Nadia had read the lists. The ten books every leader must read, the essential reading for every new manager. She’d read many of the books themselves — she could quote them. And she was still stuck, still unsure of herself as a leader. Then she asked a different question — and the same books began doing something they had never done before. Her story is about why “what are the best books for leaders?” is the wrong question, and about the question beneath it: the one that turns reading into becoming.
Category Archives: Professional Self-Coaching
How Do I Talk About Failure in a Job Interview?
Callum was twenty-seven and six years into his career — good enough that his campaigns were talked about throughout the company. So when the marketing manager role opened up, his director told him to apply. Callum said yes — and privately gave himself two reasons he might not get it. The first was the mistake everyone in the building remembered: a launch email to forty thousand customers, eighteen months ago, with his name on it. The other he never said aloud, to anyone. The panel had lived the first. The question wasn’t whether they’d ask. It was who he had become because of it.
What Is Self-Leadership?
Orla got the role. Then came the harder part: ninety days of carrying it — a restructure that was finally her call, afternoons that kept slipping into her old job, and one Monday morning that took ninety seconds and taught her team what safety is. Her story is about self-leadership: taking ownership of your WorkLife with intention, integrity and responsibility.
Introducing Get the Seat at the Table
Get the Seat at the Table — Professional Self-Coaching for Strategic Influence. Your work is good. Better than good. And yet, when the strategic conversation happens, you’re the person who provides the input rather than the one who shapes the decision. Nothing about your expertise needs fixing — what’s missing is that nobody can see how you think. Get the Seat at the Table takes you from your experience to three prepared professional stories that make your thinking visible, so it shapes the decisions that matter.
Introducing Get the Client
Get the Client — Professional Self-Coaching for Networking and Building Professional Relationships. You know your next client, collaboration or opportunity will come through people. Get the Client takes you, step by step, from your experience to three prepared professional stories — your failure, success and passion stories — built for the spoken moment and connected into one complete picture of how you think, what you’ve learnt and what drives your work. Because when people understand those three things, they don’t just remember you. They know exactly when to call you.
How Do I Answer “Tell Me About Yourself”?
Miranda’s career had three chapters that didn’t obviously belong to the same book: classroom, training room, product team. With a first-round interview five days away, she recorded herself answering the question every interview opens with — and watched a capable woman explain her own career like a route she’d wandered by accident. What she found instead, at a kitchen table with three headings and one honest question, turned sixteen years into one answer.
What Stories Should I Tell in a Job Interview?
Emeka had earned his place in the final round — twenty years, plant floor to management, a track record he didn’t need to inflate. The problem was the room: four other candidates, every one of them at the top of their game, because at final round that’s the entry fee.
The first evening he reviewed his prepared answers and read them back out loud — and heard that any one of the five could deliver them. What he went looking for across the next five evenings was different: what only he could say.
What Is Self-Coaching?
Orla had ten days. A director role opening up, a case to make to the leadership team — and a life that wasn’t going to pause for it: work, family – a life already full. What she had was one quiet hour each evening after the house went silent, a twenty-five-minute bus ride, and a notebook. On the first night she wrote a question at the top of a page, and rejected her own first answer. What she found beneath it — and what she built from it across ten days of snatched moments — is a story about self-coaching: the practice of asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Introducing Professional Self-Coaching
Get the Job — Professional Self-Coaching for Job Interviews.
You have an interview. It matters. You know you have the experience. You know you can do the job. Get the Job takes you, step by step, from your experience to three prepared professional stories — your success, failure and passion stories — so you walk into your interview able to communicate your value, your character and your potential with clarity and confidence.
Each story is built the way memorable stories are built: a powerful beginning that hooks attention in the first sentence, an engaging middle that holds it, and a memorable ending that’s still in the room after you’ve left it.
And you finish with more than the stories themselves. You finish with a question map connecting your stories to fifteen common interview questions, with a prepared way into each. Three lengths of every story — from a 30-second essence to the full telling. Your thread — the professional identity that runs through all three. Your integrated answer to “tell me about yourself.” And your Interview Page — a single page to review on the morning of your interview, with a complete story standing behind every sentence.