Be the heroine of your own life
Daunting though it may be, courageously facing the unknown in the workplace can lead to greater professional – and personal – development
Seven years ago, Lesley Roberts took a leave of absence from her corporate career to sign up for a round-the-world yacht race. Her everyday life was becoming too predictable and easy, she felt; at 35, it was time for a challenge; she was optimistic about the adventure that lay ahead. But that was before the weather broke one night during a five-week crossing from China to San Francisco and she found herself clinging on for dear life in the middle of a raging Pacific storm, as the yacht was battered with 50-knot winds and 30-foot waves.
‘That was the one night I thought, “I don’t know if we’re going to see the dawn,”’ she says now. ‘We hung on and hoped for the best.’
It was a seminal moment. Roberts and her crew-mates did make it through, but when she got back to the UK, something had shifted.
She decided to leave her comfortable job and
strike out on her own as an executive development coach, helping companies reach their full potential.
It was a risky venture and Roberts was worried that it might fail. But what gave her renewed confidence was recalling that fearful night wondering whether she’d live or die on the rough waters of the Pacific.
‘It really does put things in perspective,’ Roberts says. ‘I was asking myself, “Am I going to come out of this alive?” So many of my worries to do with work – what if I miss this deadline or this meeting goes badly? – became insignificant compared to that. Because worse things literally do happen at sea.’ So when it came to naming her new company, there was only one option: she called it Brave Conversations.
Bravery matters in the workplace. It can be the difference between staying put in a job that is easy but unfulfilling and taking a gamble that will
potentially reap far greater rewards. And yet it is a quality that many women struggle with. We are quick to self-doubt and often prone to anxiety or overthinking every decision. It means that sometimes we override our gut instincts in a flurry of cautious analysis about what makes logical sense, rather than what might actually result in a more meaningful life.
‘My mantra is: it’s better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission,’ says Jennifer Atkinson, the former CEO, now chairman of the leading luxury-travel company ITC. In 2009, ITC was losing £1 million a year and on the verge of bankruptcy, while the chairman had been diagnosed with cancer and was too ill to make plans for the business.
‘I thought, OK, go for it, what’s the worst that could happen?’ Atkinson says. She wrote up her own rescue strategy, took it round to the chairman’s home, and he immediately appointed her the new chief executive. At the time, she was in her early thirties, and had never run a business. ‘I just didn’t let myself think about it too much, or I might have talked myself out of it.’
I too know the value of striking out without overanalysing the possible consequences. Until two years ago, I was a staff features writer on a national newspaper. It was, in many ways, a dream job: I had security, a pension, likeable colleagues and I wrote about a wide variety of subjects. But I had been there for eight years and felt stuck in a rut. Plus, I had started writing novels and I wanted to devote more time to that. After a long time agonising, I decided to go freelance. Plenty of people thought I’d gone mad, but it came down to a single pressing question: what kind of life did I want to lead? The one I desired for myself, or the one other people mistakenly thought was best for me?
So I left my job. Looking back, I’m astonished I found the bravery to make that change and proud that the courage has paid off. It has made me feel so much stronger in myself, because I’ve realised that bravery is a muscle that needs flexing. Being brave once means you’re more able to do it again. You have built up your emotional resilience.
This is something that detective superintendent Tor Garnett
knows well. At 32, she has already worked her way up through the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, from being a bobby on the beat in Hackney, to leading specialist crime investigations and co-founding Police Now, an initiative to get more graduates into policing. It’s a job that required an enormous amount of bravery from day one. She says one of the moments when she can remember being most frightened was when she was called out to deal with her first suicide.
‘I wanted to be incredibly respectful to the person that had died and very careful with his body, and to be empathetic and supportive of the family – and also do the investigation as professionally as I could. I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, am I going to let myself and everyone else down?” It was that moment of “Maybe I want to go home.”
‘But you get through that first moment, and then you get through the next bit and the bit after that and in the end, you remember it’s not actually about you and your emotions. It’s about serving the public and that gets you through.’
Now that Garnett is in a position of responsibility where she is required to manage teams, she often deals with her nerves by recalling that experience: ‘I overprepare, I make endless lists, but in the end, I remind myself that people just want you to be good-hearted and try. Your own judgement of perfection is actually nonsense. For me, courage is linked to commitment and to caring. People see quite quickly if you care, not whether you’re wearing the right shoes.’ In other words, you don’t need to be perfect, just courageous. After all, worse things happen at sea.