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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: Introducing Discover Your True Direction

Introducing Discover Your True Direction — a new Professional Self-Coaching resource from School of WorkLife, created for recognising where your natural character traits truly belong, discovering how your different worlds inform each other, and helping others recognise where their own dismissed traits belong.

There may be a part of your working life you've quietly labelled as not the real thing — the side project, the volunteering, the work you took to cover the bills, the thing you do simply because you love it. And it's possible that's exactly where the most authentic part of you comes alive. When something comes this naturally, in a place you've decided doesn't count, it's easy to look straight past it — to draw a quiet line between your "real" work and your "not-real" work, and leave some of your most authentic character traits hidden on the wrong side of it.

Discover Your True Direction takes you from recognising where your traits come most alive — especially in the work you've dismissed — to seeing that you're not living two separate lives but expressing one set of traits across different worlds, then to recognising the false choice when it comes and designing a direction that honours everything you are, and finally to turning what you've learnt outward, to help others recognise where their own capabilities have been hiding.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

DISCOVER YOUR TRUE DIRECTION: Professional Self-Coaching for Recognising Where Your Natural Character Traits Truly Belong — Discover the Strengths You've Been Calling "not my real work," and the Direction They've Been Pointing You Toward All Along.

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

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How Do I Speak Up in Meetings Without Feeling Like I'm Interrupting?

How do I speak up in meetings without feeling like I'm interrupting is the question behind every I should have said something on the walk back to your desk. The answer: stop waiting for a gap, and listen for the moment the room needs you. Speaking into a problem the room has already named never feels like interrupting — because it isn't.

Tomasz knew the system better than anyone, and fixed more bad decisions at his desk than he ever prevented in the room. This is the story of the quiet colleague who changed that, and the three stories he found in years of engineering — the architecture he watched fail in silence, the rough sentence that saved a migration, and the reason he protects the people downstream of the code.

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.

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Today's Question: How could story structure enhance experiences?

How could story structure enhance experiences? In this episode of The WorkLife Question, I sit with Annie and the question — exploring what the five-layer framework created for herself, for her learners, for her fellow trainers and for the organisation. And why story structure doesn't just improve content. It creates a different kind of experience entirely.

RESOURCES

Today's question is from The Longest Way Round for Character Trait Development Question Bank —from the section Learning From Great Storytellers.

Annie is the main protagonist in the Story Lesson: How Character Traits Transform Professional Development and Organisational Success. 

Her story is featured in the episode: The Stories Behind the Stories: Annie.

 Annie's story was told in WorkLife Stories: How Character Traits Transform Professional Development and Organisational Success. (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.

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: Creating My Next WorkLife Chapter

For a long time, my work has involved writing, creating and finding ways to bring what I create to people.

Now I'm exploring what else that work could become and where it could go.

I've started creating opportunities for students to engage with real questions arising from the development of School of WorkLife, approaching publications about writing on professional self-coaching, and exploring how I could bring professional self-coaching resources into organisations.

These are different ways of bringing my writing, thinking and professional experience to people.

There are other possibilities too — podcasts, panels, speaking, teaching and perhaps things I haven't yet considered.

This episode is about exploring those possibilities: the things I try, the conversations that come from them, what works, what doesn't, what surprises me and what I learn along the way.

And, as always, I'll be writing, walking and thinking my way through it.

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 

A Note: The accompanying image is Regent’s Canal Towpath, where much of my daily walking and thinking happens — and where many of the ideas I later write about begin.

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: Could Self-Coaching Change Professional Development?

What if professional development wasn't only something delivered to us?

Imani's organisation takes professional development seriously. There are programmes, workshops, resources and regular development conversations. But when her manager asks what she wants to work on, her answers — leadership, confidence, strategic thinking — don't tell her very much about what she actually needs.

Then a moment in a meeting prompts a different question:

What is my working life trying to teach me?

This WorkLife Story explores what self-coaching can add to professional development — not replacing training, managers, coaches, mentors or learning professionals, but helping us become active participants in recognising and directing our own learning.

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

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities

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

Rod is a senior systems architect at the top of his field. He has always believed his expertise is neutral — a set of capabilities that could serve any project equally. It is a reasonable belief, and it has built him a career. It has also left him, fifteen years in, brilliant at work he cannot bring himself to care about. Then a weekend helping his sister set up a community health clinic's systems changes the question — the same skills, pointed at a different purpose, feel like entirely different work. This Story Lesson follows Rod as he separates the abilities that genuinely move him from the ones that merely occupy him, clarifies a vision specific enough to decide by, and brings the two into one direction — where work stops running on discipline and starts generating its own energy.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

How a Clear Vision Transforms Expertise Into Motivated Abilities — Discover How the Expertise You Already Have Can Come Alive in Service of a Vision That's Genuinely Yours

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

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How Do I Get People to Listen to My Ideas at Work?

How do I get people to listen to my ideas at work is the question every capable person asks after watching a good idea get a polite nod and change nothing — and the answer isn't better ideas. People ignore ideas that arrive as information. An idea that shows them how you think is much harder to ignore.

Sam's research was a direct line to the truth, and it changed almost nothing. This is the story of the colleague who made a room lean in, and the three stories Sam found in years of research — the study that was right and ignored, the one woman looking for one button, and the reason he left teaching for this.

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.

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How Leaving Security Behind Reveals Your Origin Story

How leaving security behind reveals your origin story is rarely something professionals plan to discover — but for many, it becomes the crucible that shows what they're actually willing to sacrifice for.

Jed had been a commercial litigation lawyer at one of London's most prestigious firms for nine years. He was succeeding by every conventional measure. But a discomfort he'd been telling himself was normal had been growing, case by case, year by year. This is the story of the case that made rationalising impossible, the hardship that followed when he finally chose alignment over security, and what that struggle revealed about his origin story.

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 Leaving Security Behind Reveals Your Origin Story Discover what genuine professional hardship reveals about the authentic values and origin story that comfort and security keep hidden.

Guided Programme: The Art of Origin Story Crafting: Finding Your Superpowers Crafting Your Powerful Origin Story with Compelling Beginnings, Authentic Struggles, and Meaningful Payoffs.

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

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: Can You Coach Yourself Into Better Professional Relationships?

Can you coach yourself into better professional relationships is the question that connects everything at School of WorkLife — and the answer is yes, because what a coach gives you was never the answers. It's the questions, and the accountability to act on what you find.

Brendan's technology depended on partnerships he had no idea how to build. This is the story of the coach who was booked solid and rang him anyway, the phone call that sent him to a kitchen table instead of a waiting list, and the three stories he found there — the failure that changed how he works, the success that showed him his own thinking, and the reason there were six years.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Get the Client — Professional Self-Coaching for Networking and Building Professional Relationships Tell the Three Stories That Reveal How You Think, What You've Learnt and What Drives Your Work — and Why That Makes People Want to Work With You

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

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: Professional Development: Are We Developing The Right Things?

Segun works in cybersecurity for a growing technology company. He's highly capable technically, but as his workplace changes, his role changes with it.

He begins to discover that some of the development he needs next isn't technical.

He knows how to explain a technical problem.

What he is beginning to learn is how to help someone else understand what it means for them.

This raises a bigger question:

Are We Developing The Right Things?

And perhaps an even more personal one:

What Is Your WorkLife Asking You To Develop Now?

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