This week has marked another semi-significant birthday for me and I am celebrating with a project that has been 5 years in the making.
My Intentional Career, a 10-week online and fully supported coaching program helping women design their career with confidence and purpose came out of an idea discussed with Liz Luya and Allison Warburton at the end of 2019 and early 2020, and we could not wait to get started.
It turned out that life had a few more lessons to teach me – a 1 in 100 year pandemic, businesses having to adapt to survive, children emerging as teenagers and requiring a whole new set of parenting skills we didn’t have, health and ageing issues I’ d never contemplated.
And I was exhausted – despite talking about burnout, self-care and tiredness, I didn’t recognise it in myself.
My lesson during this period was around letting go, loss and grief. We had been losing Dad slowly to Alzheimer’s for a few years but a diagnosis in early 2023 meant that our time with him was going to be short so with Mum, my brothers and our families, our focus turned to Dad and the time we had left. He became our priority.
As someone with limited exposure to grief, I tried logic to get myself through – how lucky was I to have my dad in my life for all this time I told myself and others whenever I felt sad.
It turns out for me logic couldn’t trump grief so when we lost Dad a year ago and I was sadder than logic told me I should be, I did what us Longmires had been taught to do – get up and get on with it.
So I did this day after day but the grief didn’t go away. It kept turning up and then compounding as we continued to lose other loved ones who had been integral to my life, and watched other loved ones lose loved ones with a raw and new understanding of some of what they were going through.
Dad’s birthday in December was a turning point – an unexpected day on a boat in Noosa River in the pouring rain with family and amazing friends old and new, I felt happy for the first time in a long while.
I also realised I needed some time out to recover, refocus, readjust and sleep.
So that’s what the rest of December, January and some of February looked like and it was during this time our conversations started again about the program we talked about back in 2019. It turned out the program had been in development for the last five years – both in discussions and in real life experience.
So we got to work in February and, it turns out when you have been thinking about something for that long, a lot of the blockers fall away.
After a slight delay caused by Cyclone Alfred, we soft-launched the program at the eDiscovery Collab International Women’s Day lunch in March.
This week our dream has become reality as our first cohort begin the My Intentional Career program.
For me it is a program I think of as dedicated to my dear Dad who still had some lessons to teach me in his own quiet way over the last 12 months about what is important.
And I can’t believe I get to do this with two of my amazing friends and colleagues, Liz Luya and Allison Warburton, who made this happen.
This program brings together our shared learnings over three decades of careers in corporates and our own businesses, combined coaching experience across Asia, Australia and the UK, and experience in management, leadership, executive and non-executive roles.
We still have a few seats left in our opening cohort so please message me if you would like to join us and help me celebrate this major milestone and that semi-major birthday!
If now isn’t the right time for you, thanks for visiting our website – please hang around, sign up for our newsletter and webinars, follow us on socials and be part of the Intentional Career movement.
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