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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife
Episode: Introducing Create Trust and Transform How You Lead

Introducing Create Trust and Transform How You Lead — a new Professional Self-Coaching resource from School of WorkLife, created for recognising the character trait others already rely on you for, leading through it with confidence, and drawing it out in the people around you.

You are already someone people rely on. Somewhere in your work there is a way of operating so natural to you that others have quietly built their confidence around it — and still, you may have never counted it as anything more than "just doing the job." When something comes this naturally, it's easy to dismiss it as baseline competence, the minimum anyone should meet, rather than the distinctive strength — and the leadership — it actually is.

Create Trust and Transform How You Lead takes you from recognising and naming the trait others already trust you for, to understanding the effect it creates for the people around you — then to leading through it as yourself, meeting the doubt that your quiet, steady kind of contribution counts as leadership at all, and turning what you've learnt outward to help others recognise the strengths they've been dismissing in themselves.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

CREATE TRUST AND TRANSFORM HOW YOU LEAD: Professional Self-Coaching for Turning Your Natural Character Traits into Leadership Others Rely On — Discover the Strength You've Been Calling "just the job," and Learn to Lead With the Trait Others Already Trust You For.

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 Build Professional Relationships That Last?

How do I build professional relationships that last is the question that arrives on the day you discover your network is wide, warm, and strangely useless — and the answer is that you have to stop collecting people and start understanding them.

Haruaki had more than a thousand contacts and nobody he could call. This is the story of the one conversation that had ever produced anything — a real question asked at an emptying seminar — and what he changed afterwards. Fifteen relationships out of a thousand names. Fifteen is a network. A thousand is a list.

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: Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter 

For the past few weeks, I've been building a publishing practice.

I've been writing and publishing on my own website for a long time. In January, I began sharing my writing more consistently on LinkedIn. In March, I started the WorkLife Stories podcast. More recently, I began bringing the week's published pieces together in my weekly WorkLife Stories publication.

Now, nine months from official retirement age in Ireland, I'm beginning to think about another kind of chapter.

I'm not planning to retire. I want to continue writing, creating, learning and working — but I also want more room for life.

This episode is the prologue to a nine-month experiment exploring one question:

How do I design my next WorkLife chapter around how I want to live?

Once a month, I'll return to the story — the things I try, the rooms I walk into, the people I meet, the opportunities that emerge, the things that don't work, the things that surprise me and the questions that change along the way.

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 

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Today's Question: What choice honours your character traits?

What choice honours your character traits? In this episode of The WorkLife Question, I sit with Leon and the question — exploring what it means to hold to who you are when the culture around you is moving in a different direction. And what becomes possible when that choice is made and held.

RESOURCES

Today's question is from The Longest Way Round for Character Trait Development Question Bank — from the section Aligning Character With Professional Choices.

Leon is the main protagonist in the Story Lesson: How Methodical Character Traits Create Sustainable Success Under Pressure. 

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

Leon's story was told in WorkLife Stories: How Methodical Character Traits Create Sustainable Success Under Pressure. (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: Self-Coaching When You’re Your Own Boss: Who Challenges Your Thinking?

What happens when every decision you make for your business is perfectly sensible — but those decisions keep you exactly where you are?

Fionn has been his own boss for eight years when a long-standing client offers him a substantial six-month project. Good fee. Good client. Familiar work. Saying yes seems obvious. But for almost two years, Fionn has been saying he wants to take his business in a different direction.

This WorkLife Story explores self-coaching for freelancers, founders, consultants and independent workers — and why sometimes the thinking that most needs challenging is the thinking that seems completely reasonable.

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 Do I Follow Up After a Networking Event?

How do I follow up after a networking event is the question that decides whether a good conversation becomes a professional relationship — or quietly becomes nothing. The answer: write about them, not you.

Farida had forty business cards in a drawer and a follow-up email she'd rewritten four times and never sent. This is the story of the email that arrived from someone else, what it did differently, and the eleven she sent in the fortnight that followed — nine of which were answered.

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: How a Non-Fiction Guidebook Develops Courage and Transforms Leadership.

How a non-fiction guidebook develops courage and transforms leadership is rarely what managers expect — but for many, it becomes the insight that changes everything about how they show up during crisis.

Sid had been leading his compliance team for three years. He was managing the transition well on paper. But when formal complaints arrived from three of his own team members, he discovered that good intentions and actual impact are not the same thing. This is the story of the book that showed him the difference — and changed how he led.

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 a Non-Fiction Guidebook Develops Courage and Transforms Leadership. Learn how a non-fiction guidebook that explores courage, vulnerability, and daring leadership can develop the capacity to lead effectively through difficulty and change.

Guided Programme The Power of Non-Fiction: Developing Connection Through Reading Discover how to develop community through kindness and literary exploration

This story was inspired by my book, WorkLife Book Club Volume One Shoreditch by Carmel O’ Reilly — following members of a London book club as they navigate WorkLife challenges through the wisdom found in the books they read together.

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 Do I Get Clients Without Selling?

How do I get clients without selling is the question every capable independent professional asks when the work is excellent and the diary is thinning. There is nothing wrong with selling. What exhausts people, and rarely works, is pitching yourself — explaining why you're worth it, hoping to be believed.

Kofi had twenty years behind him and a pipeline that was emptying. This is the story of a phone call he didn't expect, from a woman he'd spoken to once, beside a table of sandwiches — and of the three stories he found in twenty years of consulting, not one of them a pitch.

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: What Counts as Development?

Bada had been working as an architect for three years.

She knew she was developing. She could see the difference in her technical knowledge, confidence and ability to navigate her work.

But she had also begun to notice something less visible.

Her work was developing her judgement, her ability to listen, her understanding of other people and her confidence in situations where there wasn't always an obvious answer.

This raises a bigger question:

What counts as Professional Development?

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

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife
Episode: Introducing Transform Your Professional Impact

Introducing Transform Your Professional Impact — a new Professional Self-Coaching resource from School of WorkLife, created for recognising what you naturally bring, developing it with intention and extending it to others.

You already have a professional impact. And still, you may never have stopped to recognise what creates it — the natural character trait that has been quietly shaping the way you work for years. When something comes naturally, it can be easy to overlook its value and the difference it makes to colleagues, clients, teams and organisations.

Transform Your Professional Impact takes you from recognising and naming the natural character trait you've been carrying all along, to developing it intentionally, connecting it to real professional outcomes and turning what you've learnt outward — recognising and developing the character traits of the people around you.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

TRANSFORM YOUR PROFESSIONAL IMPACT: Professional Self-Coaching to Recognise What You Naturally Bring, Develop It with Intention and Extend It to Others — Discover the Character Trait You've Been Carrying All Along—and Learn How to Turn It into Lasting Professional Impact

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