A Story About Working Out, on Your Own, Why Your Expertise Isn’t Landing
Can I coach myself into being understood? Yes — because the reason your expertise isn’t landing is something you can work out for yourself. What you need is a way of looking at your own work from the outside, and the questions that let you do it.
Let me tell you a story about a man who sat at a kitchen table and found it.
Bruno is a character I created — his situation will be familiar to anyone whose work is good, and gets thanked for, and changes nothing.
Good Work, Going Nowhere
Bruno was thirty-four, a data analyst at a charity.
It was a mid-sized organisation working with families in temporary housing, and Bruno’s job was to make sense of what they were doing: who they reached, what changed for those people, where the effort went and what it produced. He was good at it.
He produced quarterly reports. They were clear, well-structured, honest about what the data couldn’t say. They went to the senior team and the trustees, and they were received with genuine appreciation. Thanks Bruno, this is really helpful.
And then decisions would get made that his reports had quietly argued against. Not in defiance of them. Alongside them. A programme would be extended because it felt right, when the numbers had been saying for a year that its effect faded after month four. A new project would be launched with real conviction and no way of knowing whether it worked.
He’d sit in those meetings with the report in front of him, the one everybody had thanked him for, and think: it’s all in there.
By his third year he had begun to feel like an expensive habit the organisation had got into. They wanted the reports. Nobody used them to think with.
The Evening He Sat Down With It
The change came on a Tuesday evening, after a trustees’ meeting that had gone the way they went.
He was not, by nature, someone who dwelt on things. But he’d got home, made dinner, and found himself still going over it — and rather than let it sit there souring, he did something he’d never done about his own working life. He got a notebook and treated it like a problem.
He was, after all, an analyst. When something wasn’t working, he didn’t complain about it, he took it apart.
The first question he asked himself: when has my work actually changed something? Not been appreciated. Changed something.
It took him a while. Then he found it. Eighteen months earlier, a caseworker had stopped him in a corridor and asked why the numbers for one particular estate looked so different. He’d been on his way somewhere, and instead of giving her the short answer he told her the whole thing: that he’d been chasing it for a fortnight, that the figures showed families staying in the service far longer than anywhere else, and that he’d assumed for most of that fortnight it was a data error. It wasn’t. They were staying because they were being referred back in, again and again, by a different route.
And when he told her that, she said: “That’s because there’s nowhere for them to go afterwards. We send them out and they come back because the next step doesn’t exist here.”
He had the pattern. She had the reason. Neither of them had both until that conversation. The programme design changed a month later.
He’d forgotten it entirely. It was the only time his work had genuinely altered anything.
The second question: when has good work gone nowhere? That was easier. Three years of quarterly reports, thanked for and set down. And when he made himself look at what the corridor conversation had that the reports didn’t, the answer was uncomfortable and simple. In the reports, he gave the findings. In the corridor, he’d given the road — the fortnight of chasing, the wrong assumption, the moment it turned. And because she could see how he’d got there, she could tell him where he was wrong.
The third question: why does this matter to me? He wrote several things and crossed them out. What he was left with was this: every number in his reports was a family in temporary housing, and he was the only person in the organisation whose whole job was to know whether what they did actually helped those families. Being thanked for a report that changed nothing was, when he let himself think about it, unbearable.
Three answers. About an hour and a half. Nobody had helped him.
What Bruno Was Actually Doing
He didn’t have a name for it that evening, but it has one.
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.
That is exactly what Bruno did at his kitchen table. He didn’t wait for a mentor, or a course, or a manager perceptive enough to notice. He took the thing he was good at — looking at a problem honestly and taking it apart — and pointed it at his own working life.
And look at what it produced. Not encouragement. Three true stories. A success he’d forgotten he had. A failure that had been hiding in plain sight for three years, disguised as a good report. And a passion he’d never once put into words. How he works when it goes right, what he learnt when it didn’t, and why any of it matters to him.
Bruno already had everything he needed to be understood. He’d just never sat down and looked.
Where This Skill Comes From, and Where It Goes
What Bruno turned on himself that evening is the practice underneath everything at School of WorkLife. And it doesn’t begin with being understood, or with any single professional challenge. It begins with three deeper questions — the ones beneath all the others.
Can I guide myself through this? That’s self-coaching: asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Can I choose my own direction? That’s self-directing: deciding where you’re going, rather than waiting to be steered.
Can I be someone worth following? That’s self-leadership: becoming, for yourself first, the person whose judgement you’d trust.
Those three are the ground everything else grows from. Making your expertise land is one of the things they make possible. But the practice is the same practice, wherever you point it: you ask, you answer honestly, you act.
What He Did With Them
Bruno didn’t rewrite his reports. He changed what he brought to the room.
At the next senior team meeting, the extension of that same programme was on the agenda again. He didn’t present findings. He told them what he’d told the caseworker: the fortnight, the assumption that had been wrong, and what she’d said in the corridor about there being nowhere for families to go afterwards.
Then he said what he thought it meant for the programme in front of them. That extending it would keep families in the service longer without changing why they kept coming back. That the money would be better spent on what happened after.
The chief executive asked him what he’d do instead. It was the first time anyone had asked him that. He said he didn’t know yet, but that the caseworkers would, and that he’d like to find out with them. The meeting ran twenty minutes over. The extension was deferred, and Bruno spent the following month talking to people who had never been asked.
He came back in March with something he could not have written on his own: a proposal built out of what the caseworkers knew, with the numbers underneath it. It went through.
And it became how he worked. He stopped going to the caseworkers after the analysis and started going before it — telling them what he was chasing, asking what they saw. They knew things no dataset held. Within a year he could not have said where his work ended and theirs began, which was the point.
And a year on, a new analyst arrived at a partner organisation and asked Bruno, over coffee, how you get anyone to take any notice. Bruno asked her three questions. When has your work actually changed something? When has good work gone nowhere? And why does this matter to you?
He watched her find her own answers, the way he had, at a table, on her own.
Can You Coach Yourself Into Being Understood? What Bruno’s Story Shows
You can work this out yourself. Bruno had no mentor and no course. He had a notebook, three questions, and an hour and a half.
Look for the time it changed something. Not when you were thanked. When something was different afterwards. That’s the story that shows you how you work when your expertise actually lands.
Then look at the difference. Bruno gave findings in his reports and gave the road in the corridor. Once he could see that, he knew what to change.
Ask why it matters to you. The answer is what makes it worth doing differently, and it’s the thing people trust when they hear it.
Then turn the questions outward. The same three questions work on anyone. Asking them is how you find out what someone actually needs, which is where partnership begins.
Your three stories hold the whole of it. A success, a failure and a passion, found by your own questions, at your own table. They are how you are understood, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to find them.
You Already Have What It Takes to Be Understood
Everything Bruno needed was already in three years of work he’d thought was going nowhere. The success he’d forgotten. The failure hiding inside a good report. The passion that had made him take the pay cut in the first place.
Yours are there in the same way — and so, in all likelihood, is the ability to find them, whether or not you have ever thought to sit down and try.
Continue the Work
And if you want to go deeper — recognising your three stories and the journey inside each; telling them so people enter your thinking rather than receive your conclusions; and turning the same questions outward, to draw out the thinking of the people you work with — that is what my new Professional Self-Coaching resource is for. The thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work, placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Get the Partnership — Professional Self-Coaching for Turning Your Expertise Into Genuine Working Relationships Tell the Three Stories That Make Your Insight Land, So People Engage With It, Not Just Receive It
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
Listen to the audio version here:
Share These Learning Resources
These resources are designed as short, effective learning experiences—for individuals managing their own development and companies supporting their people’s growth.
If you think this learning resource story would be helpful to others, share it forward.
Discover more from schoolofworklife.com
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.