Two years ago, I thought I'd finally cracked it until… (Joanne's story)

You might hold the same title, in the same company. But when the circumstances surrounding your role change (team changes, industry changes, company focus changes or even global changes), that role morphs into a different role.

Joanne was appointed to an exciting new role within a large organisation that chimed with her interests and values. The role absolutely played into her skills and talents…for a while.

As the role evolved over a few years, she found herself in a long-term situation that didn’t suit her skills and strengths well, and didn’t allow her to thrive.

She chose to figure out why and make different choices. Joanne articulated how she felt so wonderfully, I asked if she would share her story with you. Here’s what she said.

Two years ago, I finally thought I had cracked it.

I had a good job, a regular salary and a good distinction between work and home. I had been self-employed all my adult life, until now. Now I was employed, I was beginning to wonder what had taken me so long to actually just get a proper job!

When you are successful in a role, it brings more opportunity and more work. If it’s the kind of work that uses your Superpowers and energises you…fabulous. If it’s the style of work that is your Kryptonite…watch out!

But stuff started to gradually change. The role I was in was new when I started, which in some ways was great. I had carte blanche to mould it however I wanted. There were so many problems I could turn my creative eye to.

There were endless possibilities and I could make them happen. For the first couple of years I did so, very successfully.

But then I reached the stage many self-employed people reach a couple of years in…except I had reached it in an employed capacity.

Success can breed more work…of the wrong type.

Success, if you are not careful, can breed more work, but not the exciting kind (to me anyway).

I love taking the beginning of an idea and turning it into something tangible, something that can revolutionise a business or organisation.

In this instance, it meant more things landing on my desk, and then never moving off it.

More day-to-day complexities that needed to be solved, and I held the keys to that.

More of the type of work that I now realise was sucking the joy, not just out of my work life, but eventually from my day to day life too.

Throw in a global pandemic for good measure, and burnout, frustration and how can I ever get my spark back, all came into play quite quickly.

Heeellllpppp!!!!

When our work is draining, not only does it suck the joy from our work, eventually it drains the fun from our day-to-day life as well. Joanne is not alone, but its slow-moving nature can creep up on us silently, until you hit your tipping point.

That’s when I basically devoured most of Lucia’s website over a single weekend. I started completing all of the beautifully structured free exercises she offered, and then dropped an email saying “Helllpppp!!!!”

And help is exactly what Lucia did, beyond anything I could have imagined.

I signed up to Lucia’s Personal Redesign programme. This included a one-to-one series of sessions with some extremely deep-dive exercises in between. They really get to the nub of the key things you need to be doing in your every day work to thrive. It also highlights the “kryptonite” you need to reduce as much as possible, to let those Superpowers rise to the surface.

My own LP Version of Desert Island Discs.

Before I even got to the mega three hour one-to-one with Lucia, which I can only describe as your own long LP version of Desert Island Discs, I had so many “AHA” moments doing the deep prep-work.

Career highlights I’d forgotten, that I then realised, were at the heart of what gave me work satisfaction. How positive patterns of behaviour, that had been ingrained as a part of me since childhood, were now missing. And how, for me, work could never be “just a job” - I’d been trying to kid myself of that for a while.

I regained…

In less than a month, Jo had begun to rebuild her future work in different ways. She had her detailed Superpowers document at her side, to use as her framework for decision-making now, and at every juncture in her future career.

By the time the Superpowers discovery part of the programme was finished, I had my amazingly detailed “Superpowers evidence document”.

I felt I had regained 3 things, my confidence, my vision and my sparkle - the one thing I had said to Lucia at the start that I was desperate to regain.

I have so much energy and so many ideas in my head.

I also have the clarity to do what I do well with those ideas (again identified in sessions with Lucia), to creatively think through them, to explore all the possibilities, and then to making some of those ideas, realities.

The future.

There is a long way to go. But in just under a month, I have gone from burned out to starting to shape a bright future – it feels worlds apart.

I don’t yet have all the answers to what my future career will be. But I do feel I hold all the options. I have the power to pick the right ones.

If you liked this you might like these case studies:

• Career design following parental loss, industry collapse and redundancy (Bridie’s story)

• One of my biggest fears is that I’ll be in the same place in 5 years time - and I’ll be 5 years older! (Cillian’s story)

• So many ideas, so little time (Iona’s story)

• Designing a new career, in a new country, at the same time. (Pete’s story)