How Do I Get People to Listen to My Ideas at Work?

Sam was a UX researcher, and very good at finding out what was actually true. His research was a direct line to how the product really worked — exactly what the strategy meetings needed. In practice, he watched the glaze: the polite nods, the eyes going unfocused, the "thanks, Sam, really useful," and the room deciding what it had been going to decide anyway. He'd started to wonder if he was just bad at presenting. Then he watched a colleague present the same kind of finding — and the room leaned in.

How Leaving Security Behind Reveals Your Origin Story 

The complete lesson follows Jed's full journey — including the case that finally proved what his legal skills were for, the pattern he recognised when he looked back at three earlier moments he'd rationalised away, and the question he eventually learned to ask that no one had ever put to him — and shows how you can use the same process to recognise your own period of hardship as origin story material — and begin telling the story of your authentic professional purpose with the clarity that only sacrifice can provide.

Can You Coach Yourself Into Better Professional Relationships?

Brendan was thirty-three, a research scientist, and had just been made responsible for something he'd never done: partnerships, licensing, rooms full of people from the business side. He'd been to three events. At each one he'd explained his work with total accuracy and watched faces politely close. So he found a coach — a good one, expensive, booked solid for three months. She rang him anyway — she had no space for him, and asked what the problem was regardless — and told him what she would actually do in those sessions. He put the phone down and went to find a notebook.

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Issue Five

This week: One new resource in Professional Self-Coaching — Create Trust and Transform How You Lead. Plus seven stories: three about networking, where relationships are made or lost — a consultant, an architect, an adviser who knew everyone slightly and nobody well; a compliance leader who found a book on courage and realised he'd been armoured all along; a man his own boss for eight years, facing an obvious yes and the question that finally moved his business; the beginning of a nine-month experiment in designing a next WorkLife chapter. And a technologist discovering that knowing the answer isn't the same as knowing how to make it useful. And one WorkLife question: what choice honours your character traits?

Introducing Create Trust and Transform How You Lead

A new resource in Professional Self-Coaching: Create Trust and Transform How You Lead. You are already someone people rely on — for a way of working so natural to you that you've never counted it as anything more than "just doing the job." The question is whether you've ever recognised it as leadership. This resource takes you from recognising the trait others already trust you for, to leading through it with confidence, connecting it to real outcomes, and drawing out the same dismissed strengths in the people around you.

How Do I Build Professional Relationships That Last?

Haruaki knew everyone — twenty-two years in-house, three years advising boards, a contacts list running to more than a thousand names. Then one Sunday he needed a specialist he could trust with something delicate, and scrolled for forty minutes. He knew where they'd all worked. He could not tell you how a single one of them thought. I have spent twenty years meeting people and building nothing. Except one — a woman who had asked him a real question at an emptying seminar three years earlier, and who had rung him four times since. This is the story of what happened in that one hour, and what Haruaki changed afterwards: fifteen relationships out of a thousand names, and the difference between a network and a list.

Self-Coaching When You’re Your Own Boss Who Challenges Your Thinking?

Fionn had been his own boss for eight years when a long-standing client offered him a substantial six-month project. Good fee. Good client. Familiar work. Saying yes seemed obvious. But for almost two years, Fionn had been saying he wanted to take his business in a different direction — and every sensible decision he made seemed to keep him exactly where he was. Then he changed the question. What followed is a story about self-coaching when you're your own boss — and why sometimes the thinking that most needs challenging is the thinking that seems completely reasonable.