Category Archives: Professional Self-Coaching

Jacqui was sixty-four, a management consultant with a spotless thirty-year record — rigorous analyses, sound recommendations, not a single engagement that had ever gone wrong. And near the end of it, taking stock, she felt something she couldn’t quite justify: that for all its polish, the career had never gone anywhere deeper than the next engagement. Then a younger colleague she was mentoring asked a simple question — which client had really known how she thinks — and Jacqui found she had no answer. This is the story of what a spotless record can hide, and what she found she still had time to change.

Henrik was a Danish landscape architect with a quietly excellent reputation — gardens and public spaces that were beautiful and, more than that, worked. Clients adored what he made. And every project ended when the planting was done, and the difficult, interesting sites — the ones he’d have loved most — always seemed to go to someone else. He assumed others were simply better placed for them. Then a former client rang, not with a project but for a referral: he had a hard new site and wanted a name, because he thought of Henrik as the man who made beautiful gardens, and this was something else. Instead of giving a name, Henrik thought out loud about the site — and the client went quiet, and said: I didn’t know you did this.

Bruno was a data analyst at a charity working with families in temporary housing, and the whole of its analytical capacity. His quarterly reports were clear, well-structured, honest about what the data couldn’t say. They went to the senior team and the trustees and 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. 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. Then one Tuesday evening he stopped complaining about it and did what he does with any problem. He got a notebook and took it apart — and what he found in an hour and a half was self-coaching: asking himself the questions that brought clarity, finding his own answers, and acting on what he learnt.

Monye was a data analyst newly working for himself, and the work came quickly — he could take a messy business question and a messier dataset and come back with a clean, clear answer. Clients were pleased, the referrals came, and every one of them treated him the same way: the person you send a question to and get an answer back from. What frustrated him was that his real value wasn’t the answer — it was finding the right question, the thing the client hadn’t thought to ask. Then one afternoon, on a routine request, he sent the answer they wanted and, underneath it, showed them how he’d found a better one.

Sinata was a freelance UX designer with a good, steady practice and genuinely strong work — clean, thoughtful, user-centred. And she kept losing pitches she felt she should have won, and being treated on the projects she did win as a good pair of hands, interchangeable, released when the work was done. The feedback was always some version of “your work was great, we just clicked with someone else.” She’d built her whole pitch around her best final screens — until a competitive pitch she was sure she’d lose, where she opened instead with a design that had nearly gone wrong, and walked the room through how she’d thought her way out of it. Everything changed, and it was never the quality of the work.

Shayla was a town planner, and she’d gone into it for a reason. She’d grown up in a town that had been badly done by — not dramatically, just a series of ordinary decisions, each defensible on its own, that ended with a place people drove through rather than walked in. She was good at the job. Her assessments were rigorous, her policy knowledge thorough, her fairness trusted by everyone across the table. And decision after decision went a way her assessment hadn’t pointed. She hadn’t been overruled. She’d been asked a narrow question and answered it well, and the wider thing she could actually see had never been asked for at all. Until a meeting she nearly didn’t attend, where she stopped summarising and told them about her own street.