#TBCResults: She had a comfortable life and 0 direction. Here's what changed in 2 sessions.
These are from Next Big Move sessions, where the goal is career clarity for the next moves to make. All names and details are anonymized here. So if you have recommendations for names for the next ones, just send them over. I'm using list of UK baby names that I never hear in my real life.
Tess explained her day-to-day life to me and my first thought is that a lot of people would call her lucky. A steady role in her family's business. Prior to that, a strong corporate career where she excelled. Financial comfort, both then and now. A relationship moving toward a big life change: a move abroad with her future husband in the next 2 years.
On paper, it looked like nothing was wrong. Most people dream to live like her. The problem is, she felt unsettled by it all. She didn't know what she wanted to do with any of it. And she didn’t have the words to vocalize it to anyone else.
Now Tess is sitting in front of me for the first of our 2 Next Big Move sessions. NBM is where you come as you are, just vomit all your thoughts, worries, and ideas about your future to me, and I'll help you arrange it into 3 possible paths. Then we discuss how to explore each possible path, and you walk out of it knowing exactly what your career's next big move is.
I started by asking what her actual work at the family business looked like day-to-day. Like really explain the work she’s doing both in her professional and her personal life.
The honest answer: admin, paperwork, tasks nobody else wanted. Not because she lacked potential or capability, but because she'd never been given a bigger task to do.
Then I asked on her previous corporate stint. She was a consistent performer: if her manager asked for 80%, Tess would give 110% always. But a bit more questions from my end revealed that she was an excellent executor yet had never done any of the strategic work involved. She had little experience in initiating a project, which is quite common when you leave corporate during your early career. She had no time to build the muscle of directing her own work, initiating projects that she felt were needed, and instead was strong at executing others’ direction.
When I asked what she'd developed outside of what was handed to her (like a real personal interest, a skill, a project she'd driven herself), she came up empty. Even her 1 real "spark", a almost-10-year long interest in food and hospitality from an old internship she'd loved, had never gone further than a passing thought. Always a “someday I’ll start my own cafe". But no recipe ever tested and no real attempt at selling a baked good or drink.
This is who I coach. Not just high achievers who know exactly what they want and can't execute yet, but people who've never had to build the muscle of finding out what they want in the first place. Comfortable, capable, and completely undirected.
I’d heard enough and told her plainly:
“Your problem isn’t that you don’t know what you want. You want a million different things and that’s perfectly okay.
The problem is that you’ve never had to build the muscle of finding out if you can actually achieve any of it. You’ve been comfortable long enough that there was no need to exert effort towards any of those dreams.
No one ever told you to develop your dreams, including yourself, so you never did.”
I gave her the same analogy I give a lot of students in this same situation.
Imagine a kid who's a great swimmer, and one day someone hands them a paintbrush and says "now be a great painter." Of course they panic. Swimming never taught them anything about painting. Being the best at following instructions in a comfortable, structured life never taught Tess anything about setting her own direction and just going at it. That's not a character flaw. It's an unbuilt skill.
She left our 1st call with a stack of homework.
Not the kind you'd expect though. I didn't send her off with a to-do list of applications or plans to execute. Because that's not what she needed.
Here's the thing I caught early: Tess wasn't someone who needed more action steps. What she needed was to build a completely different muscle first, the one where you sit with a question instead of immediately reacting to it. She's reactive by default, like most of us are. Something happens, she has an opinion in 0.5 seconds, and then she moves. Fast to feel, slow to actually think it through.
So instead of "go apply for this" or "go start that," I gave her a very different kind of assignment. I call it “No baby questions”, which are the kind of conversations you can have with a 3 year old like "do you like your job?" A list of questions she needed to ask everyone around her, from her family in the business to her friends who’ve seen her through it all to the ex-colleagues who stayed in corporate.
I also gave her something I like to call the "finish the thought" exercise (something I still have to practice myself, honestly). Most people stop at their first reaction to a problem. I don't. I follow it all the way through to its real, actual conclusion before I decide anything.
And when the same worry kept circling back for her (which I already knew it would because I’ve seen a dozen Tess’ at this point) I told her to grab a new page. Write it out from a completely different angle. Don't let the same tired thought just loop.
This is the part of coaching people don't expect. They think they're hiring me to tell them what to do next. Half the time, my actual job is stopping someone from doing anything at all until they've built the thinking muscle that got skipped somewhere along the way.
Give someone who's never learned to sit with a question a 5-step action plan, and they'll execute it beautifully into the wrong life.
3 weeks later, she came back changed and also a million times more confused. Which is what tends to happen once someone finally starts doing the work instead of just thinking about it.
Here's what the 2nd session surfaced:
She'd ruled out the family business as her real future, which was a big shock as it was something she'd assumed was inevitable. Since she was a kid, she always thought the family business was her end goal because it was familiar, and not because she'd ever actively chosen it.
She'd never actually run the numbers on her own finances. When we did the math together, we found out she was just breaking even every month. No cushion, no real margin, despite feeling financially comfortable.
She had a pattern of never asking for help and resisting being told exactly what to do. Which meant she'd also never given anyone a reason to trust her with bigger responsibility. You don't hand someone the keys until they've proven they won't crash the car. (This is a very personal anecdote, because I was given the keys too early and subsequently crashed the car because I didn’t know how to take driving instructions properly lol.)
She kept expecting to get her next move right on the first try, when she'd never gotten anything right (like the rest of us!!) on a first try before.
Then we did the math that actually mattered.
Her upcoming move abroad gave her a real, if rough, timeline, that she’d leave the country within the next 24 months. That meant she had room for roughly 2 real attempts at a next step before she needed one to actually work.
By the end of our 2nd call, she wasn't handed a 5-year plan.
She was handed permission to stop trying to get it perfect and start testing. Structured conversations with people in the fields she was curious about, an honest budget, and a mode of "try it and adjust" instead of "wait until I'm sure."
We set a check-in for 3 months out to see what she'd actually learned by then and I’m excited to see how she’s moved her life forward since we last spoke.
Because that's usually the real shift I'm looking for. Not a 5-year plan. Just enough clarity to start moving and permission to be wrong on the way there.
***
The Bumpy Career's Next Big Move is for the high achiever who isn't stuck because they're option-less, and also for the ones who aren't stuck because they've got too many options. They're stuck because they've never had to build the muscle of choosing at all.
Meaning: whether you've got 7 potential paths or 0, the fix is the same. You need 1 real decision, tested, with a deadline attached.
That's where I come in.
We'll work together to turn your live options into one actual decision with a deadline attached. So you leave our sessions with a next move for the next instead of another year of "eventually."
If that sounds like where you are right now, you can book your own Next Big Move here and let's figure out what’s next for your career.