It’s easy to look back with hindsight as I write this and realise, I hadn’t really set myself up for success. I wasn’t connected to any real reason or drive to do what I was doing. Same happened as I embarked on my career. What I didn’t really grasp though was how everything I did during my 13 years working in retail management and 12 years in the charity sector, was about me finding my way to setting up my own business.
I was always passionate about learning and self-development. I realised very early on that learning was a super power; I had the ability to learn new skills, to take ideas and experiment with them in my day to day, and that in doing so I could shape my own journey. I was so excited about being able to do this that it felt like I needed to share it. I was also really fascinated by people and that provided rich, fertile ground to explore further.
During my time in retail, I nurtured the talent and ambition I saw in others, providing mentorship to new or struggling managers and using a coaching approach with my team to empower them to be their best. Coaching wasn’t the big buzzword it is now back then, nobody was using that term to describe what was happening, it was only when I undertook my formal coaching training years later that the lightbulb went on and I had a name for the skills I’d been honing throughout my work.
I remember proudly stating that I’d supported over 40 individuals to move into and up through various management and leadership positions within the companies I’d worked for in my interview for my first charity sector role. I firmly believed (still do) that development is a core component of a manager and leader’s role, but I also realised I was in the minority. This stuff didn’t just come naturally to everyone. In actual fact, there was a whole heap of people in positions of authority who didn’t give any time or thought to their people, they don’t see the connection between growing your people and growing your business or organisation and the impact it has or results it achieves.
I wondered if that was related to the pressures of a commercial environment, if the busyness of business meant that everyone had to be heads down, crack on, and did that mean I was just an oddball? I expected the charity sector to be different. After all, I’d heard about how the wages were lower but the pay off was the investment you got in your personal and professional development. Turns out it’s not that clear cut. In every sector, every business, every organisation, there are things that take the lead: so much depended on the person who was managing you and their approach because everywhere has its challenges and its priorities and every person has their own focus and ambitions. Whether development happens or not, it’s a choice that’s driven by a person’s internal drivers and motivations. I’ve encountered the full spectrum of managers and leaders during my career, from awesome to awful. Every single one of them taught me something.
Four years ago, I had a lightbulb moment that changed everything. I was thinking about all of the managers and leaders I worked with and supported in their growth and development and how much that work sparked joy in me. Not only that, I was bloody good at it! I realised, that it had taken me until I was 41 to work out what it was I really wanted to do. The scariest thing about that was knowing that I had to make a change. I needed to leave the perceived security and stability of full-time employment. I took the plunge and went solo.
It has been an absolute rollercoaster of a ride but I feel a sense of sureness that I’ve never fully experienced before. Working with individuals and organisations to support personal, professional and leadership development, using all of my experience from the last 25+ years, just feels ‘right’, whether I’m coaching, mentoring, training or facilitating. I am immersed in people and learning and that is definitely my happiest of happy places.
We don’t necessarily know what we want to be when we grow up, and it can feel like we are plodding through treacle at some points in our career. We often look sideways and think everyone else has it figured out. Stop worrying about what anyone else is doing. Tap into your own learning super powers and get curious about the patterns that have played out in your experiences to date. Take some time to get to know yourself and what truly sets your soul on fire, then work out how to cultivate more of that in your everyday. And if you want to work with a coach to help you figure all of that out, well, you know where I am!
