An author’s story about looking back at years of writing, recognising what experience has taught her and discovering what happens when she asks herself different questions.
Can self-coaching help us see what we already know? I had been writing for years before I began to ask myself that question.
The Email
The email arrived after I had been writing for years.
An editor wanted me to write an article.
I had approached the publication myself. I had found the editor, written the pitch and sent it.
So the email wasn’t a surprise.
I had been hoping for it.
But when I read it, I felt something I hadn’t quite expected.
I wanted to look back.
Not at the article they wanted me to write.
At everything that had come before it.
Years Of Writing
By then, I had written a lot.
I had spent years developing my own body of WorkLife thought — writing books, creating story-based resources and developing practical approaches to self-coaching, self-directing and self-leadership across a working life.
I had written when nobody was waiting for the next piece.
I had written because there was something I wanted to explore.
Sometimes the writing came easily.
Sometimes it didn’t.
Sometimes I didn’t fully understand the idea until I started writing it. The writing helped me work out what I actually thought.
I learned to stay with it.
I learned to ask what I was really trying to say.
I learned that a story could sometimes reveal something an explanation couldn’t.
And I kept going.
The Question I Had Been Asking All Along
There was something else I had been doing throughout those years.
I had been coaching myself.
Not deliberately every time I sat down to write.
But the practice was there.
I questioned my own thinking.
I challenged my first answers.
I looked for what I hadn’t noticed.
I returned to experiences and tried to understand what they might be telling me.
That is what self-coaching has always meant to me.
Not having somebody else supply the answer.
Being willing to ask yourself the question that takes you beyond the answer you already have.
I had spent years writing about that.
Now I found myself applying the same practice to my own writing.
What Had All Those Years Given Me?
The question was what the writing itself had taught me.
So I started looking.
I looked at the pieces I had written over the years.
I could see the development.
Not as a neat progression.
More like layers.
Ideas I had once struggled to explain had become clearer.
Stories had become a more natural way for me to communicate.
I had become more particular about words.
I had learned when an idea needed more work.
I had learned when a piece was finished.
And I had learned something else.
Writing had changed the way I thought.
What I Had Learned Without Being Taught
I had never set out to become a writer through a conventional route.
I had learned by doing the work.
But I didn’t think of myself as someone who had somehow learned without guidance.
My experience was more complicated than that.
I had read.
I had listened.
I had absorbed.
I had experimented.
I had made mistakes.
I had learned from other writers.
But the work itself had been my teacher too.
Every piece gave me another opportunity to practise.
Every completed piece gave me something to build on.
The years accumulated.
And because they accumulated gradually, I hadn’t always stopped to notice what they were producing.
Then The Responses Started Coming
The first publication response was followed by another.
Then another.
Some pieces were accepted.
Some editors expressed interest.
Some asked me to write.
The work was beginning to travel beyond the places where I had been publishing it myself.
And that gave me something new to think about.
For the first time, I could see my work through someone else’s response to it.
That gave me a different kind of evidence.
An editor, who didn’t know the years behind the work, could encounter a single article and see something in it.
That made me wonder what I might be able to see if I looked at the whole body of work with the same attention.
Looking Back At The Writer
I went back again.
This time I was looking for evidence of development.
What had changed in the way I worked?
What had become instinctive?
What had I learned to notice?
What had I become more confident about?
And where had that learning come from?
The answers were in the work.
They weren’t hidden.
They were there in the differences between one piece and another, in the ideas I had stayed with, in the subjects I kept returning to and in the way my writing had evolved.
I realised that the body of work wasn’t simply a collection of things I had written.
It was also a record of how I had developed.
What Self-Coaching Had Done
That was the part that interested me most.
Self-coaching hadn’t given me the answer.
The writing had already given me the evidence.
Self-coaching had given me a way to question it.
That distinction matters.
We can live inside our own experience for years without stepping back far enough to examine what it contains.
We can know what we have done without necessarily recognising what doing it has developed in us.
Sometimes a new experience gives us the reason to look again.
For me, that experience was hearing from editors who wanted my work.
It made me turn back towards the work I had already done.
The Question I Am Left With
I began this part of my writing life by sending pitches.
I am still sending them.
There will be more articles to write and more editors who may or may not want them.
I don’t know where this particular part of my WorkLife will lead.
But I do know something I didn’t quite articulate before.
Years of work leave evidence.
Not just of what we have done.
Of what we have developed while doing it.
And perhaps that is one of the things self-coaching can help us recognise.
Not an answer someone else gives us.
Not a new quality we suddenly acquire.
Something our own experience has been showing us, perhaps for years, if we are willing to ask the questions that make us look closely enough.
Sometimes the work is already telling us.
We just haven’t asked it yet.
What might your own years of work be showing you that you haven’t yet asked yourself?
Continue the Work
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