GIVE YOURSELF THE GIFT OF CAREER COACHING
Meet our new career columnist, Alice Olins, who thinks the best thing you can invest in this month is yourself
Wise words from our new career columnist
Well, this is exciting! I’m Alice Olins, founder of the Step Up Club, a leading female career and business-coaching community, and your new work columnist. Every month, I’ll share my expertise to help get you where you want to be in your career. To begin, I’m going to jump straight into professional self-care, which is, I suspect, a concept you might never have considered. If you’re anything like I used to be, you excel at making sure everyone else’s needs are met, but when it comes to you and your work? Pah! No time or energy for that. The thing is, preaching at the altar of general self-care (phone off at 9pm, mindful body-mapping every other Sunday) does very little if your work-self feels unsatisfied and frustrated. When work sucks, life sucks. Most of us naturally arrive at a kind of mid-career crisis somewhere between our 30s and 40s. That’s normal; what’s not okay is to endure your work status quo if it’s zapping your confidence and leaving you down.
Whether you have identified your next professional move but haven’t the foggiest idea how you’ll get there, harbour unrequited dreams of setting something up on your own, want to return to the workplace but don’t know how, or are managing some kind of other work quandary, please put professional self-care at the top of your current to-do list. In short, that means investing in yourself when it comes to work. It encompasses having a mindset open to self-improvement, utilising and expanding your network (don’t worry, I can show you how to do this in a non-fear-inducing way), looking for mentors who can share their expertise with you, committing to growing your confidence and so much in between. What’s exciting is that it doesn’t need to feel onerous. There are plenty of schools of thought that say 10 minutes a day is enough to make an exponential difference to your career or business outcomes. And the thinking is that if you put the work into nourishing yourself now, you will have the capacity to fly when the right opportunities come your way.
For total transparency, several years ago I navigated my own career crossroads – pivoting from journalism to authorhood, followed by a slightly unexpected move into entrepreneurship. It hasn’t been an easy ride; what I’ve learned along the way, though, is to trust my instincts, rely on the amazing women around me and be open to learning new skills on several fronts at the same time. Oh, and how to turn a failure into a win, but that’s for another column…
Today, I stand before you as the proud owner of Step Up’s new membership club, which brings together all of the strands of my work life to date. It’s the best bits of my book, podcast, one-to-one coaching sessions, the school I run in central London and the community I’ve been building for other like-minded working women – all wrapped into one very convenient, direct-to-your-device place. And I’d love to welcome you in, too.