My Story: I’ve Been There

I’ve reached two (possibly three, depends how you count) false summits in my career. Each one looked like “the job”, the grown-up one, the dream one, the one you worked hard to win and thought you’d maybe stay in forever. And each one, eventually, wasn’t.

The first came early. I was Director of Comms at a global ad agency, flying around the world presenting trend reports, going to Cannes and relishing it all. It was fast and thrilling. Until I had a baby, came back from maternity leave and discovered my job had quietly disappeared. My new boss had “helpfully” taken the good bits, left me some PR and suggested I focus on promoting him. It was all framed as kindness. There were HR meetings. Lawyers. It got messy, quickly. I left, shocked and enraged. And made the whole thing worse by panic-accepting the first thing I was offered.

That second job looked great… on paper. A well-respected research firm. Serious. But it was all wrong for me. Data-heavy, hierarchical, boring. It drained my energy and, over time, my confidence. I tried to fix it and made some progress but not enough to make it work. Another door opened when a competitor offered me a new job for £100k more a year (highly tied to success metrics of course) but I was already pregnant with baby two by then and I knew enough not to leap. When I think of it now, I’m pretty sure that, had I not had children, I would be running a London agency now. But it didn’t work out that way. And I ended up quitting the agency after baby two with a mortgage, large childcare bill and no plans of what to do next.

I built this programme, and did the research that underpins it, because I never want anyone else to make that mistake.

Which brings us to number three and my first steps towards taking some control. In 2013, I co-founded a new kind of consultancy: Jericho Chambers. It was flexible, hybrid (before hybrid was a word for how we work) and ambitious. I was sure it would be my forever job. And for a while, it was the best version of what work could be. But it was complicated. It had an equitable structure that seemed great in theory but didn’t work in practice. I found myself with a lot of responsibility but lacking the power to change key decisions and felt very conflicted about a lot of them. The work was meaningful, but the emotional stress was high: HR, admin, client dynamics, late nights chasing the bits that gave me energy. I was proud of what we built in some ways. But also depleted and frustrated.

I didn’t fully know it at the time but I’d already started carving a path I didn’t yet know I’d need. Back in job number one, I’d started writing (unpaid) for Management Today. Interviewing parents with big jobs to figure out how anyone was managing (mostly by quietly falling apart behind the scenes). Writing for Management Today led to me being invited to speak at conferences and events (again unpaid) and I started to build a bit of a network and external profile. Then, while at Jericho Chambers, I started to understand how to run a business: the finances, the marketing, leading the team. I had also launched “The Coven”, a network for brilliant, thoughtful women who would become a fierce network of supporters (on the name, there’s a story, don’t take it too seriously).

Bit by bit, I was growing my skills and network and building my own path without consciously planning it. Doing things that brought me joy, energy and inspiration but weren’t part of my job.

In 2018, that path became the main road. My book, The Mother of All Jobs, was published by Bloomsbury and landed on the front of the Sunday Times Magazine. It was the most-read article of the year. My world shifted. This time, I was ready financially, emotionally, professionally to create the working life I wanted

Now, I do the work I care about: helping leaders think differently about the future of work and what it actually means to build a working life that fits. I write, speak, collaborate with sharp and funny people, walk the dog, swim with friends, play bridge and go to the gym.

I got here by slowly, quietly, opening up networks and options long before I knew I’d need them. Since, I’ve seen how many people have similar bumps in their journey but haven’t managed to give attention to the outside world. Yet.