You haven't lost your purpose. You've lost the conditions for it.
Purpose recovery coaching for professionals rebuilding after redundancy, retirement or career change - and leadership development for organisations whose decisions determine whether people have to.
Where would you like to start?
I'm here for myself
I've lost a role, lost my footing, or quietly lost interest in a career I worked very hard to build — and I want to do something better with what comes next.
Purpose Recovery Coaching
I'm here for my organisation
I lead and develop people, or I'm responsible for those who do. Something in how we work has stopped working, and I need it to change rather than be surveyed again.
Leadership Development
I'm not sure yet
Start with the free workshop — it costs you ninety minutes and nothing else.
Learn moreThe Four Questions
Whether you are rebuilding your own working life or responsible for four hundred other people's, the same four things decide whether it works. Answer them honestly.
- Can I act? Do my decisions still change anything — or am I mostly waiting to hear?
- Am I good at something? Not was. Am. Have I done anything recently that proved it to me rather than to my CV?
- Do I matter to anyone? Is there a group of people whose week is different because I'm in it?
- Does my story make sense? Can I say who I am and what I'm for, in one breath, without wincing?
Agency. Competence. Belonging. Coherence. When all four are present, purpose looks after itself. When they go, no amount of confidence-building will bring it back — and almost everybody starts there anyway.
Why one person does both
Those four conditions are what collapse when a career ends. They are also, exactly, what leadership creates or destroys every day in people who have lost nothing at all.
A restructure that quietly removes people's decision rights takes away agency. A culture where it isn't safe to try something and get it wrong stops competence ever being built. A reorganisation that breaks up a working team takes away belonging — we count the roles and the reporting lines, and nobody counts the relationships. And a strategy nobody can explain destroys coherence, because if people can't say what the organisation is for, they can't say what they are for inside it.
So I do two things. I rebuild those four conditions in people who have lost them. And I teach leaders to stop dismantling them in the first place.
Same problem, opposite ends. That's why I do both.
We take the first of the four conditions and do it properly. Not talk about it — do it. You leave with one thing you can decide and act on, and you'll understand why that is where we start rather than with the enormous question everybody else hands you.
Next session: Tuesday 29 September, 10:30–12:00.
I'll email you about this session and the next one. One click and you're out, and I won't chase you. I'd rather have twenty people who want to hear from me than two hundred who've stopped opening it.
I have also been made redundant three times, so I am not describing any of this from the outside.
I lecture in leadership at BPP University, I've written two books about recovering from career transitions and about burnout, I host a podcast call The Reframing Room and I've built my coaching on a model tested against the evidence — including throwing out the popular parts that didn't survive it.
That's the whole of it. I've been there, I explored, I learnt, and I've since done it with a lot of people.