Category Archives: Professional Self-Coaching

Máire is a clinical dietitian and public-health adviser who has spent more than thirty years keeping people well. Her judgement was sound, her advice trusted, her recommendations followed — in three decades, not a single piece of advice that let anyone down. And in all that time, she’d only ever been asked for the expert answer, never the strategy she could see behind it: how the whole approach was aimed at treating people once they were ill, when the real opportunity was upstream, in prevention. She held an entire vision of how population health could work, and never offered it. Then a colleague she was mentoring asked her the biggest thing she’d seen that needed to change — and whether she’d been in the room when it got decided. Máire knew the answer at once, and it wasn’t the work she’d done, but the vision she’d never carried into the room. This is the story of what a faultless record can hide, and what she found she still had time to do.

Self-Coaching Through WorkLife Storytelling to Choose Your Direction — Adele returns to the family vineyard in Bordeaux, where her father is recovering and her brother is carrying a business in trouble. As she tells her stories and listens to theirs, she discovers how her Success, Passion and Failure Stories can help her shape a way forward with the people her decision affects.

Sanjay is an independent logistics and supply-chain consultant, and one of the best in his field. When a company had a distribution problem — a costly route, a tangled network, a bottleneck — they called Sanjay, and he handed back a fix that worked. And every contract was the same shape: bounded, technical, defined tightly. What none of them saw was that he didn’t look at a distribution problem and see a routing job — he saw the whole operation, and the strategy behind it, the far bigger engagement sitting invisible behind the one he’d been hired for. He solved the route and watched the strategic conversation go elsewhere, to the big firms, without him. Then a client’s meeting drifted to a bigger question — a major expansion they weren’t sure their operation could support — and instead of retreating to his remit, Sanjay brought his lens to the whole thing.

Fatou managed a busy branch of a credit union. She knew the members, knew the lending rules inside out. When a judgement call had to be made, she made it. Her staff had watched her be right for years, and had learned the lesson that watching someone be right teaches: bring it to Fatou. So they did. Everything. Her team were experienced, capable people, several there longer than she’d been manager, and not one of them would make a call of any weight without walking to her desk first. She’d come to see it as the mark of a well-run branch. Then a fortnight’s absence, and a decision made without her, showed her that being the answer to everything had never been the same as leading well. It was a ceiling — and she’d built it herself.

Idris is a cybersecurity consultant who had recently gone independent, and the work came fast. He could get inside a company’s systems and see what others missed — the vulnerability nobody had noticed, the exact way an attacker would get in. And every client treated him the same way: as the technical one, brought in to test the systems and patch the holes, never consulted on what security meant for the business. What none of them saw was how he actually thought about his work: not as a set of locks and walls, the department of no, but almost the opposite — that done well, security is what lets a business move boldly, build the ambitious thing, enter the markets a more exposed competitor can’t touch. He’d always led with the finding and buried that perspective. Then, in a pitch he expected to lose, he opened instead with how he saw — and everything changed.

Self-Coaching Through WorkLife Storytelling to Find Your Answers — When her brother asks her to come home and save the family vineyard, Adele faces a decision that tests her career, her family and the life she shares with her partner. By writing, questioning and retelling her Success, Passion and Failure Stories, she begins to find her own answers.

Lena was a retail space and planogram specialist — the person who decided, shelf by shelf, where every product went and why. Her layouts worked, and the business trusted her judgement absolutely. And in all that time, no one had ever asked her what she actually thought. They brought her the plan to execute; she executed it, expertly — but the reading of the sales data that told her far more than where to put things, they never heard. What none of them saw was that she didn’t look at a store’s data and see a shelf layout; she saw the whole shape of the business, which categories were dying, which were ready to grow. She converted it, every time, into a better layout and hid the thinking behind it. Then, in a routine review, a category manager asked how she actually decided — and for once, she told him.

Elke ran the editorial and translation team at a publishing house, and everyone knew it was the best in the building. Her team of eight turned out clean, careful work on time, every time. In eleven years she couldn’t remember a serious error reaching print. When the director wanted something done properly, it went to Elke. And in eleven years, not one of them had ever brought her an idea — not a book, not a better way of working, not a view of their own. She’d decided this was simply the kind of work it was: precise, quiet, heads-down. Then a difficult acquisition, and a sentence she hadn’t planned to say, showed her that her team’s silence had never been their nature. It was their read of her.