Author Archives: Carmel O' Reilly

Donovan was thirty-four, a developer, and the kind of essential that goes unnoticed. The team depended on him; few of them knew how much. In the meetings that set the direction, he might as well have been furniture. At his review, his manager offered the feedback warmly — “you need more presence, speak up more, be more visible” — and Donovan couldn’t do a thing with it. “Be more visible” wasn’t a step you could take; it was a result with the actual work missing from the middle. So he took it home and did to it what he’d do to any badly written spec. He sat down at his kitchen table and started breaking it down — and in doing it, he discovered self-coaching: asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.

A new resource in Professional Self-Coaching: Shape the Culture Around You. Some of the most valuable work in any organisation never appears on anyone’s objectives — noticing who’s left out, connecting the right people, creating the conditions in which collaboration grows. It’s easy to dismiss as merely being helpful. This resource takes you from recognising the instinct you’ve been dismissing to shaping the culture around you with it — naming the character traits beneath it, learning to create the conditions for connection rather than forcing it, making the value of your work recognised, and helping others recognise the same strengths in themselves.

Yuuki was a service designer — the person whose fingerprints were on everything and visible on nothing. His job was to design how a whole service held together: the path a customer travelled, the places it flowed and the places it caught, the way work owned by five different teams was supposed to add up to one seamless experience. When he did it well, it disappeared — a service that works is one you never notice. In a company that measured contribution in deliverables, his work was the connective tissue between all of it, and connective tissue shows up on no one’s dashboard. He’d started to wonder whether the absence of anything to point at meant there was less there than he’d thought. He was wrong — he’d just been measuring his value by the wrong yardstick.

Lucia had been offered an exciting new role. The work interested her. The opportunity stretched her. The travel gave her pause. So she began gathering perspectives — from her manager, colleagues, friends and her partner. Each gave her something useful to consider. But the more perspectives Lucia gathered, the less clearly she could hear her own. Then she began asking different questions. What followed is a story about self-coaching, seeking perspective without losing your own and learning to trust yourself to listen, question and decide.

Delmar was a chef de partie — fast, precise, calm when the tickets piled up and the heat came on. He’d been in kitchens since he was nineteen and knew his station better than anyone. But he’d started to feel restless, and stuck with it. Above him were sous chef and head chef — and he’d never quite pictured himself in either. Those were the shouters, the ones who ran things. He was a cook, and he loved the cooking, and he assumed stepping up meant leaving it behind. So he stayed where he was — never questioning the one thing that would have changed everything: that the title had stopped describing him years ago.