Character-Driven WorkLife Stories That Shift How You Think
WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Issue Six
This Week:
Seven Stories
One about a scientist discovering that the questions a coach asks might be questions he can learn to ask himself.
One about getting people to listen to your ideas at work — a researcher whose good findings met polite attention, until he saw a colleague present the same thing differently and watched the room lean in.
One about speaking up in meetings without feeling like you’re interrupting — a man who knew what was going wrong but waited for a gap that never came, until he saw someone reshape a decision with a short story.
One about leaving a secure professional career and discovering what that experience revealed about his values.
One about a professional beginning to ask different questions about her own development.
One about the possibilities opening up as I explore what else my WorkLife could become.
One about connecting the stories of our working lives to our professional development — and what they can reveal about our learning, identity and the work we are creating.
One WorkLife question:
How Could Story Structure Enhance Experiences?
One Story Lesson
How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities — A Story About Discovering How Existing Technical Abilities Can Serve a Completely Different Vision
One Professional Self-Coaching resource
Discover Your True Direction — Professional Self-Coaching for Recognising Where Your Natural Character Traits Truly Belong
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
Can You Coach Yourself Into Better Professional Relationships?
A Networking Story About What a Coach Would Actually Give You — and How to Give It to Yourself
Brendan is a research scientist who finds himself responsible for partnerships and licensing conversations. He is excellent at his work, but struggles in the rooms where his work now needs to connect with other people. Then a coach tells him what she would actually do with working him — ask questions, challenge his first answers and hold him to account. Brendan decides to try doing it for himself.
Read and Listen → Can You Coach Yourself Into Better Professional Relationships?
How Do I Get People to Listen to My Ideas at Work?
A Story About Getting a Seat at the Table When Your Ideas Deserve One
Sam is a UX researcher whose work gives him a direct line to what is actually happening with the people using his company’s product. But in strategy meetings, his findings are met with polite attention before the conversation moves on. Then he watches a colleague present a similar finding differently — and sees the room lean in.
Read and Listen → How Do I Get People to Listen to My Ideas at Work?
How Do I Speak Up in Meetings Without Feeling Like I’m Interrupting?
A Story About Getting a Seat at the Table When You Already Have the Answer
Tomasz knows when decisions are heading in the wrong direction, but he waits for a gap in the conversation that never comes. Then he watches someone else speak at the moment a decision is about to be made — not by interrupting, but by telling a short story that gives the room something it needs to hear.
Read and Listen → How Do I Speak Up in Meetings Without Feeling Like I’m Interrupting?
How Leaving Security Behind Reveals Your Origin Story
A Story About Professional Hardship, Authentic Values, and What You’re Willing to Sacrifice
A successful lawyer leaves the security of a prestigious career after a case makes him question what his professional skills are actually for. What follows is difficult, but the experience begins to reveal something that success had kept hidden — the values and motivations underneath his working life.
Read and Listen → How Leaving Security Behind Reveals Your Origin Story
Could Self-Coaching Change Professional Development?
A story about a professional, a question she couldn’t answer and what changes when we learn to direct more of our own development
Imani has access to workshops, programmes and development conversations, but when her manager asks what she wants to work on, she answers with familiar words: leadership, confidence, strategic thinking. Then a moment in a meeting makes her ask a different question: What is my working life trying to teach me?
Read and Listen → Could Self-Coaching Change Professional Development?
Creating My Next WorkLife Chapter
What Else Could My Work Become?
I’ve been exploring what else my work could become and where it could go. This week, that has meant creating student project opportunities, approaching publications with my writing and thinking, and exploring how professional self-coaching could reach people through organisations. There are other possibilities too. I don’t know yet where any of them will lead, but I’m interested in finding out — by writing, walking, thinking and doing.
Read and Listen → Creating My Next WorkLife Chapter
What Is WorkLife Storytelling?
Professional Development Through Our Stories — How Experience Becomes Meaning, Learning and Identity
Niamh is asked a deceptively simple question about the story of her working life. As she looks more closely at the anecdotes she already knows how to tell, she begins to see what lies beneath them — and how they connect to her professional development, learning and identity, and to the person she is becoming.
Read and Listen → What Is WorkLife Storytelling?
THE WORKLIFE QUESTION
How Could Story Structure Enhance Experiences?
This week I sat with Annie and this question — a trainer who had been given a five-layer framework but never the conditions to use it. Entertain. Educate. Elevate. Enlighten. Evaluate. When Annie began using all five layers simultaneously, she saw what story structure could create — not simply better content, but a different kind of learning experience. One that gave learners multiple ways in, helped trainers bring their own strengths to the work, and changed what the organisation’s training could achieve.
Read and Listen → How Could Story Structure Enhance Experiences?
The stories above are free to read. If you’d like to take the work deeper, there’s a new Story Lesson and a new Professional Self-Coaching resource this week.
Story Lessons
Each Story Lesson explores a real WorkLife moment where something important becomes visible — a conversation shifts, an assumption is challenged, or a different way of thinking begins to emerge.
From that moment, the lesson unfolds into a structured learning experience that helps you understand what happened, why it mattered, and how to apply the insight to your own WorkLife.
THE STORY LESSON
How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities
A Story About Discovering How Existing Technical Abilities Can Serve a Completely Different Vision
There may be a set of skills you’ve quietly decided are neutral — capabilities that could serve any project equally. And it’s possible that belief is exactly what’s keeping brilliant work feeling hollow. How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities follows Rod, a senior systems architect who discovers that the same expertise, pointed at a different purpose, feels like entirely different work — and reveals the vision his abilities had been waiting to serve all along.
Explore → How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities
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 SELF-COACHING RESOURCE
Discover Your True Direction — Professional Self-Coaching for Recognising Where Your Natural Character Traits Truly Belong
There may be a part of your working life you’ve quietly called not the real thing — the side project, the volunteering, the work you do simply because you love it. And it’s possible that’s exactly where the most authentic part of you comes alive. Discover Your True Direction takes you, step by step, from recognising where your traits come most alive to designing a direction that honours the whole of who you are — not by choosing which part of you is real, but by recognising that all of it is.
Explore → Discover Your True Direction
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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These resources are designed as short, effective learning experiences—for individuals managing their own development and companies supporting their people’s growth.
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