Hey Lovely!
Breaking the Timeline is a weekly newsletter by Shana Francis, Senior Lecturer, CMI Level 7 Leadership Coach and Mentor, and someone building a coaching business and personal brand alongside a full-time career and a competitive training schedule.
This newsletter is about what it actually looks like to do multiple things seriously at once. Not the highlight reel. The honest version.
Each week covers careers, early leadership, personal development, and what it means to build a full life without flattening yourself to fit a conventional path. The stuff nobody says out loud in your workplace. The stuff your training programme didn’t prepare you for.
If you’re an early-career professional who refuses to pick one lane — this is for you.
Welcome to Breaking the Timeline, where early-career teachers and ambitious young professionals come when they’re done waiting for someone to greenlight their next move. If you’ve ever felt too qualified for where you are, too early for what you want, or too much for rooms that weren’t built for you, you’re in the right place.
What you’ll find here:
This isn’t just a newsletter. Breaking the Timeline lives here as both a Substack and a podcast, honest, diary-led writing and real conversations on career design, education and leadership, life beyond the conventional script, and what it actually looks like to build something while still becoming someone. No corporate polish. No waiting for your turn, energy. Just real talk from someone in it with you.
My career TLDR:
Started as a PE teacher, became Head of Year, and now train the next generation of teachers as a Senior Lecturer in Initial Teacher Education, while continuing to study and build a name for myself in Education Leadership.
Built a coaching business from scratch, supporting early-career teachers and young professionals to design careers on their own terms.
Avid Gym girly training for hybrid competitions like HYROX, Athx and Turf Games, content creator, and host of the Breaking the Timeline podcast, because yes, you can hold all of that at once.
Let’s be friends
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Follow me on YouTube to watch my Podcast — this also might be your jam
