At a crossroads?

I was at a crossroads…

I didn’t think I was. It actually felt like a dead-end. One that I’d driven up myself.

3 years ago I’d taken a new role, and a new department – rather than face the other option of redundancy.

How naive was I. How ridiculous that after a wonderfully satisfying career that I took the “easy” option rather than thinking about what I really needed for ME.

I was shouting that out inside my head – “what about ME?”

But I was the breadwinner and sole-earner in our house, I owed this to my family. I owed something to my boss, I was the loyal one, this was simply another string to my bow. Wasn’t it?

Nope.

I’d set up whole new departments before, reorganising capability, seeking new talent, developing people and creating high-performing teams.

This new job in 2014 (as an alternative to redundancy) should have been easy for me. That was the problem I guess. Too easy. Not challenging enough. Or the wrong kind of challenge.

I’m still not entirely certain why it was so hard. There were a number of contributing factors for certain:

• We were bringing people in from outside, a lot of them. And they were bloody good! This should have been the exciting time for me, seeing new blood breathing vitality into the organisation. But I felt excluded. On the periphery.
• The male-female ratio altered from 1 in 3 to 1 in 8 at the end. And I was the one female in both cases. It got tiring. I was weary.
• Cash in the business was short – we were in rescue and turn-around for the last few years. After previous years of reputation building we had gained huge cost-saving to gain highly-deserved merit – and we were now being challenged with doing even more for even less. It was exhausting with no end in sight as the expectations of what we had to deliver (for less) were still growing.

For me personally something was missing. Autonomy, independence, and a few other things that were very personal to me and worth considering.

So I did something about it. I finally confided in a couple of influential people, and within a short time a secondment offer arose where I could test out a new role in Transformation & Change. Everyone said that this was “right up your street Steph”. That my skills & experience played right into this role. That it was a great opportunity to start the next new chapter. Nothing to lose.

My dead-end was no longer…

…it was a path forward. Maybe a fork in the road. Either way an opportunity that I grabbed with both hands.

I enjoyed the new role, the new people, the new frameworks and ways of working. It was really refreshing after so long in one area of the business. But I desperately missed leading people. This new role opened up an opportunity to “indirectly” lead thousands of employees through my actions and recommendations. But still not the same as being accountable for leading my own team.

Then the unthinkable happened. I fell ill. I postponed treatment for a few weeks longer than was wise, and got more ill. I had a life-changing operation 4 months into the new role. Text books said I needed 6-8 weeks off work. Due to a couple of complications I ended up needing 16 weeks off, and then a phased return. I’d never had this length of time off in my life. Even my last maternity leave wasn’t that long.

And it changed me.

And probably and most importantly, because it gave me the thinking time I had needed and had unknowingly missed for many, many years.

I thought long and hard about self-fulfilment & personal values. I thought about my career peak-performance and lows.

I reflected on people – my boss, my friends, my team, my family. I thought about priorities. I began to think about options. Different ones. An alternative path.

I was about to create the crossroads in my life. Rather than wait for me to come across it.

I investigated the feasibility of a complete career change.

The development of people was something that I always got great satisfaction from. Coaching, mentoring, leading, training, supporting – all of the these. I simply loved the satisfaction of knowing that I had made a difference to people as individuals. Made their lives easier by teaching them a new process, or helped them to see an alternative solution through personal coaching. Anything so long as it involved individuals willing to improve.

So how could I combine all of these passions with my experience and knowledge, and my personal values and beliefs about the world and life? How could I get what I wanted out of my career?

And that is where my new journey started. I turned off the path that I felt unfairly obliged to be on. I took the steps required to leave behind a relatively safe & secure environment.

I retrained. I am now a Leadership Coach extraordinaire! With masses of experience behind me and even more masses of passion for what I am doing.

I am a new me 🙂

Thanks to all my dearest friends and many treasured colleagues who were with me during my long journey, and to some very influential & likeable people who were with me at the most important bits in the last couple of years: David, Jane, Sarah, Kate, Abby, Beccy.

Just as important are the new friends I have made since retraining, who have helped me to value every ounce of the person I want to be: Rachel, Helena, Julie, Laura, Anna, Neil, Mark, John, Mike, Andy. Love you all.

And my boys: Tim, Matt, Jon & Anthony. For whom it wouldn’t have been worth it all.