Orla’s Crossroads, the Same Notebook and the Practice of Choosing Your Own Path
What is self-directing? It is the ability to choose your own path — knowing your values, your motivations and your priorities, and making grounded choices that align with them. The clearest way I can show you what that means in a real, busy life is through a story. It completes the story of Orla, which began in What Is Self-Coaching? and continued in What Is Self-Leadership? — a year almost over, a decision everyone assumes is already made, and a notebook that stayed open.
Orla is a character I created — her situation will be familiar to anyone who has ever stood at a WorkLife crossroads where the next step looked obvious to everybody else.
Her first story was ten days: a case built for an interim director role at a kitchen table, in one quiet hour each evening. She got the role. Her second story was her first ninety days: carrying it — with intention, integrity and three lines in a notebook that held.
This story is about the end of the year. And the question nobody thought she needed to ask.
The Email, Again
It arrived on a Tuesday afternoon.
It would.
The permanent director role was being advertised. Applications invited. Interviews in six weeks.
Her managing director mentioned it almost in passing, the way people mention things they consider settled: “You’ll apply, obviously.”
Her team assumed it. Her family assumed it.
Orla assumed it too — for about four days.
Then, on the bus home, she noticed something about the word obviously.
It was doing all the work.
And she had learnt, at a kitchen table a year ago, what to do with an answer that arrives before the question has been asked.
What Orla Learnt from the Email
The obvious next step is still a choice.
A path can be accepted so smoothly you never notice you didn’t choose it.
Obviously is a word worth stopping for.
The Question, Again
When the house went quiet, Orla sat at the kitchen table and opened the notebook.
She turned past a year of pages — the case, the three intentions, the card that had sat against her desk lamp — until she reached a blank one.
At the top she wrote a question she had written once before, with one word added:
What do I actually want — now?
Her first answer came quickly.
The permanent role.
She looked at it, the way she had learnt to look at first answers.
Then she wrote the question beneath it:
Is that mine — or the room’s?
The honest answer was that she couldn’t yet tell. A year of being told you’ll apply, obviously leaves fingerprints on your thinking.
So she went further back. Not to what she wanted.
To what the year had shown her.
What Orla Learnt at the Table
Wants have dates on them. What you wanted a year ago is information, and it isn’t a contract.
Other people’s certainty leaves fingerprints — the page is where you find your own.
When you can’t tell whose answer it is, ask an older question: what has this year shown me?
The Three Headings
The next evening she divided a page under three headings.
What I value.
What gives me energy.
What comes first.
Under the first she wrote slowly, testing each word: building things that last without her. People growing past needing her. Change done with care.
Under the second, the truth surprised her with its clarity: the restructure. Handing problems back with questions and watching people solve them. The handover mindset — she had loved building for handover more than she had loved holding the role.
Under the third: the hour at this table. The people upstairs asleep. Work that fitted a life, rather than a life that fitted work.
Then she did what the headings were for.
She held the permanent role up against all three.
It fitted the first.
Partly the second.
And it sat uneasily against the third — the permanent role, done the way her predecessor had done it, would slowly take the table hours.
What Orla Learnt from the Three Headings
Values written down become criteria.
Criteria turn agonising into deciding.
A path that fits your work but not your life is a path that fits you partly.
The Third Path
Here is where the story turns.
Because the choice, as everyone had framed it, had two doors. Apply for the permanent role. Or return to the old one — which no longer fitted the woman she’d become.
Two doors. Neither hers.
On the third evening, rereading her three headings, Orla saw what they described.
Not the director’s role. Not her old role.
They described the work she had actually been best at all year: leading change. Building it carefully, documenting it, making it reversible, handing it over — and developing the people who would carry it after her.
The organisation had three more years of transformation ahead. Everyone knew it. Nobody owned it.
She turned to a fresh page and wrote at the top:
The role I would choose, if choosing were allowed.
Then she described it. Scope, purpose, what it would make possible — a director of change, moving programme to programme, building for handover every time.
She read it back.
It fitted all three headings.
What Orla Learnt from the Third Path
When neither door fits, you are allowed to describe a third.
Your values, written down, don’t just judge the options in front of you — they can draft one.
Your path is strongest when it is self-defined.
The Second Case
She had made a case to the leadership team before. She knew how it went.
But this time she made the case to herself first — at the table, over four evenings, against her own three headings, with the doubt written down and questioned like any other thought. They’ll say the role doesn’t exist. Half-true. It didn’t exist yet. Neither had her interim year, once.
Then she took it to the room.
She proposed the role. She named what the transformation ahead would cost if nobody owned it, and what it would return if someone did. She recommended they appoint the permanent director — and gave her honest assessment of what that person would need.
The answer took three weeks.
It was yes.
But the yes isn’t the point of this story, any more than the interim role was the point of the first one.
The point is on the last page of that notebook, written the night before her new role began:
I didn’t find my path. I wrote it.
What Orla Learnt from the Second Case
Choose first in the notebook, then in the room.
A self-defined path still has to make its case — grounded choices carry their reasons with them.
The strongest position at any crossroads is knowing you would be fine on more than one road.
What Orla Practised Has a Name
Self-directing is the ability to choose your own path. It is knowing your values, your motivations and your priorities — and making grounded choices that align with them. Your path is strongest when it is self-defined.
And with this story, you have seen all three abilities at the heart of my work — in one woman, at one kitchen table, in a single year.
Self-coaching was the method: the questions that bring clarity, the answers found on a page, acted on.
Self-leadership was how she carried the role: with intention, integrity and ownership, in the everyday moments and the defining ones.
Self-directing was how she chose what came next: values made visible, options tested against them — and a third path written where two doors didn’t fit.
Three abilities. One practice. One notebook that never closed.
At the Crossroads
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 at the crossroads.
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
Listen to the audio version here:
Share These Learning Resources
These resources are designed as short, effective learning experiences—for individuals managing their own development and companies supporting their people’s growth.
If you think this learning resource story would be helpful to others, share it forward.
Discover more from schoolofworklife.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.