Character-Driven WorkLife Stories That Shift How You Think
WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Issue Nine
A Personal Note
Welcome to WorkLife Stories.
This week marks a month into my nine-month experiment, and I’m beginning to see how my next WorkLife chapter might take shape.
There’s writing, new work, a student partnership, coaching and, alongside all of that, the question of how I create the freedom to travel and experience more of the world. I don’t have it worked out yet, but the pieces are beginning to belong together.
Writing about what it actually means to coach yourself reminded me that awareness is only the beginning, and the questions we ask ourselves are what help us move forward. Writing about how we know when we’ve changed brought me back to how growth often shows itself quietly, in the way we respond. And writing about capabilities that outlast the job that held them reminded me that what we carry into a new chapter was never owned by the old one. I hope this week’s stories help you notice what’s already taking shape in your own working life.
Wishing you a good WorkLife week.
Remember: Every working life is a story. Some chapters are told. Some are waiting to be.
Keep writing your WorkLife story,
Carmel
This Week:
Seven Stories
One about work that goes unnoticed — a teaching assistant whose ability to bring children others had given up on back to life had become so much a part of the job that she had stopped seeing it as something of value.
One about why clients don’t come back — a structural engineer with twenty-six years of experience who had spent her career delivering faultless work, until one unexpected conversation made her see the difference between completing a task and becoming someone a client wants to return to.
One about getting people to really listen — a science teacher whose students were perfectly pleasant and entirely elsewhere, until exhaustion led him to tell a lesson backwards and discover what actually made them lean in.
One about productive disagreement — a collaborative leader who was good at making everyone feel heard, but began to question whether being heard was the same as thinking together, when another meeting dissolved into positional warfare.
One about what it actually means to coach yourself — a management development facilitator who was thanked by a participant who wished he could coach himself like that, and who then began asking what self-coaching really involves beyond reflection and awareness.
One about eight months to my next WorkLife chapter — a month into the experiment, and beginning to see how writing, new work, a student partnership, coaching and the freedom to travel might begin to belong in the same life.
One about how we know when we’ve changed — a woman who didn’t think she had changed in the way Professional Development usually suggests, until a difficult conversation showed her that her response was no longer the one she would once have had.
One new Story Lesson — How Vision and Motivated Abilities Survive When Your Industry Doesn’t: A Story About Discovering That Your Deepest Capabilities Were Never Owned by the Job That Held Them
One new Professional Self-Coaching resource —Prove the Value You Create: Professional Self-Coaching for Showing That Your Natural Character Traits Are Worth the Investment
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 piece 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
Why Does My Work Go Unnoticed? — A Story About Being Seen for the Value You’ve Been Creating All Along
Padma was a teaching assistant, eleven years in, and — on paper — support staff. Yet children others had given up on came alive in her care, and nobody could account for why. When it worked, everyone was pleased and nobody asked how. Padma had decided years ago that this was simply the nature of the job — support staff support, and the credit goes to the front of the room. She was wrong about why her work went unseen, and it had nothing to do with the work itself. This new WorkLife Story follows what happened when Padma finally saw her own work clearly.
Read and Listen → Why Does My Work Go Unnoticed?
Why Do Clients Take My Work and Never Come Back? — A Story About the Difference Between Delivering Work and Being Worth Returning To
Inga was a structural engineer, twenty-six years in, and had spent all of them being right. A developer would send a brief, she would produce a faultless report, the invoice was paid — and then nothing, until the next time someone needed the same thing done. At fifty-two, with twenty-six years of judgement in her, she was still being commissioned task by task, the way she had been at twenty-eight. She had come to assume this was simply what consulting engineering was. This new WorkLife Story follows what happened when a delayed meeting left a client with an hour to fill, and he asked her something nobody had asked in twenty-six years.
Read and Listen → Why Do Clients Take My Work and Never Come Back?
How Do I Get People to Really Listen to Me? — A Story About What Makes People Lean In Rather Than Sit Politely
Kojo was in his third year of teaching science, and knew his subject properly. His board work was clean, and when he was observed the feedback was good. Yet in front of him was a room of fifteen-year-olds who were perfectly pleasant and entirely elsewhere — copying what he wrote and forgetting all of it. The advice was to make it fun, and he did, and the same absence settled back in. He had begun to wonder whether he was in the wrong job. This new WorkLife Story follows what happened on a Friday when he was too tired to teach the lesson properly, and told it backwards instead.
Read and Listen → How Do I Get People to Really Listen to Me?
How a Psychology Book Develops Productive Disagreement and Transforms Collaboration — A Story About Building Collective Intelligence Through Non-Fiction
Keiko was known as a collaborative leader — the programme director who brought people together and prided herself on building consensus. Her stakeholders praised her ability to make everyone feel heard. Yet the same conflicts kept resurfacing, and meetings produced more heat than light. She was beginning to suspect that making people feel heard and helping them actually think together were not the same thing. This week’s WorkLife Story follows what happened when a kickoff meeting collapsed into two hours of positional warfare, and she went looking for something that might explain why.
Read and Listen → How a Psychology Book Develops Productive Disagreement and Transforms Collaboration
Self-Coaching: What Does It Actually Mean to Coach Yourself?
After delivering a management development programme, Kathleen was thanked by one of the participants. Then he said something that stayed with her: “I wish I could coach myself like that.” Driving home, Kathleen found herself asking a different question: What does it actually mean to coach yourself? A story about the difference between reflection and self-coaching, why awareness is only the beginning and how asking ourselves better questions can help us learn from our working lives.
Read and Listen → Self-Coaching: What Does It Actually Mean to Coach Yourself?
Eight Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter
A month into my nine-month experiment, I’m beginning to see how the next chapter might take shape. There’s writing, new work, a student partnership, coaching and, alongside all of that, the question of how I create the freedom to travel and experience more of the world. I don’t have it worked out yet. But one month in and the next chapter is beginning to write itself.
Read and Listen → Eight Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter
Professional Development: How Do We Know When We’ve Changed?
Nancy doesn’t think she has changed in the way people usually mean when they talk about Professional Development. Then, in a difficult conversation, she notices that her response is different from the one she would once have had. Her story explores how we recognise the changes that working life has made in us.
Read and Listen → Professional Development: How Do We Know When We’ve Changed?
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 Vision and Motivated Abilities Survive When Your Industry Doesn’t — A Story About Discovering That Your Deepest Capabilities Were Never Owned by the Job That Held Them
There may be a fear, spoken or not, that if your industry changed beyond recognition you would lose not just your job but yourself. And it’s possible you’ve mistaken a structure for a foundation. How Vision and Motivated Abilities Survive When Your Industry Doesn’t follows Dora, an award-winning features editor whose newspaper closed after sixteen years — until a single weekend revealed that her abilities had never belonged to the industry at all, and that the collapse had exposed her foundation rather than destroyed it.
Explore → How Vision and Motivated Abilities Survive When Your Industry Doesn’t
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
Prove the Value You Create — Professional Self-Coaching for Showing That Your Natural Character Traits Are Worth the Investment
There’s a particular kind of frustration that has nothing to do with whether you’re good at your work — it comes from having the capability to do something well and being kept from using it. A budget cut, a mandated template, a compressed timeline: the conditions won’t let your capability operate, and the work falls short of what you know it could be. It isn’t self-doubt; you know you could do better, you just can’t yet prove it. Prove the Value You Create takes you, step by step, from recognising that your capability is being prevented rather than lacking to proving it’s worth the investment — telling a limitation from a constraint, counting what the constraint actually costs, and letting evidence make the case in the terms your organisation already uses to decide what to invest in. Because a value that isn’t visible yet is not a value that isn’t real.
Explore → Prove the Value You Create
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.
Listen to the audio version here:
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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