Ten things I've learned on my way to Worked.

I didn't plan Worked. I didn't sit down at 21 with a five-year plan that somehow, thirty years later, arrived here. What happened was messier and more interesting than that. There’s been years of showing up, bending and flexing, learning on the job, raising children, supporting clients, and somewhere in all of that, during the years that have contained the usual mix of highs and lows, I worked out what I actually think, what I actually believe, and what I'm actually good at.

I'm approaching 50. Worked. is the result. Here are ten things I learned on the way.

1. A good life is not the same as an easy life.

I'm a philosophy grad and while choosing a philosophy as a degree is sometimes met with a degree of mirth, for me it's shaped a helluva lot. Whenever I've felt adrift with work, it's this I come back to: a good life isn't a pay rise and a promotion and a tic toc following. It's the full expression of who we are, over a life well-lived.

What that has meant in practice is that the best views really do come after pretty tricky journeys. Not because suffering is good, but because growth needs something to press against. A little friction.

2. The career ladder is one path. It is not the only path.

My career has not been linear or constantly upward. Not in the narrow sense of what we think moving on up looks like.

There was no plan at 21 beyond not living in poverty if I could at all avoid it. There has been a life I've wanted to live, and work woven around it. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes chaotically and often out of necessity rather than through a clear inner purpose or of ‘knowing my why’.

For a long time, particularly in social circles and when catching up with old corporate colleagues, without a clear elevator pitch or a fancy job title, it was hard to hold my head up. Life’s lived in the fuzzy parts at the edges of clarity though and we need to forge lives that actually work for us, not that sound good while we mingle with corporate climbers, gathering around uncomfortable bar stools pretending to like Aperol Spritzs

3. Showing up consistently is underrated.

The last fifteen years have not looked like laptops on beaches or one-day weeks. They have not involved curating what Instagram thinks work looks like. They have looked like fitting things around children and ageing parents. Like doing the actual work. Like turning up for clients when things were messy for them and sometimes for me too.

What I’ve learned? Whatever is going on around you, you have to keep showing up to work consistently. If you wait for the right time, the right time never comes. Routine beats inspirational moments everytime. Even if your desk is ugly or your environment not A1 or your energy a little lower than it was yesterday, find routines that help you turn up.

4. Just get started.

If someone had said one thing to me when I was starting out, I'd want it to be, “Just start!”

Not "you got this" or "you're a boss, babe" or "find your purpose" or "lean into your why" or "hone your niche." Just: get started.

The thinking, the planning and the prep only gets you so far. At some point the work has to begin, imperfectly, without all the information, before you feel ready. You will never feel ready and the learning only happens once you've started.

5. Listen first.

Every client I've worked with over the past fifteen years has come to me with too much on their plate. Very few of them have known exactly what kind of support they need.

The instinct for all involved is to reel off tasks and jump straight to solutions. But the most useful thing I've learned to do is listen first, without already composing the answer while someone is still talking.

If you engage me as your coach, or to support you in any way, I take the listening seriously. I ask questions and actually listen to the answers. There's no preplanned solution I arrive with, but there is a space to find a way forward that works for you.

It sounds easy but it takes practice, restraint, and genuine curiosity about another person's experience.

6. You can't always control your circumstances. You can always control your response.

This is the thing I come back to most in my own life.

I've worked through a dot-com bust and a global financial crash. I've navigated the particular chaos of building a career around a family during a decade when the world kept shifting. I mean seriously, I had jobs before the internet existed and I’ll continue to have them now AI’s joined the party. 

I have felt, at times, like things were very much not going to plan and like none of it was my fault and that was hugely frustrating. But the thing is that the circumstances: the person not pulling their weight, the economy, the world on fire - it’s not fair but it’s also largely out of my control and there’s an odd liberaration when we realise that.

We still do have control, we still do have choices and this centres around how we respond to the mess as it unfolds around us - that is where our empowerment lies.

7.When the gut disagrees with the facts, do the work to find out why.

There was a point where the sensible thing to do was find a bigger pipeline of higher paying clients. The numbers said so. The logic was sound. However, my gut said. “not yet”.

I got some coaching around that time to understand why I'd resisted the obvious answer. What I found was that the decision wasn't really about the money. It was about what kind of business I wanted to build and what kind of working relationships I wanted to have in it. No spreadsheet was going to surface that.

Instead of chasing faceless sales funnels, long webpages designed to ‘convert’ and slightly complicated tiered pricing ‘tricks’ I went back to the clients I had and had an honest conversation about where I was, where I wanted to be and how I hoped to work alongside them while I got there. The idea of the conversation was uncomfortable. The conversation itself? Not so much. I’m with clients for the longer term. I am here to pay the bills of course, but in a quest for quality, not quantity.

Sometimes the most important data is the stuff that's not measurable. We need to work hard to understand what it is trying to tell us.

8. Holding your head up is a practice, not a feeling.

For years I found it hard to feel confident about what I was doing. Take away the corporate logo and the away day and what's left? Just me, doing the work, making other people's dreams come true while sometimes being unsure about my own.

What I've learned is that confidence isn't something you wait to feel. It's something you practise. That practice is uncomfortable and hard and unsettling but it does work.

Fifteen years later, I know what I'm good at. I know the value of what I bring. I know how to hold my head up in any room. I also know the wobbles, the worries and the practice never end. That’s part of the journey.

9. Get help from a human.

I'm completely comfortable with Google and AI. Well, apart from the superman style baddie overlords and how they appear to delight in their attempts to undermine democracy, obvs.

 For sense-checking, research, a quick answer at eleven at night, they're useful. But there are two problems with relying on them when things get hard.

The first is that they feed a tendency many of us already have when we're too busy: head down, crack on, work through the task list as fast as we can. If anything, AI gets us working too fast, whizzing through more tasks than our mind, body and soul can get to grips with. We need to pause sometimes and humans let us do this in a way AI doesn’t

The second is that going it alone has a ceiling. At some point, explaining the problem to a search engine isn't the same as actually working through it with a human. I’ve been wondering why this is and it’s become clear to me that it’s that energy that can only surface in the space between two people.

I've felt it as a client. I feel it as a coach. That one human conversation is often enough to move things forward further and faster than months of going it alone.

Asking for help is not a last resort. It's often the most efficient thing you can do.

10. The nest doesn't have to be empty for long.

My children are nearly grown. The thing that shaped the last fifteen years, the bending and flexing, the changing lanes, the fitting work around family, is shifting.

I could have experienced this as loss. Some days I do. But also, the nest has room for something new.

Worked. is what goes in the nest.

If any of this resonates, if you're in a transition of your own, or if work and life have stopped making sense in the way they used to, I'd love to talk. Drop me a line