note on LinkedIn. And if you think this would be helpful for somebody, please do send them this episode. And then you can have a chat with them about it - that’s always a great way to turn these things into reality.

I look forward to connecting with you next time, where we’re going to take this one step further and think about our ideal week. Bye bye.

Enjoyed this episode? Catch up here:

Watch on YouTube | Listen on Apple Podcasts | Spotify

About Maya

Maya Gudka is an executive coach specialising in C-suite career progression and leadership development. She works with senior leaders in major organisations on strategic career planning, executive presence, and building sustainable influence. Maya hosts The Refreshing Leadership Podcast, which ranks in the top 2% of podcasts globally and has nearly 300 episodes exploring the challenges faced by ambitious professionals.