Openlife

Martin von Haller Groenbaek on bike
Martin von Haller Groenbaek on bike

VONHALLER – OpenLife is my personal blog. I am Martin von Haller Grønbæk, a Danish IT-lawyer living with my wife Jeanne and two sons Vilhelm and Jens in Admiral Gjeddes Gaard in the historic center of Copenhagen.

The blog is a work in progress and ever evolving Actually, my first blog post on the Openlife blog was way back 5 February 2002!

The name refers to one of my memes – the concept of Openness – as this relates to his

Jeanne and Vilhelm

private life. Openness is great principle to base a private and professional life on, but what its limits? “When I mean open, I mean open in sort of closed way”.

Openlife contains posts in Danish and in English on issues that I find relevant to involve other people than myself. This is an ever tricky exercise. One the one hand, you want to show that “you eat your own dog food” when it comes to practicing openness by revealing information about your personal life.  On the other hand, many blogs and social media profiles excels in narcissism and misunderstood belief that other people finds your trival and boring life somehow interesting.

On area, where I think that I can actually help not just myself, but other people, is by being open about the diabetes that struck me in 2005. Being open in this regards helps my motivation for improving me condition and it makes it much easier for me to ask for related flexibility in my professional life when people know upfront that I have diabetes. Also, I hope that other people hit by diabetes will be able to get inspiration from the very optimistic tone that I strike whenever I confront and deal with my condition.

Jens at about 18 months
Jens at about 18 months

I will try to write more about my way to live healthy with diabetes at http://www.vonhaller.dk/openlife/health_matters/

My work is an IT-lawyer brings me in contact with a lot of people all the time. Constantly, I have to consider conflicts of interests, not just in relation to the professional rules of ethics that I as a Danish lawyer must observe, but also more fundamentally with respect to the trust that I have to earn and maintain from clients, business partner and in other professional as well as private relations.

eanne og Martin von Haller Groenbaek
Jeanne og Martin von Haller Groenbaek

Openness and transparency also seem to be the best remedy in this respect. I blog repeatedly and post to social medias about who I meet and talk to. And on this portal I have posted an extensive CV at http://www.vonhaller.dk/about-martin/curriculum-vitae/

At http://www.vonhaller.dk/openlife/social-me/ you can access all my social media profiles.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed from VONHALLER – Openlife from http://www.vonhaller.dk/category/openlife/feed/