Character-Driven WorkLife Stories That Shift How You Think
WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Issue Five
This Week:
Seven Stories
One about getting clients without selling — a consultant who forgot a conversation beside a table of sandwiches, and the client it brought him eight months later.
One about following up after a networking event — an architect whose honest, careful email was rewritten four times and never sent, dying in a drafts folder.
One about building relationships that last — an adviser who knew a thousand people slightly and nobody well, until he needed one he could trust.
One about a compliance leader who discovered a book on courage that showed him he’d been armoured all along.
One about a man his own boss for eight years, facing an obvious yes and the question that finally moved his business.
One about the beginning of a nine-month experiment in designing a next WorkLife chapter around how to live.
One about a technologist discovering that knowing the answer isn’t the same as knowing how to make it useful.
One WorkLife Question:
What Choice Honours Your Character Traits?
One new Professional Self-Coaching resource
Create Trust and Transform How You Lead — Professional Self-Coaching for Turning Your Natural Character Traits into Leadership Others Rely On
WorkLife Storytelling
The stories we tell are one of our most powerful ways of expressing who we are. They reveal our character, values and beliefs, our thinking and individuality — and help us speak our truth in ways that create connection and credibility.
Each WorkLife Storytelling resource helps you find, shape and tell the right story at the right time — in interviews, conversations, presentations, networking and the many moments when your story matters.
THE STORIES
How Do I Get Clients Without Selling?
A Networking Story About the Conversation He Forgot — and the Client It Brought Him Eight Months Later
Kofi was an exceptional consultant — twenty years of being the one they sent when something mattered, work that sold itself once someone had already hired him. Then he went independent, the diary thinned, and he caught himself doing the thing he’d never had to do before: pitching, explaining why he was worth it, hearing the lift in his own voice. Then a woman he’d met once, eight months earlier, rang out of nowhere — still able to repeat an idea he’d shared beside a table of sandwiches. A story about the difference between selling yourself and being understood, and why one honest conversation travels into rooms you’ll never enter.
Read and Listen → How Do I Get Clients Without Selling
How Do I Follow Up After a Networking Event?
A Networking Story About the Email That Sat in Drafts for Three Weeks
Farida was good in the room — curious, interested, an architect who asked real questions and left every event feeling something had actually happened. Then she got home, and nothing had: forty cards in a drawer, and a follow-up email she rewrote four times and never sent, polite and true and completely worthless. Then an email arrived from someone she’d met two days earlier, and it did the one thing hers never had. A story about why the follow-up that gets answered is the one that proves you were listening — and what it costs to let a good conversation die in a drafts folder.
Read and Listen → How Do I Follow Up After a Networking Event?
How Do I Build Professional Relationships That Last?
A Networking Story About Knowing Everyone Slightly and Nobody Well
Haruaki knew everyone — twenty-two years in-house, three years advising boards, a contacts list running to more than a thousand names. Then one Sunday he needed a specialist he could trust with something delicate, and scrolled for forty minutes: he knew where they’d all worked, and couldn’t tell you how a single one of them thought. Except one — a woman who’d asked him a real question at an emptying seminar three years earlier, and had rung him four times since. A story about the difference between collecting people and understanding them, and why fifteen real relationships beat a thousand names.
Read and Listen → How Do I Build Professional Relationships That Last?
How a Non-Fiction GuideBook Develops Courage and Transforms Leadership
A Story About Choosing Vulnerability Over Armour in Crisis — Featuring Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
Sid was an exceptional compliance team leader — reliable, dependable, three years of clarity built on directives and standards. Then a restructure put twelve people and a screen between him and everything that had always worked, and a book he’d approached with scepticism showed him he’d been armoured all along — mistaking the appearance of certainty for strength. A story about the gap between the leader you believe yourself to be and the experience you’re actually creating, and the courage it takes to close it once you’ve seen it.
Read and Listen → How a Non-Fiction Guide Book Develops Courage and Transforms Leadership
Self-Coaching When You’re Your Own Boss: Who Challenges Your Thinking?
A story about working for yourself, one seemingly obvious decision and learning to challenge your own thinking
Fionn had been his own boss for eight years when a long-standing client offered him a substantial six-month project. Good fee. Good client. Familiar work. Saying yes seemed obvious. But for almost two years, Fionn had been saying he wanted to take his business in a different direction — and every sensible decision he made seemed to keep him exactly where he was. Then he changed the question. A story about self-coaching when you’re your own boss, the decisions nobody else is responsible for challenging and why sometimes the thinking that most needs questioning is the thinking that seems completely reasonable.
Read and Listen → Self-Coaching When You’re Your Own Boss: Who Challenges Your Thinking?
Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter
Prologue: I’ve Been Building a Publishing Practice
For the past few weeks, I’ve been building a publishing practice. At the same time, I’ve found myself thinking increasingly about the next chapter of my WorkLife — how I want to work, write, learn, travel, connect and make more room for life. This is the beginning of a nine-month experiment in discovering what that next chapter might look like, guided by a question I’ll be exploring by living it: How do I design my next WorkLife chapter around how I want to live?
Read and Listen → Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter
Professional Development: Are We Developing The Right Things?
What Happens When The Work Around You Changes?
Segun is highly capable at what he does. But as the technology company he works for grows, his role begins to change. He finds himself spending less time solving technical problems and more time helping other people understand them. Then, in one meeting, he discovers that knowing the answer isn’t always the same as knowing how to make it useful.
Read and Listen → Professional Development: Are We Developing The Right Things?
THE WORKLIFE QUESTION
What Choice Honours Your Character Traits?
This week I sat with Leon and this question — a man whose careful, thorough, methodical nature was suddenly being called a liability in a company moving fast. His manager wanted speed over perfection, traditional processes out the window, and Leon faced a choice: abandon the character trait that had always defined his effectiveness, or hold to it in a culture that wasn’t yet ready to value it. He held. And in week four, when the prototype crashed, his risk assessment sat open on his laptop — every problem, clearly outlined, four weeks earlier.
Read and Listen → What Choice Honours Your Character Traits?
The stories above are free to read. If you’d like to take the work deeper, there is one new Professional Self-Coaching resources this week.
Professional Self-Coaching
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.
Each Professional Self-Coaching resource is created for one important professional moment. One purpose. One challenge. One outcome. Distilled from more than twenty years of professional coaching, writing and practice.
THE RESOURCE
Create Trust and Transform How You Lead — Professional Self-Coaching for Turning Your Natural Character Traits into Leadership Others Rely On
You are already someone people rely on — a way of working so natural to you that you’ve never thought to name it, and have quietly called “just the job.” Create Trust and Transform How You Lead takes you, step by step, from recognising that trait to leading through it — the strength you’d been dismissing as the baseline anyone should meet — so you can create trust, lead as yourself, and draw out the same overlooked strengths in the people around you.
Explore → Create Trust and Transform Leadership
The Thinking Behind the Work
School of WorkLife has been built on stories — I believe they are our most powerful mechanism for teaching, learning and communicating who we really are. Through character-driven narratives and structured reflection, WorkLife Stories helps you navigate your challenges, develop your professional capabilities and articulate your own journey — supporting self-coaching, self-directing and self-leadership across a working life.
Work With Me: Individual WorkLife Coaching, 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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