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.

Introducing How Vision and Motivated Abilities Survive When Your Industry Doesn’t

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.

How a Psychology Book Develops Productive Disagreement and Transforms Collaboration 

The complete lesson follows Keiko's full journey — including how insights from Think Again changed how she approached her team, the executives who challenged her, and her own relationship with certainty — and what she discovered when she returned to the book several months later. It shows how you can apply the same perspective in your own work — learning to recognise the thinking modes that either enable or prevent genuine collective intelligence, and developing the capacity to channel disagreement toward discovery rather than defence.

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.

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Issue Nine

This week: Seven stories: one about coaching yourself into being heard — a developer told to "be more visible" who broke the vague advice down like an unclear spec; one about the restlessness that means you've outgrown your frame — a physiotherapist good at his job and quietly stuck; one about getting recognised without bragging — a librarian who thought letting her value be seen meant selling herself; one about a clear vision transforming expertise into motivated abilities — a systems architect who felt hollow until the same skills pointed at a community clinic; one about why self-coaching is becoming essential — a man asking what he's becoming useful for now; one about the space between the doing — a first postcard from Regent's Canal; and one about what work reveals in us. One Story Lesson — How Vision and Motivated Abilities Brought His Two Selves Together. One resource in Professional Self-Coaching — Stand Firm Under Pressure.

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.