Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: Introducing Thrive Through Change

Introducing Thrive Through Change — a new Professional Self-Coaching resource from School of WorkLife, created for adapting through your natural character traits without losing what makes you effective.

When everything around you changes, the first thing you're tempted to change is yourself. A new system, a reorganisation, a technology that shifts the ground under your feet — and somewhere in the noise, a quiet message that the way you've always worked is outdated, and that to keep up you'll have to become someone else. It's one of the most convincing lies that change tells, and acting on it is how good people lose the very thing that made them good.

Thrive Through Change takes you from recognising the character traits change is tempting you to abandon, to adapting them for a changed world without losing what makes you effective — telling what to protect from what genuinely needs to change, finding new expressions for your enduring strengths, moving through the hardest middle of a transition to something sustainable and authentically yours, and helping the people around you recognise the strengths they've been told to leave behind. Because thriving through change was never about becoming someone new to keep up. It's about carrying who you are into what comes next.

RESOURCES 

THRIVE THROUGH CHANGE: Professional Self-Coaching for Adapting Through Your Natural Character Traits Without Losing What Makes You Effective — Discover Why the Strengths You've Been Told Are "outdated" May Be Exactly What Sees You Through Change.

Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.

The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles, failures and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O' Reilly schoolofworklife.com

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES:

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How Do I Make My Boss See My Value?

How do I make my boss see my value is the question behind every excellent, reliable, quietly overlooked career — and the answer isn't more output. They can already see your work. What they can't see is the judgement behind it: how you think, what you've learnt, and what drives you.

Béatrice did everything right for years and watched other people get promoted past her. This is the story of the mentor's coffee that changed how she understood it, and the three stories she found underneath a flawless record — the grandmother who set her whole course, the correct forecast nobody acted on, and the day she stopped sending the number and told her director what she could see.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Get the Seat at the Table — Professional Self-Coaching for Strategic Influence Tell the Three Stories That Turn Your Expertise Into a Voice People Listen To

Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: What does longevity mean for WorkLife?

Millie is approaching retirement.

But she doesn't want to stop working.

After more than forty years as an architect, she has built a long and successful WorkLife. She has taken on responsibility, developed expertise, mentored others and learned from the many projects, people and challenges that have shaped her career.

Now she is beginning to wonder what comes next.

She doesn't want another forty-year career. She doesn't want to keep working in quite the same way. And she no longer feels she has anything to prove.

She has done that.

What she does have is experience, judgement, perspective — and, perhaps for the first time, the time to pause before rushing into whatever comes next.

This episode explores one question through Millie's story:

What does longevity mean for WorkLife?

Perhaps living and working for longer isn't simply about extending the traditional working life.

Perhaps it gives us an opportunity to rethink it.

To work differently.

To choose more carefully.

To contribute in new ways.

And to design the later chapters of our WorkLife around who we are now, rather than continuing to follow the model that worked for who we once were.

RESOURCES

The Storytelling Newsletter (Free) Short, focused, and grounded in real WorkLife situations — how we communicate, lead, make decisions, and navigate challenges at work.  

Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships. schoolofworklife.com 

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES

Today's Question: How do you guide authentic trait recognition?

How do you guide authentic trait recognition? In this episode of The WorkLife Question, I sit with Jon and the question — exploring the shift from performance evaluation to character observation. And the questions he asked that made Rhona, Sam and Julian's traits visible to them — without telling them what those traits were.

RESOURCES

Today's question is from The Longest Way Round for Character Trait Development Question Bank — from the section Supporting Others' Character Development.

Jon is the main protagonist in the Story Lesson: How Integrated Leadership Character Traits Build Organisational Capacity. 

His story is featured in the episode: The Stories Behind the Stories: Jon.

Jon's story was told in WorkLife Stories: How Integrated Leadership Character Traits Build Organisational Capacity. (Free to listen).

Deepen the practice with the WorkLife Compass Guided Programme: The Longest Way Round: A Journey of Character — How Embracing Your Natural Traits and the Wisdom of Great Storytellers Can Transform Your Path to Purpose.

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: Self-Coaching: The Difference Between Thinking and Thinking Well

Have you ever spent hours thinking about something and still ended up exactly where you started?

Anders has spent years helping other people solve problems, develop ideas and see possibilities they hadn't seen before. But when something about his own working life needs to change, he finds himself returning to the same questions, possibilities and arguments without getting any closer to an answer.

Then something he says while helping a colleague with a creative problem makes him question not the problem, but the way he has been thinking about it.

This WorkLife Story explores the difference between thinking and thinking well — and how self-coaching can help us question assumptions, change perspective and recognise when the thinking that once served us may need to change with us.

RESOURCES

Read more Professional Self-Coaching stories and explore practical self-coaching resources in the Professional Self-Coaching collection

The Storytelling Newsletter (Free) Short, focused, and grounded in real WorkLife situations — how we communicate, lead, make decisions, and navigate challenges at work.  

WORK WITH ME

Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements and organisational partnerships: [email protected]

schoolofworklife.com 

The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles, failures and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities.

Carmel O’ Reilly

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES:

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: Why Does My Expertise Get Ignored?

Why does my expertise get ignored is the question behind every specialist's quiet folder of times they were right and overlooked — and the answer is almost the opposite of what you'd expect. A room doesn't ignore expertise because it doubts it. It ignores expertise it can't connect to a person's judgement. Being more right won't fix it.

Rahul had fifteen years of sound judgement and a folder of warnings no one remembered. This is the story of the colleague who carried a room he never could, and the three stories he found underneath the evidence — the cool objection that discredited months of work, the warning that landed when he led with the stakes, and the boy who kept asking how we know that's true.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Get the Seat at the Table — Professional Self-Coaching for Strategic Influence Tell the Three Stories That Turn Your Expertise Into a Voice People Listen To

Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES:

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How Vision Turns Your Motivated Abilities Into Authentic Leadership

How Vision Turns Your Motivated Abilities Into Authentic Leadership — a Self-Discovery Story Lesson from School of WorkLife, exploring a real WorkLife moment where a long-held assumption is quietly challenged.

Mel had just been promoted to director of operations. Fresh from a leadership programme full of models and frameworks, he felt lost — unsure which leadership style to adopt, and certain none of them felt like him. Then a weekend coordinating a community flood response shows him something different — leading the way he naturally works, with no persona to perform, and having people follow because what he does plainly helps. This Story Lesson follows Mel as he learns to tell his natural authority from his performed authority, recognises the specific pattern in how he genuinely leads, and names the vision of capacity-building that finally gives his abilities a direction to serve — where leadership stops being a role he summons and becomes something that simply happens when he works.

RESOURCES 

How Vision Turns Your Motivated Abilities Into Authentic Leadership — Discover That the Way You Naturally Work With Others Is Already the Way You Lead

Vision and Motivated Abilities: - Finding Your True Direction in Your WorkLife 

Guided Programme: Vision and Motivated Abilities: - Finding Your True Direction in Your WorkLife 

Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.

The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles, failures and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O' Reilly schoolofworklife.com

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES:

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How to Recognise Curiosity as a Character Trait That Defines Your Deepest Contribution

Learning how to recognise curiosity as a character trait that defines your deepest contribution begins with seeing what feels so natural you've never thought to call it a strength.

Jonas had been working as a business analyst for exactly three weeks when he asked a question in a leadership meeting that silenced the room — and revealed a strategic blindspot nobody had thought to look for. This is the story of the question he wrote down and never asked, the moment he understood what that silence had cost, and what became possible when he stopped treating his natural drive to ask why as a professional liability.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

The Storytelling Newsletter (Free) Short, focused, and grounded in real WorkLife situations — how we communicate, lead, make decisions, and navigate challenges at work.  

Story Lesson: How to Recognise Curiosity as a Character Trait That Defines Your Deepest Contribution Discover how recognising your natural gift for questioning can unlock deeper impact, stronger leadership, and your most powerful professional contribution.

Guided Programme: The Salt of the Earth: A Journey of Character How Embracing Your Natural Traits and the Wisdom of Everyday Heroes Can Transform Your Path to Purpose

Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships: [email protected] schoolofworklife.com

The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles, failures and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O' Reilly

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES:

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: Why Am I Never Asked What I Think?

Why am I never asked what I think is the question every excellent, overlooked specialist asks on the way back to their desk. People can see your output. They cannot see how you think — and until they can, they'll keep using your work and deciding without you.

Nazanin's analysis shaped every decision in the building, from outside the room. This is the story of the colleague's question that changed everything, and the three stories she found in four years of work — the buried warning, the average that hid its real customers, and the reason she became an analyst at all.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Get the Seat at the Table — Professional Self-Coaching for Strategic Influence Tell the Three Stories That Turn Your Expertise Into a Voice People Listen To

Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.

Support the show

Send us Fan Mail

SHOW NOTES

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: What Is WorkLife Storytelling?

Professional Development Through Our Stories — How experience becomes meaning, learning and identity

Niamh had always been good at stories.

Not the kind with a carefully constructed beginning, middle and end. She simply noticed things — the small details other people forgot — and when a complicated situation needed explaining, she often found herself saying, "Let me tell you what happened."

But she had begun to notice something else. When she told a story, people didn't just understand what had happened. They understood why it mattered.

Then a colleague asked her a deceptively simple question:

"What's the story of your working life?"

This raises a bigger question:

What is WorkLife Storytelling?

RESOURCES

The Storytelling Newsletter (Free) Short, focused, and grounded in real WorkLife situations — how we communicate, lead, make decisions, and navigate challenges at work.  

Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships. schoolofworklife.com 

The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles, failures and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O' Reilly schoolofworklife.com

Support the show