Smart Careers: how to turn a mid-career crisis into a rewarding work life
Book due out Summer 2025 from Bloomsbury
Register here for occasional updates
CAREER CRAFTING
Want to find your work more meaningful? If so, it’s time to craft your career.
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Meaningful work has always mattered to me. Right from my very first full-time job, I knew it was important that I was doing something valuable. Something that made a difference, contributed in some way. And - ideally – be working alongside like-minded people.
For me, this took me into the UK Civil Service first (including five years' planning and delivering the London 2012 Olympics) and then into Higher Education. Now, as a full-time coach and facilitator, I find helping others to find more meaningfulness at work deeply fulfilling.
As a topic, meaningful work regularly comes up in coaching sessions, as well as team and group sessions. This is brilliant. Finding our work meaningful is hugely beneficial for us: it supports our psychological wellbeing and helps us engage and perform better at work. It’s not a silver bullet, though: there’s a growing body of research (including my own published study), into some of the potential dark sides of finding work deeply meaningful.
One thing I’ve noticed through my coaching, is that we can often find a bit of a “meaning deficit” in the mid-part of our career. Perhaps it’s no wonder: working lives are generally getting longer, and so more people are asking challenging questions about whether their work is truly serving them, in emotional, spiritual, and practical terms.
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The good news is that mid-career crises like these can become the springboard to finding greater meaningfulness at work, resulting in huge psychological and performance benefits.​
Career crafting is a skill for life. It helps you to find and sustain a strong sense of purpose over the long-term. Once you understand your personal sources of meaning at work, you can make changes that boost and amplify those experiences. These might be small day-to-day tweaks, or a complete career change, and everything in between. Importantly, these adjustments are unique to you, and dynamic over time.​​​​
In 2024, I launched my Career Crafting programme to 1:1 coaching clients. For 2025, we're super-sizing the impact with a first organisational pilot.
So, if you're feeling a bit 'meh' about your work life, or feel like your people wouldbenefit from finding (or re-finding) their meaningfulness mojo, get in touch.
​My book, Smart Careers: how to turn a mid-career crisis into a rewarding work life, will be published by Bloomsbury in Summer 2025. The book blends real stories, science, and exercises, and will show you how to use career crafting to design, create and sustain a work life that’s deeply satisfying and fulfilling.
Register here to be kept in the loop with occasional updates.​