Orla’s First Ninety Days, the Same Notebook and the Practice of Carrying Yourself
What is self-leadership? It is the ability to take ownership of your WorkLife — leading it with intention, integrity and responsibility, in the everyday moments and the defining ones.
The clearest way I can show you what that means in a real, busy life is through a story. It continues the story of Orla, which began in What Is Self-Coaching? — a new role, and a notebook that stayed open.
Orla is a character I created — her situation will be familiar to anyone who has ever stepped into a bigger role and discovered that getting it was the easier part.
Her first story was ten days: an email on a Tuesday afternoon, a director role opening up for a year, and a case she built for the leadership team in one quiet hour each evening, on a twenty-five-minute bus ride, in a notebook.
She got the role.
This story is about what happened next.
The Night Before
The role began on a Monday.
On the Sunday night, when the house went quiet, Orla sat at the kitchen table and opened the notebook.
Not to prepare anything. The preparing was done.
She wrote a different kind of question at the top of the page:
What kind of director do I intend to be?
Her first answer came quickly, and she recognised it for what it was.
Effective. Respected. On top of things.
The answer she’d practised for other people.
So she asked the question beneath it.
And how would that actually look, on an ordinary Tuesday?
This answer took longer.
Eventually she wrote three lines:
I ask before I assume.
I decide, and I say why.
I build for handover, not for legacy.
The last line she already knew. She had written it on a bus, under the hardest question on her list, ten days before the interview. Now it wasn’t an answer.
It was an instruction.
What Orla Learnt the Night Before
A role gives you a title. It doesn’t tell you how to carry it.
Self-leadership begins with intention — deciding in advance how you will lead, because otherwise the days will decide for you.
Three lines in a notebook can govern ninety days.
The First Decision
In her second week, the restructure landed on her desk.
Her restructure.
The one she had proposed two years ago and been told wasn’t her call to make. It was her call now. She could implement it exactly as she’d written it — and be twice vindicated.
That evening she took the old proposal to the kitchen table and read it the way she’d learnt to read her own words.
Slowly. Aloud, in places.
And she found something she hadn’t expected.
It had aged.
The woman who wrote it hadn’t known about the supplier consolidation. Hadn’t watched what the last two years had changed. Hadn’t sat in the meetings Orla had sat in since.
Being right two years ago was not the same as being right now.
She kept the heart of the plan and changed a third of it.
In the notebook, before bed:
The point was never to win the old argument. The point is to make the right change.
What Orla Learnt from the First Decision
Ownership means the decision is fully yours — including the decision to disagree with your own past thinking.
Vindication is a feeling. Responsibility is a practice.
When they point in different directions, self-leadership follows responsibility.
Whose Job Am I Doing?
The everyday moments were harder than the defining ones.
In week four, Orla noticed where her afternoons were going.
A supplier issue she could resolve in ten minutes — so she did. A scheduling clash she’d untangled a hundred times — so she untangled it. The work of her old role, reaching for her, comfortable as a worn coat.
Meanwhile, the decisions only she could make waited on her desk until evening.
She caught it on a bus ride, the way she caught things now.
That evening she wrote one question on a card and propped it against her desk lamp, where she would see it every afternoon:
Whose job am I doing right now?
Some afternoons the answer stung.
She started handing the ten-minute problems back — with the question that would help the asker solve them, which took longer than solving them herself.
At first, it cost her time.
By week six, it was returning time she didn’t know she’d lost.
What Orla Learnt at Her Desk
Self-leadership includes leading yourself away from work you’ve outgrown.
The comfortable task is rarely the responsible one.
Handing a problem back with a question develops the person who brought it.
One honest question, kept in view, redirects a hundred small choices.
The Wrong Call
In week seven, Orla got one wrong.
A rota change she approved quickly — too quickly — left the Friday shift short, twice, and two of her team absorbed the cost of it in long days and cancelled plans.
She heard about it the way directors hear about things: late, and softened.
The old instinct arrived first. Explain the context. Note the incomplete information she’d been given. Let it settle quietly.
She took the instinct to the kitchen table and questioned it, the way she questioned everything now.
If someone on my team handled their mistake this way, what would I think of them?
The answer ended the debate.
On Monday morning she said it plainly, to the people who had carried it: the call was mine, it was wrong, here’s what changes.
It took ninety seconds.
The change she made was documented and reversible — the instruction from the first page of these ninety days, keeping her honest when it mattered.
Nobody mentioned it again.
But she noticed, in the weeks after, that people brought her problems earlier — while they were still small.
What Orla Learnt from the Wrong Call
Integrity is what ownership looks like when you’re wrong.
A leader who owns a mistake in ninety seconds teaches a team what safety is.
People decide what to bring you based on what they watched you carry.
Day Ninety
On the evening of day ninety, Orla sat at the kitchen table and turned back to the page from the night before it all began.
I ask before I assume.
I decide, and I say why.
I build for handover, not for legacy.
She read the three lines the way she’d once read her case aloud — listening for what was hers and what was borrowed.
All three had held.
Not perfectly. There were afternoons the card by the lamp had stung, and one Monday morning that had cost her ninety seconds of standing entirely alone in her own decision.
But the woman who wrote those lines had kept faith with them.
Under the old intention, she wrote one new line:
The role didn’t change me. It revealed what I’d already decided to be.
What Orla Learnt on Day Ninety
Titles are given. Leadership is carried.
The everyday moments — the desk, the rota, the ten-minute problems — are where it’s carried or dropped.
Self-leadership is how you carry yourself through it all.
What Orla Practised Has a Name
Self-leadership is the ability to take ownership of your WorkLife — leading it with intention, integrity and responsibility. It is how you meet your decisions, your transitions and your relationships — in the everyday moments and the defining ones. It is how you carry yourself through it all.
Notice something about Orla’s ninety days.
The notebook never closed.
The questions that won her the role — the question beneath the answer, the doubt examined on the page, the line to take to bed — were the same questions that governed how she held it.
Self-coaching was the method.
Self-leadership was what it built.
One practice, carried from a kitchen table into a director’s chair — and it weighed nothing, because it travelled as it always had: one question, one page, one quiet hour at a time.
When the Moment Comes
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.
Whenever your moment comes.
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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