Learning From the Moment When the Work Was Right, But the Conditions Weren’t
12 Rooms of a WorkLife Room 1 When the Room Wasn’t Right.
I’ve been thinking about the next chapter of my WorkLife and what I am learning as I build it.
Not just the things that go well.
The things that don’t go well too.
The experiments that work.
The ones that don’t.
The decisions I get right.
And the moments that leave me wondering what I might do differently next time.
I’ve started thinking of these as twelve rooms — twelve places to pause and look more closely at something happening in my WorkLife.
This is the first.
Trying Something New
I’ve developed a series of live online classes called Book Club Books Live Story Classes.
The idea is simple: stories from literature — both fiction and non-fiction — can illuminate our own WorkLife experiences.
The classes bring together literature, story, reflection, structured thinking and practical application.
One of the classes I developed is The Atticus Practice: How to Navigate Difficult WorkLife Situations with Integrity and Courage, inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
At its centre is Nicole’s story — a successful sales director who begins to question the quiet cost of delivering results she no longer fully believes in.
Through her experience, the class explores judgement, responsibility, integrity and moral courage, and introduces the ATTICUS framework as a practical way of thinking through difficult WorkLife situations.
Then someone booked the class.
Preparing For The Moment
I rehearsed.
I thought through the structure.
I worked through the material.
I prepared myself to deliver it live.
But there was something else I was testing too.
I haven’t been an enthusiastic adopter of Zoom.
I’ve held back from jumping on the Zoom bandwagon simply because it became the accepted way of working.
But I have been thinking about what it might mean for my own WorkLife.
Could live online work give me the freedom to work from different places?
Could I create something that could reach people without requiring me to be in the same physical place as them?
The booking gave me the opportunity to find out.
I was ready to try.
Or at least, I thought I was.
The Room I Was In
It was the middle of a heatwave.
I was working from my bedroom.
That wasn’t obvious on camera — I had made the setting look professional.
I decided to stand for the class because I thought that would look and feel more professional.
The window was closed because I didn’t want outside noise to interfere.
I didn’t have a fan on for the same reason.
And I hadn’t closed the blinds because I wanted to make the most of the natural light.
Everything seemed reasonable.
Individually.
Taken together, perhaps not.
The class began.
When Things Changed
For most of the session, I was doing what I had prepared to do.
Then, towards the end, I began to feel faint.
I tried to carry on.
Then I realised I couldn’t.
I sat down.
That didn’t help.
I felt worse.
Eventually, I had to end the call a few minutes early.
The person who had booked was understanding.
Afterwards, I emailed to apologise and offered to run the remaining part of the session.
I never heard back.
That was disappointing.
But it wasn’t the only thing I took away from the experience.
The Work Wasn’t The Problem
I’ve thought quite a lot about what happened since.
Was the class wrong?
I don’t think so.
The material is good.
The idea behind the class is good.
The ATTICUS framework works.
The combination of literature, reflection and practical application still feels like a valuable way to explore difficult WorkLife situations.
What didn’t work was the way I had created the conditions for delivering it.
I had thought about the content.
I had thought about the technology.
I had rehearsed the class.
I hadn’t thought enough about the room.
There were technical things to learn too. The timing needed to be adjusted, and the material needed some further refinement for a live format. Those are things I can work through. They are part of developing the class rather than reasons to abandon it.
What The Room Taught Me
It is easy when trying something new to concentrate on whether the idea works.
Does anyone want it?
Can I create it?
Can I deliver it?
Will someone book it?
But there is another question.
What conditions does this work need in order to work well?
That question hadn’t occurred to me in quite the same way before.
If I want a WorkLife that allows me to work from different places, I need to think beyond whether something can technically be delivered online.
I need to think about the environment in which I am working.
How I sit or stand.
How long I can sustain the delivery.
The temperature.
The light.
The sound.
The space.
And perhaps most importantly, whether the way I am working allows me to do my best work.
Not Every Experiment Needs To Be A Success
I could look at this experience and decide that live online classes don’t work.
But I don’t think that’s the right conclusion.
I tried something.
Someone booked it.
I delivered most of it.
Something went wrong.
I learned from it.
That’s an experiment.
The class may work better as a recorded experience.
It may work live with different conditions.
It may need a different format.
I don’t know yet.
And I don’t need to decide immediately.
One of the things I’m learning as I think about my next WorkLife chapter is that not every experiment needs to produce an immediate answer.
Sometimes it produces a better question.
The Room Wasn’t Right
There is something else I’ve been thinking about.
The irony of this particular experience isn’t lost on me.
The Atticus Practice is about navigating difficult WorkLife situations with integrity and courage.
And when my own difficult moment arrived, I had to make a judgement.
I had to acknowledge that I couldn’t continue.
I had to take responsibility for what was happening.
And I had to stop.
Perhaps that is part of the work too.
We often think of professional courage as carrying on.
Pushing through.
Meeting the expectation.
Delivering what we promised.
But sometimes courage is recognising that something isn’t working and making a different decision.
What I Will Do Next
I’m not abandoning the class.
I’m not abandoning the idea of working online.
And I’m certainly not abandoning the possibility of creating a WorkLife that gives me more freedom about where and how I work.
But I will change the conditions.
I will test the physical environment as carefully as I test the technology.
I will think about how I want to deliver rather than simply how I can deliver.
And I won’t assume that because something can be done from anywhere, it can be done well from anywhere.
The work was right.
The room wasn’t.
And perhaps that is what this first room has taught me.
When we’re creating something new in our WorkLife, sometimes the thing that needs changing isn’t the work.
It’s the room we’re trying to do it in.
Connect and Continue
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