Ella was an HR specialist, and remarkably good at seeing what people were worth. She could sit across from someone and watch their real value surface — the strength they’d underplayed, the thing they were brilliant at and had filed under “just my job.” People left her office standing a little taller. And in fifteen years of doing that for others, she had never once done it for herself. She, too, had a role she was ready for — and when she thought about making her own case, she froze. She’d started to believe she needed someone else to do for her what she did for everyone. She was wrong — she already had the whole skill. She’d just never pointed it inward.
Category Archives: Professional Self-Coaching
How Do I Pass On What I Know?
Miriam was a stonemason, sixty-four, and had been doing the work since she was twenty-six. She restored old buildings — churches, town halls, the occasional wall that mattered to somebody — and when something was difficult, it went to Miriam. For the last few years she had taken on apprentices, because the trade needed them and she wanted to. And she had begun to notice that what she told them arrived in pieces. They listened, they wrote things down, they tried hard, and a fortnight later she’d watch one of them do exactly the thing she’d warned about — not because they’d forgotten, but because they hadn’t recognised the moment when it came. She had five or six years left in her hands. She had thirty-eight to hand over. Then one wet Thursday she stopped giving instructions and told an apprentice what had happened to her at twenty-nine.
Introducing Focus Your Strengths Where They Matter
A new resource in Professional Self-Coaching: Focus Your Strengths Where They Matter. There’s a particular kind of tiredness that doesn’t come from having too much work — it comes from watching everything you produce sit at good rather than great, however hard you push. It isn’t a problem of capacity or workload; it’s how you’re deploying the strengths you already have. This resource takes you from recognising how you deploy your strengths to focusing them where they create distinctive value — seeing where you downshift, matching the rest to others whose traits serve it better, and discovering the capabilities that focusing, and developing others, reveal in you. Because your best work was never about bringing your full strength to everything.
Self-Coaching A Practice for Everyday Working Life
Otto spent a great deal of time doing his work. Then he became curious about how much he was learning from the experience of doing it. He began paying closer attention to what was going well, what he enjoyed, where he was becoming stronger and what he wanted more of. Gradually, he noticed patterns in his working life that might otherwise have passed him by. A story about self-coaching as an everyday practice for noticing, questioning, choosing, acting and learning as we work.
How Do I Turn a Client Into a Partner?
Hayato was a commercial photographer, twenty years in, and the work came in reliably. A brief would arrive by email: shot list, deliverables, date, budget. He’d turn up, do the job well, deliver on time, invoice. Then another brief would arrive. That is the shape of commercial photography, and there is nothing wrong with it. What wore at him was watching brands he shot for build an entire visual identity, decided by people who had never stood in the places at the times of day when those places became themselves. He knew things about those brands nobody had asked him. Then a woman in her sixties stopped him before he opened his laptop — and he found out what happens when you ask instead of show.
Why Do I Keep Getting Passed Over for Promotion?
Fen was a laboratory technician in a large diagnostics lab, and by every measure meant to matter, the best they had. Her results were flawless, her turnaround the fastest, and when a sample was complex or a result didn’t look right, it came to Fen — because she caught what others missed. And three times now, the senior role had come up, and three times it had gone to someone else. The third time broke something in her. I’m the best technician here. Everyone says so. Why do I keep getting passed over? She’d decided it must be politics. She was half right — it had nothing to do with the quality of her work. But it wasn’t politics either.
How Do I Get People to Really Listen to Me?
Kojo was in his third year of teaching science, and better at it than his Thursday afternoons suggested. He knew his subject properly, he’d worked in a lab before he trained, and he could explain a concept three different ways until one of them fitted. When he was observed, the feedback was good. And in front of him was a room of fifteen-year-olds who were perfectly pleasant and entirely elsewhere — copying what he wrote, answering when asked, and forgetting all of it. The same misconception would reappear a fortnight after he’d spent twenty minutes taking it apart. Until a Friday when he was too tired to teach the lesson properly, and told it backwards instead. What happened in that room showed him what makes people lean in rather than sit politely.
How do I get people to really listen to me? Clear explanation isn’t enough on its own. Kojo’s story shows what makes people lean in rather than sit politely
Introducing Prove the Value You Create
A new resource in Professional Self-Coaching: Prove the Value You Create. There’s a particular kind of frustration that has nothing to do with whether you’re good at your work — it comes from having the capability to do something well and being kept from using it. A budget cut, a mandated template, a compressed timeline: the conditions won’t let your capability operate, and the work falls short of what you know it could be. It isn’t self-doubt; you know you could do better, you just can’t yet prove it. This resource takes you from recognising that your capability is being prevented rather than lacking to proving — with evidence rather than argument — that your natural traits are worth the investment. Because a value that isn’t visible yet is not a value that isn’t real.
Self-Coaching What Does It Actually Mean to Coach Yourself?
Kathleen spent much of her working life helping other people develop. After delivering a management development programme, one participant said something that stayed with her: “I wish I could coach myself like that.” The comment prompted Kathleen to ask a question of her own: What does it actually mean to coach yourself? What followed is a story about the difference between reflection and self-coaching — and why asking ourselves better questions can change how we learn from our working lives.
Why Do Clients Take My Work and Never Come Back?
Inga was a structural engineer, and had spent twenty-six years being right. A developer would send a brief, she would survey the building, do the work, and produce a report. Her reports were exemplary — clear, thorough, honest about uncertainty, never padded. And when a report was delivered, that was the end of it. The invoice was paid, the client said thank you, and then nothing. She was fifty-two, she had twenty-six years of judgement in her, and she was still being commissioned task by task, the way she had been at twenty-eight. Until a delayed meeting, a client with an hour to fill, and a question nobody had asked her in twenty-six years.