When you’re feeling unsure and confused about your next career step, it can be hard to know what to do next. But being in a period like this is a normal and common part of human existence and there are lessons you can take from others who’ve successfully navigated this time of ‘fogginess’. By embracing this time as a period of exploration and experimentation, and focusing on just taking simple steps towards the direction that feels right for you, you can step your way through the fog and into your next chapter. 

When building a development plan that will help you get to the next level of leadership, it's common to focus on things like gravitas, credibility and executive presence.

Perhaps you've received feedback that you need to be more influential or strategic at senior levels. Perhaps you're aiming for a promotion, stepping into a bigger leadership role, or simply looking at the qualities that distinguish those operating at executive level.

You may already be researching training courses that promise to help you develop these skills.

In this article, I'm going to make a slightly controversial argument: an executive presence course may not give you the results you’re hoping for if you haven't first invested in developing four things that sit underneath it all: self-awareness, self-regulation, self-belief and self-trust.

I’m often asked a question along these lines when I talk to people about transformational coaching. Transformation is a big word, and it conjures up visions of big changes. In my work helping sustainability leaders to transform their careers, I often speak to people who hope to transform their lives through a career pivot - perhaps leaving corporate, changing industry, or going freelance. And it’s certainly true that all these things will have the effect of transforming the circumstances of your life. What is less clear though is whether they’ll transform your life for the better. For that, you need to think even bigger, and counter-intuitively, act smaller. 

Have you been setting new boundaries? That’s great, but there’s something you need to know. You need to be aware of overshooting your new boundaries.

Firstly, well done. It’s not always easy to implement new rules which protect your time, energy and peace. When we do the difficult work of deepening self-awareness and building self-belief, we uncover patterns and behaviours that may have served us well in the past, but now drain us. Noticing when these patterns or behaviours are playing out is the first step. The next challenge is to intervene, to pause and avoid those instinctive responses from kicking in. And then we might make a promise to ourselves, or set a boundary, to give us a new playbook to guide our responses. Setting boundaries can feel good, and it can free up precious time and energy. But it can also feel uncomfortable too - this is the ‘messy middle’. And sometimes we can overshoot our boundary - going too far and creating unintended consequences - a sort of ‘push me, pull me’ kind of effect.

Taking better care of your energy isn’t just about sleeping well, recharging the batteries on the weekend, and going for a run. For deep transformation, you’ve got to really tackle the way you spend your energy when you’re at work. I’ve been using the GC Index profiling tool with clients and we’ve been exploring what work naturally energises and depletes them, and considering what implications this has for the work they do and the way they spend their days. I’m challenging my clients to consider their energy consumption on a much deeper level. 

Sometimes our lives can become so busy, so full on, that we can become really disconnected from our own bodies. But if we can learn to tune in more closely, and pay attention to what our bodies are telling us, we can get the clues we need to transform our lives. In this article I’ll share what’s helped me, and what helps my clients to tune into what their bodies are telling them. 

I’ll share the three game changing lessons I’ve learned about burnout, habits, courage and what I say to my coaching clients about how you can transform your life for the better in the space of just one year.