Ten Days, a Notebook and the Practice of Finding Your Own Answers
What is self-coaching? It is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn. The clearest way I can show you what that means in a real, busy life is through a story. It begins with an email, a kitchen table and ten days.
Orla is a character I created — her situation will be familiar to anyone who has ever faced a defining WorkLife moment with a full life and limited time.
Orla
Orla had ten days.
The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon.
Her director was moving on. The role would be covered internally for a year, and anyone interested should prepare a case for the leadership team.
Orla read the email three times.
She had run operations through two restructures and a systems migration. She knew the work. She knew the organisation. She knew she could do the job.
What she didn’t know, sitting at the kitchen table that evening, was how to show other people.
Ten days.
Not ten empty days.
Ten days of work, family responsibilities — a life already full.
What she actually had was one quiet hour each evening after everyone had gone to bed, a twenty-five-minute bus journey each morning and evening, and whatever thoughts arrived between them.
Years earlier, she’d worked with a coach.
She remembered the questions more than the answers.
Questions that never accepted the first response.
Questions that kept going until something deeper appeared.
She didn’t have the time to work with a coach now.
So she opened a notebook.
Day One
Across the top of the first page she wrote:
What do I actually want from this role?
Her first answer filled only half a line.
Progression. Recognition. A seat at the table.
She stopped.
That wasn’t wrong.
It just wasn’t true enough.
She remembered what her coach would have done.
He wouldn’t have nodded.
He would have asked another question.
So she did.
And what would that give me?
This answer took much longer.
Eventually she wrote:
The authority to make the decisions I’ve already been quietly making.
She looked at the sentence.
That felt different.
Not because it sounded impressive.
Because it sounded like her.
Before closing the notebook she wrote one final question to carry with her.
What is the case that only I can make?
She didn’t answer it.
Not yet.
Some questions need to stay open.
What Orla Learnt on Day One
The first answer is usually the answer you’ve practised for other people.
The second answer is often the one you’ve been carrying for years.
Self-coaching begins when you stop accepting your first answer and start becoming curious about the one beneath it.
Day Two
Orla woke before her alarm.
The open question had been working while she slept, and something had surfaced with her.
She wrote it on the pad she’d left by the bed:
Nobody else has run change here from the inside and been proven right about it.
Two lines. Ten seconds. Then breakfast, lunchboxes, the bus.
On the bus she turned the sentence over. By the time she reached work it had weight.
That evening at the kitchen table, the doubt arrived.
It usually does, the moment something starts to feel possible.
They’ll say I’ve no director experience.
She almost closed the notebook.
Then she did with the doubt what she’d done with her first answer.
She wrote it down.
And beneath it, she wrote a question:
Is that the whole truth?
She sat with it in the bath, after the hour was over.
The answer came quietly.
Half-true.
She lacked the title.
She held the experience.
Her line to take to bed:
Where have I already done the director’s job?
What Orla Learnt on Day Two
In your head, doubt sounds like a verdict.
On the page, it becomes a claim — and claims can be questioned.
Self-coaching treats doubt as material, not as an ending.
Day Three
Three examples were waiting when she woke.
The restructure she’d steered when her director was seconded. The migration decisions that had landed on her desk. The proposal she’d made two years ago that had been right, two years too early.
She wrote them before they dissolved. A line each.
The walk to the bus stop put them in order of strength.
But nothing came to her on her journey.
That evening she didn’t wait for the answers to arrive.
She sat at the table and simply began — and in the free flow of the writing, they came.
The evening hour wrote all three out in full.
When she closed the notebook, she noticed something.
She hadn’t found anything new in three days.
Everything on those pages had been there all along.
The questions had simply gone and got it.
What Orla Learnt on Day Three
Your evidence already exists.
You don’t create a case — you retrieve one.
Some answers come in seams.
Others come through the pen.
A question held through an ordinary day — waking, walking, waiting — does the retrieving for you.
Day Four
Now she had to shape it.
At the top of the evening’s page she wrote a different kind of question.
Not about her.
What does the leadership team need to hear?
It changed everything on the page.
Two examples she was proud of came out — they mattered to her, but they carried nothing for the case.
What stayed was what answered the question the room would silently be asking: can she carry this?
Her line to bed:
Proud of it and useful to them are different tests.
What Orla Learnt on Day Four
Self-coaching includes asking questions on behalf of the people you need to reach.
What do they need to hear? is a coaching question you can ask yourself.
Selection is a form of respect — for them, and for your strongest material.
Day Five
A stuck evening.
Every honest account of ten days includes one.
The page she wrote, she didn’t like. The harder she pushed, the worse it read.
So she stopped pushing.
She closed the notebook early and went to bed with no line at all.
In the morning she walked the long way to the bus stop.
Somewhere on that walk, without being summoned, the problem introduced itself:
She’d started in her own voice.
Somewhere in the middle pages, she’d shifted into writing in a voice that wasn’t hers.
Performing a candidate.
Instead of reporting what she knew.
She typed one line into her phone at the bus stop:
Stop auditioning. Start reporting.
What Orla Learnt on Day Five
Stepping away is part of the practice, not a failure of it.
Four evenings of written questions had trained her mind to keep working — through sleep, baths, buses and long walks.
This time she hadn’t even known what to ask.
Her semi-conscious asked it for her — and delivered the answer on a walk.
Day Six
That evening she gathered the pages — the want, the evidence, the shaped case — into one continuous whole.
Then she read it aloud at the kitchen table.
Quietly. But aloud.
The ear catches what the eye forgives.
She could hear exactly which sentences were hers and which were borrowed from some imagined idea of how a director speaks.
The borrowed ones went.
What remained was shorter.
And stronger.
She read it aloud once more.
This time it sounded like the woman who had written the authority to make the decisions I’ve already been quietly making.
What Orla Learnt on Day Six
Reading your words aloud is the fastest honesty test there is.
If a sentence embarrasses you in an empty kitchen, it will not survive a full room.
Sounding like yourself is a strategy — the only one no other candidate can copy.
Day Seven
She turned the table around.
That evening she sat, in her mind, where the leadership team would sit — and wrote every question they might ask her.
The hard ones first.
Why you, and why now?
What would you do in the first ninety days?
What happens when the permanent director arrives and disagrees with your changes?
The last one made her stomach drop.
Which is how she knew it belonged at the top of the list.
What Orla Learnt on Day Seven
The questions you hope they won’t ask are the ones to write first.
Written down, the unknown becomes a list.
Lists can be prepared for. Dread can’t.
Day Eight
She didn’t script answers.
She’d learnt that lesson years ago, watching a colleague recite his way through a presentation until one interruption collapsed the whole thing.
Instead, under each question, she wrote the point of her answer.
One line she could stand on, whatever exact words came on the day.
Under the hardest question — what happens when the permanent director arrives and disagrees with your changes? — she wrote:
Everything I change will be documented and reversible — I’m building for handover, not for legacy.
Not a final answer.
A place to stand.
Then she used the bus.
Each ride, she drew one question from the list and answered it in her head.
Fresh. Without notes.
The first attempts wandered.
On every bus ride, the answers arrived steadier — because she wasn’t remembering words.
She was speaking from points she knew were true.
What Orla Learnt on Day Eight
Prepare points, and trust yourself for sentences.
A point can flex to any wording the moment requires.
A script has only one way of going right.
Day Nine
One full run.
She stood in the kitchen and said the whole case aloud, start to finish, once.
Then she stopped.
She wanted to run it again. And again after that.
Instead she wrote the kindest instruction in the whole notebook:
Nothing new tonight.
She read her opening once. Her closing once.
And went to bed early.
What Orla Learnt on Day Nine
Preparation has a finish line.
Crossing it twice doesn’t make you readier — it makes you tireder.
Rest is not the opposite of preparation. It’s the last step of it.
Day Ten
The room.
Orla spoke for twenty minutes without notes.
Not because she had memorised anything.
Because everything she said was something she had already found, tested and chosen on the pages of a notebook.
She wasn’t performing a case.
She was reporting one.
When the hard questions came — and they did, including the one that had made her stomach drop — they were questions she had already answered on a bus.
Orla got the role.
But here is the part worth sitting with.
The woman in that room on day ten was the same woman who had read an email on day one.
She was simply more available to herself.
Nine evenings. Nine bus rides. A bath, a pad by the bed, one long walk.
That was the whole apparatus.
What Orla Learnt on Day Ten
Confidence in a room is built in the days before the room.
You are your own resource — your experience, your values, your knowledge of the situation. Nobody holds these but you.
Self-coaching is how you reach them.
What Orla Practised Has a Name
Self-coaching is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — through stable times and times of change and uncertainty. It is asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Notice what Orla’s coach had given her, all those years earlier.
Never answers.
Questions. In an order that took her deeper than her first response. And the patience to let her own knowledge surface.
The answers had always come from Orla, because the answers were always hers to give.
Which means the essential material of coaching was in her possession all along.
At a kitchen table, with ten days on the clock, she completed the logic.
She learnt to draw it out herself.
Especially When Time Is Limited
It would be easy to read Orla’s ten days and think she succeeded despite having so little time.
Look again.
One hour holds one question properly. A bus ride holds one answer. A line on a nightstand pad holds a thought safely until morning.
Self-coaching doesn’t wait for the clear week that never comes.
It lives in the seams of a full life — which is exactly where your defining moments will find you.
What deepens the practice is the quality of the questions. That is what my work exists to provide. Each Professional Self-Coaching resource from School of WorkLife captures the thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks I would have brought to hours of one-to-one coaching work — developed through more than twenty years of professional coaching, writing and practice, and placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Especially when time is limited.
Continue the Work
Explore Professional Self-Coaching from School of WorkLife — each resource created for one important professional moment: [link to the Professional Self-Coaching collection]
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel
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