How could story structure enhance experiences? In this episode of The WorkLife Question, I sit with Annie and the question — exploring what the five-layer framework created for herself, for her learners, for her fellow trainers and for the organisation. And why story structure doesn’t just improve content. It creates a different kind of experience entirely.
Author Archives: Carmel O' Reilly
Could Self-Coaching Change Professional Development?
Imani’s organisation took professional development seriously. There were programmes, workshops, resources and regular development conversations. But when her manager asked what she wanted to work on, Imani’s answers — leadership, confidence, strategic thinking — didn’t tell her very much about what she actually needed. Then a moment in a meeting prompted a different question: What is my working life trying to teach me? What followed is a story about self-coaching, professional development and what changes when we become active participants in directing our own learning.
Introducing How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities
Introducing How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities — telling Rod’s story — a senior systems architect who believes his expertise is neutral — until the same skills, pointed at a community clinic rather than a trading platform, feel like entirely different work. The lesson follows him as he separates the abilities that genuinely move him from the ones that merely occupy him, clarifies a vision specific enough to decide by, and brings the two into one direction — and shows how the expertise you already have can come alive in service of a vision that’s truly yours.
How Do I Get People to Listen to My Ideas at Work?
Sam was a UX researcher, and very good at finding out what was actually true. His research was a direct line to how the product really worked — exactly what the strategy meetings needed. In practice, he watched the glaze: the polite nods, the eyes going unfocused, the “thanks, Sam, really useful,” and the room deciding what it had been going to decide anyway. He’d started to wonder if he was just bad at presenting. Then he watched a colleague present the same kind of finding — and the room leaned in.
How Leaving Security Behind Reveals Your Origin Story
The complete lesson follows Jed’s full journey — including the case that finally proved what his legal skills were for, the pattern he recognised when he looked back at three earlier moments he’d rationalised away, and the question he eventually learned to ask that no one had ever put to him — and shows how you can use the same process to recognise your own period of hardship as origin story material — and begin telling the story of your authentic professional purpose with the clarity that only sacrifice can provide.
Can You Coach Yourself Into Better Professional Relationships?
Brendan was thirty-three, a research scientist, and had just been made responsible for something he’d never done: partnerships, licensing, rooms full of people from the business side. He’d been to three events. At each one he’d explained his work with total accuracy and watched faces politely close. So he found a coach — a good one, expensive, booked solid for three months. She rang him anyway — she had no space for him, and asked what the problem was regardless — and told him what she would actually do in those sessions. He put the phone down and went to find a notebook.
WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Issue Five
This week: Seven stories: one about getting clients without selling, and the conversation that brought one back eight months later; one about the follow-up email that died in a drafts folder; one about knowing a thousand people slightly and nobody well; one about a compliance leader who found a book on courage and realised he’d been armoured all along; one about a man his own boss for eight years, facing an obvious yes and the question that moved his business; one about the beginning of a nine-month experiment in designing a next WorkLife chapter; and one about a technologist discovering that knowing the answer isn’t the same as knowing how to make it useful. One WorkLife question — What Choice Honours Your Character Traits? One resource in Professional Self-Coaching — Create Trust and Transform How You Lead.
Professional Development Are We Developing the Right Things?
Professional Development Are We Developing The Right Things? Segun is good at what he does. But as his workplace changes, he begins to discover that some of the development he needs next isn’t technical. His story raises a question for any WorkLife: what is your WorkLife asking you to develop now?
Introducing Create Trust and Transform How You Lead
A new resource in Professional Self-Coaching: Create Trust and Transform How You Lead. You are already someone people rely on — for a way of working so natural to you that you’ve never counted it as anything more than “just doing the job.” The question is whether you’ve ever recognised it as leadership. This resource takes you from recognising the trait others already trust you for, to leading through it with confidence, connecting it to real outcomes, and drawing out the same dismissed strengths in the people around you.
How Do I Build Professional Relationships That Last?
Haruaki knew everyone — twenty-two years in-house, three years advising boards, a contacts list running to more than a thousand names. Then one Sunday he needed a specialist he could trust with something delicate, and scrolled for forty minutes. He knew where they’d all worked. He could not tell you how a single one of them thought. I have spent twenty years meeting people and building nothing. Except one — a woman who had asked him a real question at an emptying seminar three years earlier, and who had rung him four times since. This is the story of what happened in that one hour, and what Haruaki changed afterwards: fifteen relationships out of a thousand names, and the difference between a network and a list.