Introducing How Vision and Motivated Abilities Survive When Your Industry Doesn’t — telling Dora’s story — an award-winning features editor whose newspaper closes after sixteen years, until a single weekend shows her the abilities she thought she’d lost had never belonged to the industry at all. The lesson follows her as she separates what was the newspaper’s from what was hers, names the vision her abilities had been serving beneath the job title, and carries both into new forms — and shows how recognising which capabilities your industry never owned can turn disruption from the end of a career into its evolution.
Category Archives: Professional Self-Coaching
Why Does My Work Go Unnoticed?
Padma was a teaching assistant, eleven years in, and — on paper — support staff. She sat beside the children who struggled and kept the classroom calm while the teacher taught. But something happened around Padma that nobody could account for: the children others had given up on, the disengaged and disruptive ones, tended to change when they were put with her. When it worked, everyone was pleased, and nobody asked how. It went down as the child “settling.” She’d stopped wondering why her work was never quite seen. She was wrong about why — and it had nothing to do with the work.
How Do I Get Recognised at Work Without Bragging?
Rosa was a librarian, and had been one for nearly forty years — the reason a great many people in her town had become readers at all. She was the one who put exactly the right book into exactly the right hands: the quiet child handed the story that opened a whole new world, the retired man given the title that turned a passing curiosity into a passion. She had a real gift. And in forty years she’d never once described it as one. Now a role had opened where her understanding of what a library truly gives could help protect it — and she had no intention of putting herself forward. Because to do that, she felt, she’d have to sell herself. She was about to learn she’d had that wrong all along.
Introducing Stand Firm Under Pressure
A new resource in Professional Self-Coaching: Stand Firm Under Pressure. There’s a particular kind of pressure that doesn’t come from the work being too hard — it comes from everything around you telling you the way you work is wrong. Too careful, too slow, too much. Sometimes from people, sometimes from the situation itself. This resource takes you from recognising the trait you’re being pressured to suppress to standing firm in it — naming it truly, seeing what it prevents, articulating its value before a crisis proves it, and holding steady as leadership rather than stubbornness. Because the trait a culture pressures you to suppress is often the very thing it most needs.
Why Self-Coaching Is Becoming an Essential WorkLife Skill
Archie had spent much of his working life adapting to change. But when his organisation began changing around him, this time there was no obvious next step. His role wasn’t disappearing. It was becoming less clearly defined — and his manager invited him to help shape what came next. What followed is a story about self-coaching, recognising how our value evolves and learning to navigate when the next step isn’t mapped out for us.
I’m Good at My Job — So Why Do I Feel Stuck?
Tassos was a physiotherapist in a busy private clinic, and doing well in his job. His patients recovered, his diary was full, his reviews were strong. He should have been happy — he’d trained hard for this, wanted it badly, got it. And three years in, he felt a restlessness he couldn’t explain and was almost ashamed of. What did he have to complain about? He’d started to wonder whether he’d chosen the wrong career, whether the stuck feeling meant physiotherapy wasn’t for him. The thing he couldn’t see was that he wasn’t in the wrong job — he was doing the right one in a frame that left out the part he cared about most.
Can You Coach Yourself Into Being Heard at Work?
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.
Introducing Shape the Culture Around You
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.
How Do I Show My Value at Work?
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.
Self-Coaching: When Other People’s Perspectives Drown Out Your Own
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.