Personal News Klaxon: I Have a New Job!
Or, why I've decided that enough is enough on doing it all alone
TLDR: I’ve been working with the beautiful team at Lea_p Leadership for the past few years as a freelancer and this month I made the leap (pun intended) and joined them as a partner in the business. Lea_p provide the best leadership development training that I’ve found anywhere on the market and I’m so excited to be working with them to grow the business and change what leadership looks like for everyone. Want to know more about what they provide? Drop me an email harriet@lea-p.com. Want to know more about why I decided to leave behind my footloose and fancy-free freelance life? Read on!
Emmy and I on my first “official” piece of work for Lea_p as a partner.
A few months ago I attended a training course for new coaching tool. It’s a 360 profiling which allows you to instantly understand how you see yourself vs how others see you. I asked six people that I worked with regularly as a freelancer to fill in a short questionnaire about me and I did the same. What I saw shocked me.
When the results came back, they all saw me as someone who was open, collaborative, determined and who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Meanwhile, I saw myself as someone acting from a place of fear, constantly protecting what I had and worrying that I would lose it all. I went through the data with a coach trained in analysing the results and they explained that it was common for there to be a gap between how people saw themselves and how others saw them, but they hadn’t seem someone for whom the gap was quite so large in a while. Whatever someone said about me, I seemed to believe the opposite. When I asked them why this was, they suggested that it might be because the traits people saw in me were skills I’d cultivated to help myself feel safe. Now I had that safety and those skills had become a part of who I am but I still didn’t quite trust myself or others not to let me down.
I don’t think I’d ever seen it articulated that clearly before and it brought me up short. Did I really want to be someone who spent the rest of her life operating from a “waiting for the worst to happen” perspective? I did not. And I’ve been a coach myself long enough to know that if you want to do things differently you have to ask yourself, what feels uncomfortable? What do I really want that I’m too scared to ask for or think I can’t get? And the answer for me was, people.
I went freelance in 2016. I’d been a journalist for over decade and I knew I wanted something different. I also knew that after six years of negotiating office politics, casual sexism and the general aggressive competition that goes with working in a big organisation, I wanted a break from it. I didn’t want to have to question whether I was good at my job because of the behaviour of someone in a meeting, I just wanted to get on with it. And I did, very successfully for eight years. I trained as a coach, I built a speaking and facilitation business, working with some of the biggest brands in the world and making a very good living doing it. Plus, it was safe. No more wondering if my boss was trying to get rid of me or feeling like I had to defend my work because it had annoyed a more senior journalist.
Despite at least 80% of my revenue coming from something other than journalism since I started freelancing (which is the way for most journalists by the way, buy a newspaper!), I’ve never quite been able to shake the moniker of “journalist”. I still write, I have a column in Psychologies magazine and occasionally I like to pitch something to a paper just to prove to myself that I’ve still got it, but it hasn’t been what I actually do for a long time. And it hasn’t been what makes me happy for even longer than that.
There is a cache in calling yourself a journalist. People think they understand what it is you do and they want to talk to you about Piers Morgan. When I had nine different revenue streams and wore a minimum of three different hats a day, sticking with “journalist” to describe myself felt like the easy option but it also felt increasingly untrue. I spend my days working with teams and leaders to grow their businesses. I try to keep Mondays and Fridays free to coach amazing women to have even bigger lives. I write books about leadership and management. And on my favourite days, I go on stages around the world and provide advice, inspiration and a bit of comedy to any business that wants to listen. I have a great working life but not much of it could be classed as journalism.
I knew I wanted to find a way to move on, to be known for something else other than my writing but the thought of doing that by myself made my heart sink. It felt like fighting for my identity all over again and all by myself. And then there is the advice that I so often give to my coaching clients, why create something all by yourself when there’s someone out there already doing it brilliantly that you could partner with? As a coach, I am big believer in finding people out there who can help you do the things you want to do and I hit a point in my career when I had to take my own advice.
Last summer I spent a week in a fairytale pink chateau just outside of Paris introducing hundreds of future leaders to the idea of self-development. One of Lea_p’s clients hold an annual training festival for their up and coming employees, and as part of it Lea_p run a half-day programme where we teach these future captains of industry what it means to actually have emotions. It was my first time running the course and I loved it. All the participants left with a feeling that they could be more than who they were when they walked through the door. At the end of the week I was exhausted but really, really happy. I wanted to do it again.
A few months ago, another company called Lea_p in to help a team going through a difficult restructure find a way to work together again. Emmy, one of the founders of Lea_p, and I walked into that day’s training with a sense that it was going to be hard work and it was. But it was also energising and fun and powerful and a little bit incredible. We started the day with a team barely speaking to each other and ended with group hugs, tears and everyone going out to dinner together. On a call with the client a few days later she described the team as “transformed”. I felt a level of pride in my work that I’d never had sitting on the sofa of Good Morning Britain.
And slowly, slowly I realised that if I wanted a different life, I was going to have to step out of my comfort zone a little bit. It sounds strange to say this now but the last job I had before I went freelance hurt me. I was hurt by it. In the same way that we’re hurt in relationships or by our family. It’s nobody’s fault, nobody means to hurt you and yet there’s a lack of care that means it happens anyway. I was going to have to trust that working in a team again wouldn’t be as it was the last time I did it. I was going to have to trust that I’d learned enough about myself to be able to articulate what I need from my teammates and that in turn they’d do their best to accommodate me where they could and still care for me when they couldn’t.
When I worked with Lauren, Emmy and Stephanie, the core team at Lea_p, I felt that care. So I decided to trust them and as I write this I have been a new job for a whole seven days. I know it was the right decision. The funny thing is that on my first day they told me the reason they’d wanted me to join the business was because they’d felt that same care back from me, above all that was what they valued in me. I realised then that this isn’t going to be working in a team as I have known it but working in a team as I have hoped it could be. After nearly fifteen years of writing about how work could be different, it finally is.
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So happy for you 🥹🙌
Harriet you continue to be a real inspiration for me. Best of luck with your new adventure ✨️