Our story gathers pace in the barren grey wastelands of corporate middle-management.
You know the kind of drone-like lifestyle we’re talking about: secure, predictable, desk-bound. I designed and built software. Connected humans to systems. I played grown-ups. On repeat.
One very small fish in a huge, overcrowded pond – creative freedom and autonomy beckoned…
Did you know there’s a finite number of salaried toilet breaks you can distract yourself with, before you finally realise your life is on autopilot, and you snap?
Well, I snapped (in a car park somewhere outside Knaresborough to be precise). Freelancing was my escape hatch, mastering copywriting and marketing comms. With that came listening, expression and enterprise.
But compromise soon followed in its wake.
10 years later I was a hired gun
A self-employed mercenary, serving decent, yet terrifically ordinary clients.
Know what it feels like to crave more impact than enriching campaigns you don’t really care about? Ever felt like you need a bigger, more meaningful challenge in life? Now you know exactly where I was.
Question: what could possibly go wrong with a hard-won life of freedom and creative independence?
Actually living a hard-won life of freedom and creative independence – yet feeling empty, lost and stuck, alone in a basement (renovating our house) going slowly mad.
Not face-smeared-in-faeces-mad, just low-grade, brooding, existential despair mad
This feels familiar, I thought, in wistful remembrance of staid 9-to-5 melancholy.
Enter lifelong friends of every achiever: introspection, rumination and procrastination – all of whom gleefully rose to the challenge but weren’t much help.
No, things only really took off when I dived into the mechanics of what we stand for: our hows, whats and whys. I pinned mine down, tapped into my story so far.
More significantly though, I reached out. I put serving other people first instead of feeling sorry for myself. I hung out with people on similar journeys. I took inspiration from great thinkers. I hired specialists to get me out of my head (and way).
Then I began to wonder… What if I could help other people along their journeys too?
“You sound like a coach”, said my coach
Now there’s a thought…
So I gathered up everything we take for granted – those stories you collect along the way (like living in bigfoot’s back garden). Everyday superpowers (like my proclivity for sense over disorder).
Plus lifelong insatiable appetites (like honesty and clarity) that so delighted people who hired me.
Eventually I realised: maybe there is a place for curious, irreverent, provocative coaching, after all.
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