You sit down for your appraisal. You’ve been doing good work, you know the systems, you know the politics, and you’ve built the credibility. Your manager looks at your paperwork, nods, and asks the question that’s supposed to be the obvious next step:

“So, are we looking at putting you forward for the senior leadership track next year?”

And for the first time in your life, you hesitate.

The hesitation isn’t a lack of drive

You are ambitious. You have always been ambitious. You’re the person who did the extra reading, took on the extra projects, and actually cared about the quality of your work.

But you look at the rung above you and feel nothing but dread.

Nobody sits you down and tells you this is going to happen. The system just assumes that if you’re good at your job, you naturally want to manage the people doing your job. That is the only way to grow is upwards, into the exact institutional structure that is currently exhausting the people ten years ahead of you.

I was 27 when I realised the maths of traditional career progression no longer made sense to me. I was looking at the people in the roles I was supposed to be aiming for. They were stretched impossibly thin. Their reward for absorbing a massive amount of institutional friction was a marginal bump in monthly pay.

I became a senior lecturer at 28. I know what it looks like from the inside.

And the hesitation you feel when you’re offered the traditional path? That’s an observation.

The number that’s making HR panic

I was reading a Deloitte report this week that finally put a number on this feeling.

They surveyed Gen Z and Millennial professionals, and the headline statistic stopped me mid-scroll: only 6% say achieving a leadership position is their primary career goal (Deloitte, 2024).

Six per cent.

Institutions are looking at that number and spiralling. There are articles circulating right now about the “leadership pipeline paradox”, how young professionals are actively resisting traditional promotions (Economic Times HR, 2026). The corporate narrative is that we’ve lost our ambition. That we just want to quietly quit and do the bare minimum.

They are entirely misreading the room.

We haven’t lost our ambition. We’ve redirected it. We watched middle managers burn out for a title that doesn’t pay the mortgage, and we collectively decided to play a different game.

What the internet gets wrong about the alternative

Here’s where it gets frustrating.

If you go online and say, “I want more from my life, but I don’t want to be a middle manager,” the algorithm immediately serves you the most unhelpful advice imaginable. Quit your job. Escape the 9-to-5. Passive income. Working from a beach. Your career is framed as a prison you need to break out of.

But what if you actually like your profession? What if you’ve spent years building real credibility, in education, in the public sector, in your field, and you don’t want to throw it away just because the promotion structure is broken?

You don’t want to escape your career. You want to expand around it.

There’s a word for this strategy now. It’s called polyworking, the deliberate approach of keeping your primary career as an anchor while building secondary streams of income, identity, and creative output around it (Grey Journal, 2024).

This is the Anchor Model. And it’s exactly what we’re doing.

What the Anchor Model actually looks like

We are not building side hustles so we can dramatically hand in our notice and become full-time influencers.

We are building alongside our careers to gain optionality. An identity that is bigger than our job title. The knowledge that if the institution changes, funding gets cut, or the culture turns toxic, our entire professional worth isn’t tied to a single HR department.

I won’t pretend it’s easy. It’s 45 minutes carved out in the evening when you’re already mentally done. It’s deciding what to drop so you can keep the important things moving. It looks nothing like the aesthetic morning routines you see on TikTok.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to: the friction of building something for yourself feels entirely different to the friction of institutional bureaucracy.

One drains you. The other builds you.

The data says something institutions don’t want to hear

There’s a brilliant irony in all of this panic.

HR departments are terrified of us having other things going on. They see a side business or a personal brand as a distraction, proof that you’ve got one foot out the door.

But the research says the exact opposite.

A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that having a secondary income stream actually increases commitment to your primary job (MDPI, 2024).

When you’re not relying on your employer to fulfil every single one of your professional, creative, and financial needs, you show up better. You’re less reactive to the daily politics. You don’t spiral when a project doesn’t go your way, because that project is no longer the only thing defining your worth.

You become a more grounded professional because your entire identity isn’t resting on your line manager's shoulders.

Institutions should be begging us to build alongside our careers. Instead, they make us feel like we have to hide it.

The permission barrier

This is the thing I want to talk about directly.

There’s an unspoken belief that wanting more than your job title is somehow disloyal. The staffroom dynamic. The worry about what people will think if they see you posting on LinkedIn. The quiet assumption that you haven’t “earned” the right to take up space outside your contracted hours.

I spent too long inside that barrier. I waited for someone to tell me it was okay to be a senior lecturer, a founder, and a coach all at once. I waited for the system to give me permission to be more than one thing.

The system is never going to give you that permission. It wasn’t built to.

What I actually think you should do

If you’re in the first few years of your career, looking at the path ahead and feeling that quiet, nagging sense that being good at your job isn’t the whole game, you’re right. It isn’t.

You don’t have to choose between being a credible, committed professional and building something of your own. You don’t have to buy into the false binary of either climbing a broken ladder or quitting everything to become an entrepreneur.

Keep the anchor. Do the work. Build the rest of your life around it, on your own terms, in the margins of your own day.

The most ambitious thing you can do right now isn’t fighting for a promotion that will exhaust you.

It’s deciding that your career is just one part of a much bigger professional life, and then quietly, consistently, going to build the rest of it.

Speak soon,

Shana

References

Deloitte (2024) *Gen Z and Millennial Survey 2024*. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/gen-z-and-millennial-workforce-trends.html (Accessed: 25 June 2026).

Economic Times HR SEA (2026) ‘Leadership pipeline paradox: Millennials hesitate, Gen Z resists traditional promotions in 2026’. Available at: https://hrsea.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/employee-experience/leadership-pipeline-paradox-millennials-hesitate-gen-z-resists-traditional-promotions-in-2026/128938764 (Accessed: 25 June 2026).

Grey Journal (2024) ‘Polyworking: Career strategy for founders’. Available at: https://greyjournal.net/hustle/grow/polyworking-career-strategy-founders/ (Accessed: 25 June 2026).

MDPI (2024) ‘Side hustles and workplace attachment’. *International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health*, 6(2), p.21. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7116/6/2/21 (Accessed: 25 June 2026).

You submitted the application. You prepared for the panel. You answered every question as honestly as you could, drew on every example you had, and walked out thinking: I gave it my all. Then the email came. “On this occasion, we will not be progressing your application.” No real explanation. Just that quiet, disorienting feeling of having done everything right and still not getting there.

If that’s where you are right now, I want you to hear this first: it almost certainly wasn’t your teaching.

I know that sounds like something people say to make you feel better. It isn’t. I’ve been in enough rooms, had enough conversations with educators at every stage of their careers, and watched enough brilliant people get passed over for TLR and middle leadership roles to say this with complete confidence: teaching quality, in most cases, is not the deciding factor.

The people making those decisions already know you can teach. That’s not what they’re trying to find out.

What they’re trying to find out is something different. And most applicants, including me the first time around, don’t realise that until after the rejection.

Here’s what I’ve learned. There are three gaps that consistently separate the shortlisted from the overlooked. All three are fixable. None of them requires you to become a different person. But you do have to know they exist before you can close them.

The gap nobody names in the feedback conversation

Before we get into the three, I want to say something about the feedback process, because I think it does a lot of damage.

Most post-rejection feedback in schools is well-intentioned and almost completely useless. You’ll hear things like “develop your whole-school perspective” or “evidence your impact more clearly.” Technically accurate. Practically meaningless. Because what you actually need to know is why those things weren’t already visible in your application, and what specifically would have changed the outcome.

That’s what I’m going to try to give you here.

01. You were invisible before you applied

Not invisible in your classroom. Invisible to the people making the decision.

There is a difference between being excellent and being known for your excellence. And that difference is the first gap.

Senior leaders cannot advocate for what they haven’t seen. If your impact lives entirely within your four walls, it doesn’t exist institutionally. The people sitting on that panel need to have encountered your work before your name appears on an application form. Leadership decisions are, at their core, trust decisions. And trust is built through repeated exposure over time, not through a forty-five-minute panel.

Here’s the counterintuitive part: this is not about self-promotion. It’s not about being louder or more visible for the sake of it. It’s about making sure your work has natural reach beyond your room. There’s a difference between performing visibility and creating it through the genuine extension of your practice.

Ask yourself honestly: before you submitted that application, had the decision-makers seen your impact in action? Had they heard your name in a conversation about something that mattered? If the answer is no, that’s not a reflection of your ability. It’s a visibility gap. And visibility gaps are solvable.

Visibility isn’t self-promotion. It’s making sure your work has reached beyond your room.

What closing this gap looks like:

• Volunteer to present something at a staff meeting. Not to perform, but to share something genuinely useful that came out of your classroom. Make your thinking visible in the spaces where senior leaders are present.

• Offer to support a colleague in a different department with something you’ve already figured out. Expertise shared across departments travels.

• Ask to be involved in a working group, even in a small capacity, before you need the credit. Show up before it counts.

• When you do these things, don’t do them quietly. Document them. Talk about them in the staffroom. Let the work be seen.

You don’t need to be louder. You need to be seen doing the thing you’re already doing.

02. You were still thinking like a classroom teacher

This is the one that stings a little. I’m going to say it anyway.

If your application was full of evidence about what you do in your lessons, you were answering the wrong question.

The panel wasn’t asking whether you’re a good teacher. They already knew that. They were asking whether you can think and act beyond your classroom, and whether you’ve already started doing it. TLRs go to people who have already begun to lead before the title exists. Not people who are ready to start leading once they get the title. That distinction matters more than most people realise.

Demonstrated whole-school perspective means being able to point to something that created a measurable impact for students or colleagues outside your direct remit. A project you contributed to. An initiative you helped shape. A shift in practice that rippled outward from your room into someone else’s.

If your application is full of “I do this in my lessons,” you’re answering the wrong question.

If you don’t have that evidence yet, that’s the work. No more lesson observations. Not a better personal statement. The work is going out and doing something that matters beyond your four walls, and then being able to talk about what changed because of it.

What this looks like practically:

• Identify one area of whole-school need that intersects with something you’re already good at. Not a grand initiative. One specific, real problem you could help solve.

• Approach your line manager or a senior leader with a specific, small proposal. Not “I’d love to get more involved.” Something concrete: “I’ve noticed X, and I think I could help by doing Y. Can we talk about it?”

• Document what you do and what changes as a result, even informally. A short email to your line manager after the fact. A note in your CPD log. Evidence doesn’t have to be formal to be real.

• Think in terms of impact on colleagues and students you don’t directly teach. That’s the shift. From “my students” to “our students.”

The goal is not to be busy. The goal is to have a story to tell about something that mattered beyond your classroom.

03. You participated. You didn’t own.

This is the distinction that separates strong applications from the rest. And it’s the one most people don’t realise they’re missing until they’re sitting in the feedback conversation, wondering what went wrong.

Participation says: I was involved.

Ownership says: this didn’t exist before I made it happen.

Leadership, at every level, is evidenced by authorship. A working group you initiated and drove. A new approach to assessment you designed from scratch. A cross-departmental collaboration that you built, not joined. Something that has your fingerprints on it in a way that couldn’t be replicated by anyone else who happened to be in the room.

Here’s the counterintuitive part: the project doesn’t have to be big. In fact, the smaller and more specific it is, the more convincing it reads on an application. A grand whole-school initiative nobody asked for is participation with ambition. A targeted, well-documented solution to one real problem is leadership. Panels can tell the difference.

You don’t need a title to lead. You need to have led something.

What ownership looks like in practice:

• Think back over the last two years. Is there anything that exists because of you specifically? A resource, a process, a new approach to something that was broken? If not, that’s your next project.

• Start small and specific. A shared resource bank. A peer observation structure. A new approach to a recurring problem in your department. It doesn’t have to be grand. It has to be yours.

• When you do it, document it properly. What was the gap? What did you build? What changed? Who benefited? Write it down as you go, not retrospectively.

• Own it in conversation. Not defensively, but clearly. “I started this because I noticed...” is a leadership sentence. Practice saying it.

You don’t need a title to lead. You need to have led something.

What this means for your next application

Your teaching practice earns you consideration. These three things secure the role.

And here’s what I want to leave you with, because I think it matters: none of this is about becoming someone you’re not. It’s about making what you’re already doing more visible, more intentional, and more outward-facing. The ability is there. The gap is almost always strategic, not personal.

You are not someone who failed to get promoted. You now know exactly what the gap was.

That’s a different position entirely.

Close the gap. Document the work. Apply again.

If this resonated, this is what Breaking the Timeline is every week. The stuff nobody says out loud in the staffroom. Subscribe below.

- Shana x

And I want to be clear about that.

I knew. It wasn’t a gradual realisation that crept up on me one day in the staffroom. It was a background hum I woke up with and went to sleep with for the entirety of those two years. The pupils were great. My observations were strong. I was genuinely good at the job.

And I was slowly dying inside every single day.

So why did I stay?

Because good at it felt like a reason. Because leaving felt ungrateful. Because I didn’t yet have a name for the thing I was actually supposed to be doing, staying felt safer than the alternative. And because, and this is the part nobody talks about, being excellent at something you’ve outgrown is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can have.

You can’t point to anything broken. Nothing’s wrong, technically. And yet something is very, very wrong.

That gap between competence and alignment is where many ambitious people quietly lose years.

The cost of being excellent in the wrong room

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being good at something that isn’t quite yours. It’s not the exhaustion of failure. It’s the exhaustion of performing at full capacity in a role that only uses a fraction of who you are.

I’ve thought about this a lot in the years since, particularly through the lens of what I now understand about integration. The idea that no area of your life improves in isolation, that your career and your sense of self and your physical and mental state are not separate departments, they’re one system. When you’re misaligned in one area, you feel it everywhere.

In that sports hall, I was professionally competent and personally invisible. I was showing up fully in one room and not at all in the other rooms I was capable of filling. And that invisibility, the parts of you that never get activated, that’s what costs you the most. Not the hard days. Not the difficult classes. The chronic underuse of yourself.

I didn’t have language for that at the time. I just knew something was off.

Why do we stay when we know?

This is what I actually want to talk about, because I suspect some of you are sitting in your own version of that sports hall right now.

You know. Maybe you’ve known for a while. And you’re still there.

Subscribe now

There are a few things that keep people in misaligned situations longer than they should be, and I want to name them plainly because they’re rarely named:

1) Gratitude as a trap.

You’re grateful for the opportunity. You don’t want to seem like you think you’re too good for it. You’ve been told, explicitly or implicitly, to be thankful for what you have. And so the gratitude calcifies into obligation, and the obligation keeps you stuck.

2) Competence as identity.

When you’re good at something, it becomes part of how you see yourself. Leaving it means dismantling part of your self-concept before you’ve built the new one. That’s genuinely uncomfortable, and most people avoid it for as long as possible.

3) No name for the next thing.

This is the big one. It’s very difficult to leave something for nothing. And if you can’t yet articulate what you’re moving towards, the familiar, even the misaligned familiar, will always feel safer than the unnamed alternative.

4) Waiting for permission.

The belief that someone, a manager, a mentor, a life event, or external circumstances, needs to confirm that you’re ready or that it’s time. That permission almost never comes, because no one is watching your life as closely as you are, and no one else has access to the information you have about yourself.

None of these is a character flaw. They’re structural. They’re the predictable output of systems that don’t reward people for taking up more space than they’ve been assigned.

What the delay actually gave me

Here’s what I know now that I couldn’t have articulated then: those two years weren’t wasted. They weren’t ideal. But they weren’t wasted.

They showed me, at granular resolution, what it costs a person to be misaligned. I know what it looks like when someone is performing competence while quietly eroding. I can recognise it in the people I coach because I lived it. That’s not something you learn from a textbook or a leadership programme. You learn it by staying when you should have left and then eventually leaving anyway.

They also clarified what I actually wanted. Being excellent in the wrong room made the right room obvious in a way it might not have been if I’d stumbled into it earlier. Contrast is information. The misalignment was in the data.

And they gave me a timeline that is entirely mine. The Senior Lecturer role at 28, the business I am building for young professionals, none of it would look the way it does if I’d moved differently. I’m not saying the delay was necessary. I’m saying it happened, and it produced something real, and I’m not interested in running a parallel-universe calculation on what could have been different.

The thing nobody gives you permission to do

You don’t need to have the full picture before you start moving.

You don’t need to have a name for the next thing. You don’t need to feel ready. You don’t need to have proven to enough people that you’re capable of more before you go and do more.

The version of you that’s sitting in the wrong room, knowing, is already carrying the answer. The knowing is the data. The discomfort is evidence that you’ve outgrown the container.

What you need is not more clarity. It takes more courage in the absence of clarity.

That’s the thing I’d go back and tell the girl in the sports hall. You don’t need permission to take it seriously.

The question I’ll leave you with

Where in your life are you currently being excellent in the wrong room?

Write it down somewhere. Not to fix it today. Just to stop pretending you don’t already know.

The knowing is the beginning.

See you soon.

Shana x

Someone close to me told me recently that I was too much. And I want to be honest about what happened in my body when I heard that, because it wasn’t anger, it wasn’t defensiveness. It was this quiet, sinking shock. The kind that comes when you didn’t know you were making someone feel a certain way, and suddenly you’re retracing every interaction, wondering where you got it wrong.

I didn’t see it coming. And that’s what made it sit so heavily.

In this issue:

• What it actually feels like to be called too much by someone you love

• Why coasting isn’t the problem, misalignment is

• The loneliness of building when the people around you aren’t

• Whether the people in your corner are actually in your corner

• What I’m doing with this feeling, right now, today

I want to say this clearly before anything else: I am not writing this from the other side. I haven’t figured it out. I’m still in it. But I’ve learned that sometimes the most useful thing isn’t a tidy conclusion, it’s someone saying out loud the thing you’ve been feeling quietly, so you know you’re not alone in it.

Subscribe now

So here it is.

What “too much” actually means

I’ve been called intimidating before. Mostly by men, which, if I’m honest, has always made me more confused than anything else. Intimidating to whom? For what? For having opinions, for knowing what I want, for not making myself smaller to make someone else more comfortable in the room?

I’ve dimmed myself for people in the past. More times than I’d like to admit. Pulled back on my excitement about something because I could feel it was landing wrong. Stopped talking about what I was building because the energy in the room shifted when I did. Shrunk. Not dramatically, just enough. Just enough to fit.

And every single time I did that, something in me knew it was wrong. Not because the other person was wrong to feel what they felt. But because the version of me that was shrinking wasn’t real. And you cannot build anything real from a version of yourself that isn’t.

So when it happened again recently, when someone close to me used those words, what hit me hardest wasn’t the words themselves. It was the realisation that I’d somehow still not fully given myself permission to take up space, even now. Even after everything I’ve built. Even after deciding, over and over again, that I was done making myself smaller.

The shock was about that. Not about them.

There is nothing wrong with coasting

I want to say this carefully because I mean it genuinely.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being content. Having a job that pays your bills, coming home, switching off, and being okay with where you are. Not everyone needs to be building something. Not everyone needs to be optimising, growing, pushing. Some people have decided that peace is enough, and I think that takes its own kind of courage.

But here’s what I’ve had to accept: for some of us, that is simply not enough. Not because we’re better. Not because our way is right and theirs is wrong. But because we are wired differently. Because the version of ourselves that coasts is not a version we can live in without feeling like we’re disappearing.

And when you’re that kind of person, surrounded by people who are genuinely happy to stay still, the gap doesn’t just feel like a lifestyle difference. It starts to feel like loneliness.

Nobody really talks about this honestly. The loneliness of being the one in your friendship group, your family, your immediate world, who wants more. Who wakes up thinking about what they’re building. Who finds it hard to switch off because the thing they’re working towards actually means something to them.

It’s not that the people around you are bad people. They love you. They’re rooting for you in the way they know how. But there’s a particular kind of isolation that comes from not being able to share the full version of what’s going on inside you, because every time you try, the energy changes. People get uncomfortable. They go quiet, or they make a joke, or they say something that’s meant to be grounding but lands like a ceiling.

And then you start to wonder: is it me? Am I being too intense? Should I care less? Would it be easier if I just wanted less?

The answer, by the way, is no. Wanting less would not make you easier to be around. It would just make you less yourself. And there is no version of that which ends well.

Are the people in your corner actually in your corner?

This is the question I keep coming back to. And I think it’s one of the most important and most uncomfortable questions you can ask yourself if you’re building something.

Because there’s a version of support that looks like love but is actually fear. Fear that you’ll change. Fear that you’ll outgrow the dynamic. Fear that your growth somehow reflects on them, or asks something of them that they’re not ready to give. It doesn’t make them bad people. But it does make them the wrong people to take counsel from about your life.

Real support doesn’t flinch when you share your goals. Real support asks questions and means them. Real support is honest with you, but the honesty is in service of you moving forward, not in service of you staying put.

I’ve been sitting with the question of who in my life genuinely does that. Not who says the right things, but who actually shows up in a way that makes me more myself, not less.

It’s a shorter list than I’d like. But it’s a real one.

Now I don’t have a clean answer. I told you I was still in it, and I meant that.

What I do know is that I am not going to dim myself again. Not for this, not for anyone. The version of me that shrinks to make a room more comfortable has never produced anything worth having, not in my career, not in my relationships, not in my own sense of who I am.

I also know that the feeling of being too much is sometimes just being in the wrong room. And the work is not to become less. The work is to find, build, and protect the rooms where the full version of you is not just tolerated but genuinely wanted.

That’s what I’m working on.

If you’re in this too, if you’ve been called too much, too intense, too ambitious, too focused, I want you to know that the problem has never been the too. The problem is the room.

Find better rooms. Be patient with yourself while you do.

And please don’t shrink.

I mean that.

Shana 🖤

Some of what I stopped doing, I’m slightly embarrassed it took me this long to figure out. Other bits felt genuinely hard to let go of. All of it changed something.

In this issue:

• Ten things I quietly stopped doing when I got serious about my career.

• Why each one was costing me more than I realised.

• A practical action attached to every single point, because insight without action is just entertainment.

• The one I think will hit hardest for most of you.

I’m sharing this because I know I’m not the only one who has been doing some of these things on autopilot. And sometimes the most useful thing isn’t a strategy. It’s someone saying: “you can stop doing that now. It’s costing you”.

Subscribe now

Here we go:

1. I stopped explaining my moves.

I used to justify every decision, as if I needed someone’s approval before I could act. A new role, a pivot, a project I wanted to try, I’d build a case for it before I’d even committed to it myself. And most of the time, the people I was explaining myself to weren’t even asking.

What I realised is that over-explaining is a confidence tell. It’s the behaviour of someone who hasn’t fully decided yet. When you’re sure, you don’t need to convince anyone. You just move.

What you can do: The next decision you make, big or small, notice whether you feel the urge to explain it before anyone asks. Sit with that urge instead of acting on it. Make the decision first. The explanation, if it’s ever needed, can come later.

2. I stopped giving my time to people who don’t treat it as valuable.

This one sounds obvious. It took me longer than it should have to actually act on it.

Time spent in the wrong meetings, the wrong relationships, the wrong obligations is not neutral. It is actively taken from the right ones. Every yes to something misaligned is a no to something that matters, and if you’re ambitious and you’re building, those nos compound quickly.

What you can do: Audit the last two weeks. Where did your time go? Write down the commitments that left you drained versus the ones that left you energised. One person or obligation will probably jump out. That’s the one to address first.

3. I stopped chasing every new trend.

I used to be so obsessed with what was next that I’d move on before I’d mastered what was in front of me. New platform, new format, new framework, every few weeks, something else to chase. And I stayed stuck at surface-level competence in everything because I never stayed long enough to go deep.

Now I go back to basics first. I ask whether I’ve actually executed the fundamentals well before I start looking at what else is out there. Most of the time, the answer is not yet.

What you can do: Pick one thing you’ve been doing consistently but not excellently. Before you add anything new this month, spend the next two weeks trying to genuinely improve that one thing. Depth beats breadth in the long run, every time.

4. I stopped trying to do everything alone.

There’s a version of independence that looks like strength and is actually just fear, fear of being seen to need help, fear of owing someone something, fear of not being enough on your own. I lived in that version for a long time.

The right people in your corner will get you further faster than any amount of solo grinding. Not because they do the work for you. Because they see what you can’t see from where you’re standing. They open doors you didn’t know existed. They tell you the truth when everyone else is being polite.

What you can do: Identify one person further ahead than you in an area you care about. Not to ask for a favour, just to start a genuine conversation. One message. That’s the whole action. Most people who’ve built something want to pay it forward. You just have to give them the opening.

5. I stopped waiting for someone to tell me it’s my turn.

No one is coming. That’s the uncomfortable truth beneath many stalled careers: the quiet hope that someone with more authority or visibility will eventually notice you and grant you permission to go.

I decided that when I feel ready enough, that’s enough. Not perfectly ready. Not risk-free. Ready enough. And I go anyway.

What you can do: Name the thing you’ve been waiting to feel ready for. Write it down. Now ask yourself honestly, what is the actual cost of waiting another six months? And what becomes possible if you start now, imperfectly? The answer to that second question is usually more important than the first.

6. I stopped setting financial goals without understanding where the money is actually coming from.

Ambition without a realistic plan is just wishful thinking, especially in this economy. I used to set income goals that were completely disconnected from any real mechanism. I wanted the number without having to work backwards to the route. That’s not a goal. That’s a wish.

What you can do: Take your current financial goal, whether that’s a salary, a revenue figure, or a savings target, and work backwards. What would need to be true for that number to happen? How many clients, what rate, what hours, what opportunities? If you can’t answer those questions, the goal isn’t real yet. Make it real first.

7. I stopped avoiding the things I’m scared of failing at.

Avoidance kept me small for a long time. There were things I wanted, opportunities I could see clearly, that I kept circling around without ever actually going for them. And the story I told myself was that I was being strategic, patient, measured. The honest version was: I was scared of trying and it not working.

Doing it scared has done more for my growth than staying comfortable ever did. I stopped shrinking to avoid the possibility of getting it wrong.

What you can do: What have you been circling? The thing that comes up when you think about what you actually want but haven’t gone for yet. Write it down. Then identify one action, one that would move you towards it this week. Not the whole thing. Just one step in the direction of it.

8. I stopped speaking only to people in my industry.

Some of the most useful perspectives I’ve ever received have come from people who had nothing to do with education or coaching. A conversation with someone in tech, or finance, or a completely different creative field, will show you your own industry’s blind spots in a way that talking to peers never can.

Your industry echo chamber is comfortable. It’s also limiting.

What you can do: This month, have one meaningful conversation with someone who works in a completely different field to you. Not a networking event, a real conversation. Ask them how they think about career progression, about building credibility, about navigating their industry. You will come back with at least one idea you wouldn’t have had otherwise.

9. I stopped only looking at what’s happening in the UK.

There is a whole world of people building differently, thinking differently, operating with different constraints and different freedoms, and I want that perspective in my corner. The way career development, content creation, and entrepreneurship work in the US, Africa, and Asia (and that is only a tiny fraction of the amazing places out there) isn't the same as it is here. And some of what those ecosystems have figured out is years ahead of the rest.

What you can do: Follow three creators, thinkers, or professionals from outside the UK who are working in your space. Not to copy what they’re doing, but to expand your frame of reference. Spend thirty days paying attention to how they think. You’ll start to see patterns you’d been missing.

10. I stopped blaming other people for my results.

This is the one that required the most honesty. Because sometimes the reason things aren’t moving is genuinely external, structural barriers are real, and I don’t believe in pretending otherwise. But sometimes it’s just me. My habits, my decisions, my consistency, my follow-through.

Being able to say that, not as self-criticism, but as self-awareness, is one of the most useful things I’ve learned. When I own my results, I have agency over them. When I outsource them to circumstance, I don’t.

What you can do: Look at one area of your career or life that isn’t where you want it to be. Ask yourself, honestly, not harshly, what part of this is in my control? You don’t have to fix everything at once. Just name the part that’s yours. That’s where the work starts.

None of this happened because I read the right book or attended the right seminar.

Most of it came from making mistakes, noticing the pattern, and deciding to do something different. The quietest shifts have had the loudest impact.

Pick the one that landed hardest. Just one. And do the thing underneath it this week.

Reply and tell me which one it was 🖤

Signing off now,

Shana x

The first time I properly used AI beyond a fancy search engine, it slightly embarrassed me. I realised how much thinking I had been outsourcing without even noticing (not sure if everyone is feeling the same here). Not to AI. To other people’s frameworks. Other people’s career timelines. Other people’s idea of what the next right move looked like for someone in my position. I’d been running someone else’s operating system for my life, and I hadn’t stopped long enough to question it.

That’s what this issue is actually about.

In this issue:

• Why are there two completely different ways to use AI, and only one of them actually develops you

• The three shifts that change everything about how you engage with it

• What I’ve been quietly building that connects all of this

• And a question I want you to sit with this week

The way most people use AI is making them worse at their jobs

And if you do not change your habits now, things will only get worse.

There’s a version of AI use that looks productive, drafting emails faster, summarising documents, and generating first drafts, and it is productive, in a narrow sense. Tasks get done. Time gets saved. But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re essentially outsourcing the cognitive work that builds your actual capability. The thinking you skip today is the skill you don’t have tomorrow.

Sam Altman made an observation recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He noticed that older generations tend to use AI the way they used Google, as a search engine, a shortcut to an answer. Younger generations, particularly Gen Z, are using it completely differently. As a life advisor. As a thinking partner. Almost as an operating system for how they navigate decisions.

That gap in mindset is going to matter more than most people realise.

The two modes

There’s task outsourcing: you give AI a command, it produces output, and you move on. It saves time. It doesn’t build you.

Then there’s thinking partnership: you bring AI the full context of a real problem. Your actual goals, your specific constraints, your past attempts, the thing you’re afraid you’re missing. You use it to stress-test your thinking rather than replace it. You walk away sharper, not just faster.

The difference isn’t about the tool. It’s about the intention you bring to it.

The three shifts

The first shift is giving context, not just commands. Instead of “write me a response to this email,” try “here’s the situation, here’s what I’m trying to achieve, here’s what I’ve already considered, help me think through what the right move is.” The quality of what you get back is incomparable.

The second shift is using AI to stress-test, not just produce. Before a difficult conversation, a negotiation, a job application, or a business decision, run it through first. Ask AI to find the weaknesses in your argument. Ask it what questions you haven’t considered. Ask it to push back. This is the shift that changes how you show up in high-stakes moments.

The third shift is building an ongoing relationship with it, not just using it transactionally. This means giving AI sustained context about who you are, what you’re working towards, and how you think. Every interaction builds on the last. Over time, it starts to function less like a tool and more like a genuinely useful thinking partner who actually knows you.

What I’ve been building

This third shift is what led me to build something I’ve been sitting on for a little while now.

It’s called the Full Character OS, a Claude-powered AI tool built around the idea that your life doesn’t fit into one lane, and your AI shouldn’t either. It holds context across the things that actually compound on one another: your career, your mindset, your physical performance, your energy, and how you’re living. It’s built to help you think more clearly, make better decisions, and operate from your own framework rather than someone else’s.

It’s not a productivity app. It’s not a journaling tool. It’s a thinking partner that already knows where you’re going and can help you figure out how to get there.

Take a look

I want to know what you think. This is early, and I’m building it with real feedback from people who actually use it, so if you try it, come back and tell me what landed and what didn’t.

The question for this week

When you use AI right now, honestly, which mode are you in? Task outsourcing or thinking partnership?

If the answer is mostly the first one, pick one real decision or conversation you have coming up this week and run it through properly. Give it the full context. Ask it to push back. See what comes up.

That’s where it gets interesting.

Reply and tell me what you find

See you next week,

Shana x

P.S: And if you want to know more, I spoke a lot about this in this week’s episode on Breaking the Timeline.

If you’ve been following along since Issue 1, I want to check in before we go any further. How’s it actually going? Did you move your body a few times and then fall back into the old patterns? Did you start the wind-down boundary and hold it for four days before the late-night work crept back in? Did you glance at your accounts and then close the tab?

Good. Me too.

Here’s what I’ve learned about momentum: the first two weeks feel like building. The second two weeks are when you find out if you actually meant it. The novelty has gone. The discipline is all that’s left. And that’s not a failure of commitment, that’s just what the middle of any real process looks like. It looks like showing up when it's no longer new.

We’re in the deepening now. That’s what May is. Spring Part 2 isn’t about finding the thread again; Issue 1 was for that. This is about pulling it tighter. Deciding that the version of yourself you started building in April is the one you’re committing to, even now, in the unsexy middle bit where no one gives you a gold star and the transformation isn’t visible yet.

I’ve been sitting with a question recently, and I want to share it with you because I think it’s the right one for this season.

Am I building the life I said I wanted, or just managing the life I’ve got?

There’s a version of busy that feels productive because it never stops. And there’s a version of deliberate that’s quieter, less dramatic, but actually compounds. May is when we properly choose the second one. Not because it’s easier, it isn’t, but because we’ve done enough surviving. It’s time to actually build.

This is your Spring Deepening Curriculum.

Nine practices. Honest as always. Let’s continue.

Subscribe now

01. Stop performing wellness. Start practising it.

Here’s something I noticed in myself around week three of “being better” at spring: I was doing all the things and photographing none of them for content, which is actually progress, but I was still narrating them in my head like someone was watching. Moving my body and noting internally that I was the kind of person who moves her body. Eating lunch away from my desk and feeling vaguely like I deserved a certificate.

That’s wellness as identity performance, and it’s exhausting in a completely different way.

Real practice doesn’t care if you notice it. It just shows up in the quality of your sleep, the steadiness of your mood, the fact that you handled something difficult this week without completely unravelling. It’s in the outcomes, not the optics.

This month, I’m trying to drop the narration. No internal running commentary on how disciplined a person I’m becoming. Just doing the thing, and letting the thing speak.

Practically: pick one wellbeing practice and do it badly, quietly, without measuring it for three weeks. See what it actually feels like when you stop performing it.

02. What your body is trying to tell you

By May, the “move joyfully, no agenda” reset from Issue 1 has served its purpose. You’ve (hopefully) stopped treating exercise like punishment. Now it’s time to actually listen.

Your body is a very honest communication system, and most of us are too busy to read the signals. The persistent tightness in your shoulders. The afternoon energy crash that happens at exactly 3 pm every day. The fact that you can run five kilometres but you’re completely winded going up the stairs to your office. These are not random inconveniences. They’re data.

This spring, I’ve started treating my body like a client I’m trying to understand, rather than a machine I’m trying to manage. What does it actually need this month? Not what does the programme say? What did I do this time last year? What does this body, in this season, under this specific load, need right now?

For me, the answer has been: less intensity, more longevity work. More stretching, more walking, more sleep. Less proving. If your answer is different, trust it. You know your body better than any training plan does.

One thing I’d encourage: write down how you feel before and after your sessions this month. Not splits. Not reps. Just: what went in, what came out. You’ll start to see patterns you’ve been too busy to notice.

03. The dissertation is a project, not a personality

I need to say something I’ve had to say to myself repeatedly these past few weeks.

The thesis is not the measure of your worth. It is an academic piece with a deadline. It will be submitted. It will be examined. And then it will be part of your CV and your credibility, but it will not be the whole of your identity. The version of you that exists after the submission is the same person as the one before it, just with a bit more headspace.

I mention this because May is when dissertation pressure intensifies, and it’s also when it becomes most dangerous to let it colonise everything. Your social life. Your sleep. Your sense of self. Your coaching work. Your content. The dissertation is important and also a project. Keep it in its lane.

Practically, I’m doing something this month that feels slightly counterintuitive: I have scheduled three full days off from the dissertation. Not rest days where I’m still thinking about it. Off. Proper off. Because I’ve learned that the work I do after proper rest is better than the work I do in the fifty-eighth consecutive hour of grinding.

Write your cut-off time. Write your three scheduled rest days. Hold them.

04. Content that compounds vs. content that consumes

One thing I’ve been genuinely examining this spring is the difference between content I’m creating because it serves something and content I’m creating because I’m anxious about the gap.

Anxious content is easy to spot in hindsight. It’s the post you published at 11 pm because you hadn’t posted in four days, and the pressure got too loud. It’s the reel that technically performed fine, but you can’t really remember making. It’s the caption that sounds like you but slightly flattened, like you were writing from muscle memory rather than from something real.

Content that compounds is slower to make and faster to forget you made it, because it comes from somewhere true. The posts that get the most saves, the messages that go “I needed this today”, those aren’t the ones I agonised over the hook for. They’re the ones where I sat down and wrote what was actually on my mind.

This month, before you open a draft, ask yourself: am I making this because I have something to say, or because I’m afraid of going quiet? One of those answers produces work that lasts. The other produces noise.

Quality of presence beats quantity of posting. Always.

05. The identity audit

Here’s a question worth sitting with for longer than feels comfortable.

Who are you becoming, and is it actually who you want to be?

Not who you’re pretending to be for your audience. Not the aspirational version on the vision board. The actual daily version, the choices you’re making, the way you’re spending your time, the person you are at 7 pm on a Tuesday when no one’s watching and nothing’s at stake.

I did an informal identity audit in late April, and it was clarifying in ways I wasn’t entirely prepared for. Some things were tracking: I’m showing up for the people in my care, I’m building things that matter, and I’m moving in the right direction on the academic work. But in some areas, the gap between who I say I am and what my calendar actually reflects was bigger than I wanted to admit.

You are the sum of your consistent choices, not your stated intentions. Identity is built in the small decisions, not announced in the big moments.

This month: look at your calendar for the last four weeks. Look at your bank statements. Look at your search history. Who does that data describe? Is that the person you’re trying to become? If yes, brilliant, double down. If not, that’s not a reason to feel bad about yourself. It’s just information. Use it.

06. Build your financial floor

Issue 1 was about knowing your money. May is about making a decision based on what you now know.

Because there’s a version of financial awareness that’s still avoidance dressed up in responsible language. You look at the numbers, understand them, then file them away and carry on as before. That’s not financial intelligence. That’s financial literacy used as a comfort blanket.

Real financial leadership is: I looked at the numbers, I made a decision, and I did something different this month because of it.

For me, that’s meant being more deliberate about which income streams I’m actively investing energy into, and which ones I’m keeping on because they make me feel busy. Not every idea deserves equal effort. Not every possible offer is the right offer right now. Focus is a financial decision.

For you it might be something simpler: set up the savings account you’ve been putting off. Raise the rate you charge for something. Stop a subscription you forgot you were still paying for. Make one decision that moves your financial floor upward, even slightly.

One decision. Acted on. This month.

07. The people who make you more

I want to revisit the connection from a slightly different angle this time.

Issue 1 was about remembering to connect at all. This month is about being more deliberate about who you’re connecting with and why.

Not in a cynical way, not “networking” as a transaction. But with honest clarity about the fact that the people around you shape your sense of what’s possible. If everyone in your immediate circle is stuck, scared, or playing small, it is very hard to play big. Not impossible. But hard. The pull of the average is real, and it is quiet, and it works on you even when you don’t notice it.

This spring, I’ve been actively seeking out conversations with people who are further along in something I care about. Not to compare myself to them, that road ends in spiralling, but to expand my map of what’s possible. To sit across from someone who’s built what I’m building and hear that it’s harder than it looks and worth it anyway.

Who in your world expands what you think is possible for you? Go spend time with them this month. On purpose.

And equally: who are you that person for? Someone in your orbit is watching you and recalibrating their sense of what’s possible based on what you’re doing. That’s not pressure. That’s the purpose. Carry it lightly.

08. Finish something

May is the month I finish things.

I have a list, probably you do too, of projects, commitments, and ideas that are 80% done and living in a kind of ambient guilt in the back of my mind. The email draft I’ve been sitting on. The system I said I’d set up. The thing I told someone I’d send them. The idea that’s been in my notes for three months.

Unfinished things cost more energy than you think. Not because the work is particularly heavy, but because the mental weight of carrying them around, the low-level awareness that they exist, and you haven’t dealt with them, that accumulates.

This month, pick three things from your “in progress” pile and close them. Don't start them, close them. Send the thing. Make the decision. File it, publish it, delete it, or formally shelve it. But resolve it. The relief of a clear mental desktop is disproportionate to the effort it takes to get there.

Finishing is a skill and a habit. Train it.

09. Say what you want out loud

The final practice for this month is the one I always resist most, which is how I know it’s the right one.

Say what you want out loud. To another person. In specific words.

Not in the vague, hedging, “I’m kind of hoping that maybe one day I might...” way. In a direct way. The specific way.

I want to have my first coaching client signed by June. I want to have a consistent income stream from content by the end of this year. I want to finish this dissertation and walk into my viva feeling prepared. I want to be someone my audience genuinely trusts.

There is something that happens when you say a specific thing out loud to another person that is different from writing it in a journal or holding it quietly. It becomes real in a different way. It also makes you accountable in a way that’s uncomfortable and useful.

This month: find one person, one conversation, and say the specific thing. Not the polished goal. The actual want. See what happens when you stop keeping it to yourself.

You are building something. Say so.

That’s your May curriculum.

Nine practices that build on the nine you started in April. None of them is new. All of them require you to go a bit deeper than last month, to push past the novelty and into the actual discipline, the actual change, the actual commitment to the life you said you wanted to build.

The spring is still here. It won’t last forever, and neither will the particular window of momentum we’re all in right now. Use it, not frantically, but with the quiet intention of someone who has decided.

You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to keep choosing, in small ways, on ordinary days, to be the person who’s building it.

See you in June.

— Shana x

Well, the role. Head of Year. And the thing that made it sting wasn’t the rejection itself, it was who it went to. Someone I genuinely felt wasn’t stepping up the way I was. Quieter. Less visible. And from where I was standing, not doing the work I was doing.

I had been running interform sports competitions across the school. Organising culture days that brought the school together every year. Starting from initiatives that nobody asked me to start, they just got noticed, picked up, and rolled out across the school. I was building. I was showing up. I was, by every measure I had access to, ready.

And still. It went to someone else.

In this issue:

• The moment that reframed how I understand career progression

• Why being qualified and being hireable are two completely different skills

• The four principles from Michaela Coel’s career that explain the gap

• What I did wrong, and what I’d tell you to do instead

• The one action to take this week, depending on where you are

I’ve just released the first Career in Focus episode of Breaking the Timeline, a new monthly format where I take one person’s career trajectory apart and extract the exact principles that made them not just talented, but strategically unhirable on anyone else’s terms. This month: Michaela Coel. Council estate in Tower Hamlets to Emmy winner, on her own terms, every single stage. Here’s what her career taught me, and what it should teach you.

Being qualified and being hireable are not the same skill

One is about what you know. The other is about how you are known.

Most of us have been trained incredibly well in the first one. The degree. The experience. The CV that ticks every box. The years of showing up and doing the work. Nobody teaches you the second one. Nobody sits you down and explains what a panel is actually weighing up in the room, what separates the candidate who gets it from the equally prepared one who doesn’t.

That is the gap I didn’t understand when I applied for that Head of Year role. I was building capability. I hadn’t yet figured out how to build visibility. And in a competitive process, those are two different skills, and you need both.

Michaela Coel understood this before she had a single industry credential. And her career is the clearest blueprint I’ve found for deliberately closing that gap.

The four principles

Principle 1: Build the proof before the platform

Before Guildhall, before Channel 4, before any industry door opened to her, Michaela Coel was performing poetry at open mic nights in Ealing and releasing music. She was building a body of creative work entirely on her own terms. She didn’t arrive at drama school hoping the institution would make her into something. She arrived with a distinct voice and a graduation project already forming in her head.

That project became Chewing Gum Dreams. It ran at the Bush Theatre and the National Theatre. It got the attention of Channel 4 executives. It became the sitcom she wrote herself and won a BAFTA for. The proof opened the door. Not the other way around.

I was doing a version of this without understanding it. The interform leagues, the culture days, and the form initiatives were proof-building. I just hadn’t connected it to a conscious strategy. I was hoping the work would speak for itself. What I don’t yet understand is that work only speaks for itself if the right people are in the room to hear it.

Diagnostic question: What am I currently building as proof, and who can actually see it?

Principle 2: Know what you bring and say it plainly

When Michaela Coel got to Guildhall, she didn’t shrink. She was the first Black woman admitted in five years. She was working-class, from a council estate, at one of the most prestigious drama schools in the country. She could have arrived quietly and tried to fit in. Instead, she brought exactly what made her different, and she made it work.

Most early-career professionals undersell themselves, not because they lack confidence, but because they’ve been taught that naming their strengths is arrogance. It isn’t. It’s information. And the people making decisions about your career need that information.

Diagnostic question: What do I consistently minimise about myself that I should be saying plainly?

Principle 3: Saying yes to everything is not always the strategy

When Netflix approached Michaela Coel about I May Destroy You, they offered her $1 million. They also asked her to give up ownership of the intellectual property in her work. She said no. She walked away from the biggest streaming platform in the world, took the show to BBC and HBO on her own terms, and it became one of the most critically acclaimed series of the decade. She won a primetime Emmy. A BAFTA. Time’s 100 Most Influential People. Not despite the decision, because of it.

Early-career professionals are often told to say yes to everything. Build experience, be picky later. There is truth in that. But there is a version of saying yes to everything that is actually saying yes to the wrong things. Roles that look good on paper but ask you to become a smaller version of yourself. Positions that are technically a step forward but are actually a step sideways. They cost more than they give, because every role you take shapes who you become, not just in skills, but in identity and reputation. And once you are known for something, it takes real effort to be known for something different.

Diagnostic question: Is this opportunity building towards the version of me I’m trying to become, or am I just tired of waiting?

Principle 4: Your voice is part of your employability

This is the principle that explains why this newsletter exists.

In 2018, Michaela Coel was invited to deliver the James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Youngest woman ever. First Black speaker in the festival’s history. She could have used that platform to promote her work or play it safe. Instead, she said the uncomfortable thing in the most prominent room available to her. She spoke publicly as a thinker, not just as a practitioner, and in doing so built something that no amount of output alone can build: trust in her perspective.

I started showing up publicly because I was sick of being told I wasn’t ready. My headteacher (at the time) told me I was turning my back on the school. Family members said moving into higher education would leave me stuck. These were people I respected, and it hurt; I had real moments of doubt when the noise almost won. But I knew that if I had listened, I would have lost something I couldn’t get back. And I know I am not the only person who has stood at that exact crossroads, capable, qualified, building, and been one bad piece of advice away from talking themselves out of the thing they most need to do.

That’s why this exists. You do not need to compromise and fit in a box just because others say so.

From a career strategy standpoint, before a candidate walks into a room, the panel often already knows more about them than the CV shows. They’ve been Googled. Their LinkedIn has been read. Whatever is publicly available has been looked at. The candidates who arrive with a visible, coherent point of view and can be found and understood before the interview begins have an advantage that no amount of interview preparation can replicate. Your voice is part of your employability. Not a nice extra. Part of it.

Diagnostic question: If someone searched for my name today, would what they find reflect the version of me I want to be known as?

Go back to the four diagnostic questions. Identify which one landed hardest, the one that’s slightly uncomfortable because it’s pointing at something you already know. That’s your stage. That’s where you are right now.

Then move one step. If it’s principle one, identify one thing you can start building as proof this week. If it’s principle two, write down what you keep minimising and practise saying it plainly. If it’s principle three, make an honest assessment about the role or opportunity in front of you. If it’s principle four, write one piece of thinking in public this week. A Substack note, a LinkedIn post, a comment in a professional community that actually represents your point of view.

The full episode is out now. [Listen here → You're Qualified. So Why Aren't You Getting Hired? | A Michaela Coel Career Diagnostic]

Come and tell me in the comments which stage you’re at. And if you know someone who is applying for something, navigating a career decision, or trying to figure out their next move, send them this. That’s exactly who it was made for.

Speak soon,

Shana x

You are not the problem.

And I want to say it slowly, because I’ve watched brilliant, driven women receive this message, smile politely, and then continue apologising for themselves for the next six months. So let me be more specific.

You are not too much. You are not unfocused. You are not failing to commit. You are not scattered, inconsistent, or difficult to categorise. You are not the problem.

The model is.

The single-track career model, one lane, one title, one area of expertise, climb upward, reduce complexity, was not designed with you in mind. It was designed around a particular kind of life: one with few competing demands, clean boundaries between professional identity and personal one, and the luxury of saying “I’m a [thing]” without the rest of the sentence needing to follow.

That life was not designed for women who also happen to be carers, creators, athletes, researchers, teachers, coaches, and community builders. It was not designed for people who are genuinely excellent at more than one thing and refuse to pretend otherwise.

But here’s what the personal development industry did with that design flaw. Instead of questioning the model, it sold you a solution. Get clearer on your niche. Find your one thing. Stop spreading yourself thin. The message, delivered with warmth and good intentions, was: the problem is your lack of focus, and the fix is discipline.

That framing does something very specific and very damaging. It takes a systems problem and relocates it inside you.

And once the problem lives inside you, you stop asking who designed the system and why, and you start trying to fix yourself instead.

I know this because I did it too.

I became a Senior Lecturer at 28, a module leader at 29, a leadership coach, a Master’s student, a wannabe hybrid athlete, and now apparently a person who builds a newsletter and shows up on the internet. When I tell people that list, I watch something happen in their face. A small calculation. An attempt to find the dominant category. A slight, uncomfortable pause before they ask: “But which one is the main thing?”

For a long time, I felt the pull to give them an answer they could hold onto. To lead with one title and let the rest follow quietly behind it. To make myself legible in the way the model expects.

What I’ve realised is that the discomfort in that pause is not mine to absorb. The pause is the model struggling to accommodate a person who doesn’t fit its template. That’s a model problem. That is not my problem.

Being multi-passionate is not a developmental phase you haven’t finished yet. It’s not a sign that you’re avoiding commitment, haven’t “found yourself,” or lack the discipline of people who have narrowed down. For a lot of us, it is a completely rational response to being handed a model with one acceptable shape and realising our lives will never fit cleanly inside it.

Research on identity and professional development consistently shows that people with multiple, integrated identities, rather than singular professional identities, report higher wellbeing, greater resilience when one role is disrupted, and more sustainable long-term performance. The person who is “just a teacher” and loses that job has lost their entire professional self-concept. The person who is a teacher, a coach, a writer, and an athlete has a self-concept that holds.

The single-lane model doesn’t just limit your life. It makes you more fragile. And it was still the dominant advice we were handing out last year.

The thing nobody talks about openly is that your career, your body, your mindset, and your energy aren’t separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are the same system. Pull on one thread and everything else moves. Your energy levels directly affect how you show up professionally. Your career clarity directly affects your motivation to move your body. Your sense of identity affects everything. When one is off, everything else quietly suffers.

Which means getting fragmented support, a career coach here, a PT there, a mindset book somewhere in between, will only ever get you so far. You’re applying single-lane solutions to a whole-life problem. That’s why it hasn’t clicked yet. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a structural mismatch.

I know all of this because I have experienced it myself and built an entire business around it. I built my business because when I was in that position, an integrated programme didn’t exist. A space where someone held the full picture, career, movement, mindset, energy, and helped you build a structure that worked for your actual life, not a hypothetical tidier one. I had to figure out the integration myself. Now that’s what I help women do in 90 days. If that’s something you want to know more about, you can find the details below.

Learn more

So here’s what I want you to do with this.

Not a wholesale rejection of focus, I want to be clear about that. Focus matters. Prioritisation matters. You cannot do everything at maximum intensity simultaneously, and I’m not suggesting you try.

What I’m asking you to reject is the idea that having multiple serious interests, multiple expressions of ambition, multiple roles that matter to you, is itself the problem. It is not. The problem is the absence of a structure that holds them all without constant cognitive and emotional cost.

That structure is what the Full Character philosophy is built around. Not doing more. Refusing to edit yourself down to a size the model finds convenient, and building systems that actually accommodate the full version of who you are.

It means asking different questions. Not “which one should I focus on?” but “how do I build a week that holds all of this without destroying me?” Not “why can’t I just pick one thing?” but “who told me I was supposed to, and were they right?”

A few things that have genuinely shifted how I hold this, if you’re looking for somewhere to start.

Stop treating your multiplicity as a problem to be managed, and start treating it as a design constraint to work with. Your week needs to be built around the reality of who you are, not who the model expects you to be. That means honest time-blocking across all of your roles, not aspirational time-blocking that assumes you’ll magically stop being interested in the other things.

Get very clear on what a season is and what a permanent feature is. Some of my roles have different intensities at different times of the year. The Master’s is heavier in some months. Training volume shifts around competition. Knowing which demands are seasonal versus structural stops you from crisis-managing what is, in fact, a predictable rhythm.

Stop apologising in the introduction. Watch how many times you front-load your multi-passionate identity with a disclaimer. “I know this sounds like a lot...” “I’m probably doing too much...” “I can’t really explain what I do...” The disclaimer is the place where you’ve internalised the model’s judgment. Remove it. State what you do plainly, with no apology embedded.

The Full Character conversation continues here every week. If you want the frameworks and deeper structures behind how I actually run this, the paid tier is where that lives.

Subscribe now

But even if you’re just here for the free version, sit with this before you close it.

The next time someone implies you’re doing too much, or asks which thing is “the real one,” or suggests you’d be further along if you just focused, notice where you feel that land. In your chest, probably. A small contraction. The beginning of an apology forming.

That feeling is not evidence that they’re right.

It’s evidence that you’ve been living under a model that wasn’t built for you, for long enough that it started to feel like your own opinion.

It isn’t.

What are you juggling right now that people keep telling you is too much? Drop it in the comments, or come and find me on Instagram.

Until next week,

Shana Francis

Breaking the Timeline by Shana Francis

Apply for my new 1:1 Signature Coaching Kaurah

The fog. The disproportionate tiredness. There is a vague sense that everything has piled up, and you cannot quite identify where to begin. Maybe you checked your emails before you had even had breakfast. Maybe you spent the first two days in reactive mode, just getting back on top of things, and arrived at Friday feeling like the break never happened.

If that is you, I want you to know something I took longer than I should have to figure out.

The holiday was not the problem. You are not bad at switching off and back on again. You were just never given the tools to return well, because nobody in teaching, nobody in professional development, nobody running induction programmes or onboarding processes ever named re-entry as the skill it actually is.

This newsletter is for that.

In this letter:

• What the research actually says about why returning from a break is hard (and why it is not a willpower problem).

• What the UK education data tells us about the specific pressures teachers carry into every new term.

• The pattern most high-achievers fall into during the first week back, and why it makes everything worse.

• The three-part re-entry practice I use myself, and have started sharing with the trainees I work with.

• Your one thing for this week.

What the research says about coming back

There is a growing body of occupational psychology research on what is called psychological detachment, the process of mentally switching off from work during non-work time. The evidence is consistent: the ability to genuinely detach during a break is one of the most reliable predictors of wellbeing, sustained performance, and engagement when you return.

A study drawing on UK workforce data found that psychological detachment predicted better mental wellbeing and quality of life in working-age adults over a sustained period, and that the inability to detach was directly associated with higher rates of anxiety and depression (Blake et al., 2025). The research is detailed that mentally switching off is not laziness. It is the mechanism through which your system recovers enough to function well.

What is less talked about is the return side of that equation, what researchers call psychological reattachment: the process of mentally reconnecting to your work when you come back. A qualitative study by Kühnel et al. (2024) found that reattachment is its own distinct process, separate from detachment, and that employees who navigate it well tend to do so deliberately, reviewing priorities, building anticipation for specific tasks, and giving themselves a transition window rather than expecting to be at full capacity immediately.

In other words, re-entry is a process with its own requirements. The research does not treat it as a mood, a willpower challenge, or a character trait. It treats it as a cognitive and emotional transition that can be done well or badly, and that almost nobody is explicitly taught.

It is also worth noting that the length of a break matters less than you might think. Research summarised by the Work Psychology Group (2024) found that what determines how recovered you feel on return is not how long the holiday was, but the quality of disconnection you achieved during it, and whether you had any intentional structure on the other side.

What this looks like specifically in education

This is the part I want to name directly because, if you work in education, context matters.

The Education Support Teacher Wellbeing Index (2024), the UK’s most comprehensive annual survey of teacher mental health, found that 78% of all education staff reported being stressed, and 79% had experienced physical, psychological or behavioural symptoms as a direct result of their work in the past academic year. Staff wellbeing scores across England, Wales and Scotland sat significantly below national population averages (Education Support, 2024).

The picture from the NASUWT Wellbeing at Work Survey was similarly stark. Across nearly 12,000 teachers, wellbeing scores on the internationally recognised Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale were substantially below those of the general population, with workload identified as the primary driver of that gap (NASUWT, 2024).

What does this mean for re-entry after Easter? It means that most teachers are not returning from a rest to a neutral baseline. They are returning from a rest to a system that was already running them at capacity before they left. The Easter holiday does not erase the accumulated weight of a spring term. It gives you enough distance from it to feel human again, and then Monday arrives and the full weight returns, often before you have had a chance to recalibrate.

This is a structural reality.

The pattern most high-achievers fall into

Here is what I see most often, in teaching and in any demanding professional role.

The first day back, the goal is to clear the backlog. You stay late. You skip a proper lunch. You work reactively, inbox, messages, the stack of things that came in while you were away, and by the end of the day, you feel like you have been running on a treadmill that was set slightly faster than you could comfortably manage.

On the second day, you try to get ahead for the week. By Wednesday, you are tired in a way that feels disproportionate to what you have actually done. By Friday, you have a vague sense that the break was not sufficient, that you are falling behind, and that you need to be more organised for the next holiday.

This cycle repeats every term. And the conclusions people draw from it-"I need more discipline," "I need to be more productive," "I need to do more during the holidays", are almost entirely the wrong diagnosis.

The right diagnosis is simpler and more uncomfortable: you are treating re-entry like it does not exist, and your body and brain are paying the price for it.

The occupational stress literature offers a useful explanation here. Hobfoll’s (1989) work underpins much of the burnout and recovery research, which proposes that when people return from rest without a structured transition, they tend to accelerate their resource expenditure in the first week back as a compensation response. They overwork to catch up, which depletes them faster, which makes the rest feel like it never happened, which means the next break has to do even more recovery work than the one before it (Hobfoll, 1989; Lyubykh et al., 2022).

It is a cycle with a predictable structure. And if you can see the structure, you can interrupt it.

The three-part re-entry practice

This is what I have built over several years of working in a role with intense on-off cycles, running a coaching practice alongside it, completing a master’s in Education Leadership, and building this platform on top of all of that. It is not a perfect system. But it is the difference between a first week back that leaves me functional and one that leaves me in the hole.

1. The orientation day, not the catch-up day.

Give yourself permission to make your first day back an orientation day. Not a productivity day. Not a catch-up day. The sole purpose is to understand the landscape: what has come in, what is genuinely urgent versus what is just loud, and what the next two weeks actually require of you.

This means scanning everything, triaging by real deadline, and identifying your three priorities for the week. Three. Not a list of fourteen things you would like to have done by Friday. Three things that, if completed, would make the week a success.

Research on psychological reattachment directly supports this. Kühnel et al. (2024) found that employees who reattach most effectively are those who build in a deliberate transition window with clear priority-setting, rather than moving straight into reactive task completion. In teaching terms, this is the difference between spending Monday triaging and planning intentionally versus spending Monday firefighting and ending the day further behind than you started.

2. The honesty audit.

Before the term or the quarter gathers speed, sit with three questions. Not as a journaling exercise, as a data collection exercise, because the break gave you information about yourself and your work, and the audit is how you actually use it.

What genuinely depleted me in the last stretch, and is that depletion still present?

What did the break teach me about what I actually need to function well?

What is one thing I can do differently in this next stretch, given what I now know?

This is not about making grand changes at the start of a new term. It is about using rest as diagnostic information. The research consistently shows that employees who attend to their own recovery signals, rather than overriding them, sustain performance more effectively over longer periods (Lyubykh et al., 2022; Blake et al., 2025).

3. The pace agreement.

Decide before the week starts what pace you agree to for the first five days. Not for the whole term. Just the first week back.

This might be: I will not stay more than 45 minutes past my contracted hours this week. Or: I will take a full lunch break every day, even if it is only 20 minutes away from my desk. Or: I will not agree to any new commitments this week that were not already on the list before the holiday.

Small. Specific. Time-bounded. This is not a permanent boundary. It is the runway you are giving yourself to land properly before you accelerate again.

I started sharing this framework with the trainees I mentor after watching several of them return from half-terms in a worse state than when they left, convinced they needed more resilience. They did not need more resilience. They needed a structure for coming back.

The skill nobody names

The reason re-entry is hard for high-achievers specifically is that we are used to being competent at our jobs. The dip feels like evidence that something has gone wrong, with us, with the break, with our discipline.

It has not. The dip is normal. It has a name, a literature, and a set of conditions under which it improves. The people who manage sustained, long-term performance, in teaching, in professional life, in anything with rhythms of intensity and rest, are not the ones who push hardest on the first Monday back. They are the ones who have learned to return with intention.

That is a learnable skill. And once you have it, the holiday actually does what it is supposed to do. The rest sticks. The recalibration works. And you arrive at summer, or the next break, or the next term, with something left.

Your one thing this week.

Write down your three priorities for the next five working days. Not your full to-do list, just three. The three things that, if you got them done, would make this first week back feel like a success. Put them somewhere you will actually see them. Let the rest of the noise exist without having your full attention.

I want to hear from you.

What does your first week back usually look like, and if you are honest, is it actually working for you? Come and tell me on Instagram or reply to this email. I read every single one.

Until next week,

Sources referenced in this issue

Education Support. Teacher Wellbeing Index 2024. educationsupport.org.uk

NASUWT. Wellbeing at Work Survey 2024. nasuwt.org.uk

Blake et al. (2025). Psychological detachment from work predicts mental wellbeing. PLOS One.

Kühnel et al. (2024). Investigating the nature of psychological reattachment to work. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.

Work Psychology Group (2024). Do holidays really help you recover from work? workpsychologygroup.com

Lyubykh et al. (2022). Role of work breaks in well-being and performance. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

Not “I’m struggling with behaviour management” or “I need to work on my questioning.” Those are clean problems with clean solutions. This is messier. This is the quiet, creeping suspicion that everyone else has figured something out that you haven’t. That the other trainees in your programme are coping better. That your mentor can see what you can’t say out loud.

I know because I felt it. And now I train the teachers who feel it, too.

Subscribe now

Here’s what I want to say first: the feeling isn’t the problem. The structure is.

Initial teacher training is one of the few programmes where you are simultaneously expected to perform, reflect, evidence, study, and emotionally regulate, all in the same week. On the same day, sometimes. You’re in front of a class of thirty by 9 am and writing at a master’s level by 9 pm. Nobody designed that to be easy. It isn’t supposed to be easy. But it is supposed to be survivable, and sometimes the system forgets to tell you that.

The trainees I work with are struggling because they’re trying to be finished teachers before they’ve been allowed to be unfinished ones. The pressure to perform competence before you’ve had the chance to build it is baked into the programme. Knowing that doesn’t fix it. But it does mean you can stop blaming yourself for finding it hard.

So let’s talk about what actually helps.

The Teachers’ Standards are not a checklist. I cannot tell you how many trainees I see treating them like a tick-box exercise, collecting evidence for each standard in isolation, filing it away, and moving on. That approach will keep you compliant. It won’t make you a strong teacher, and it won’t make your portfolio compelling.

The Standards are relational. They overlap. A single well-planned lesson can evidence Standard 1 (setting high expectations), Standard 4 (curriculum knowledge), and Standard 7 (managing behaviour) simultaneously. When you’re gathering evidence, don’t think “what do I have for Standard 3?” Think “what does this lesson tell me about the kind of teacher I am becoming?” Then work backwards to the Standards.

Your reflections are where this matters most. The difference between a trainee who meets the Standards and one who exceeds them is almost always in the quality of their reflection. Descriptive reflection, “I did this, the class responded like this”, meets the bar. Analytical reflection, “I did this, the class responded like this, and here’s what that tells me about how I plan differently next time, drawing on what I know about motivation and classroom climate”, goes beyond it. That second version is also the beginning of Master’s level thinking.

If you’re on the Master ’s-bearing route and the academic writing feels like a completely separate thing from your placement, that’s worth examining. Your classroom is your research site. Your mentor conversations are data. The questions keeping you up at night are your research questions. The best assignments I mark are the ones where a trainee has taken something they genuinely struggled with in practice and interrogated it properly with the literature. Not performed an essay. Actually used theory to understand something real.

One practical thing you can do this week:

Pick one lesson that didn’t go the way you wanted. Write half a page.

Not about what went wrong, but about why, drawing on anything you’ve read or been taught about pedagogy, child development, or curriculum. That half a page is worth more to your development than five perfect lesson plans.

Something I come back to a lot, working in teacher education, is this: the teachers who go on to be genuinely great are rarely the ones who sailed through training.

They’re the ones who were honest with themselves about the gap between where they were and where they wanted to be, and who didn’t let that gap become evidence that they didn’t belong.

I didn’t sail through. I was a PE teacher who moved into Head of Year before most people thought I was ready. I moved into higher education before most people thought I was ready. I am still, right now, a master’s student sitting with the same uncertainty you are, because staying in that discomfort is what growth actually requires.

You’re not behind the timeline. You’re building it.

If you’re in the middle of your training year and you’d find it useful to talk through what you’re navigating, your portfolio, your reflections, your placement, the Standards, the writing, or just the mental load of it, I’ve opened up a small number of mentoring spots specifically for trainees.

It’s not a coaching programme. It’s a conversation with someone who’s been in the classroom, led a year group, trained new teachers, and written about it at Master’s level.

If that sounds like something you need, you can get in touch through the link below or drop me a message on Instagram. No pressure. Just an open door.

Book your free discovery call

Shana x

Somewhere between finishing a dissertation chapter at midnight, submitting placement paperwork at 6 am, recording a podcast episode on four hours of sleep, and trying to show up for trainees who needed me to be fully present, I lost the thread.

Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone would notice from the outside. I was still producing, still showing up, still ticking things off the list. But internally? The motor was running on fumes. I wasn’t building. I was surviving. And there is a difference, even if the outside world can’t see it.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being the person who’s always “on it”: the hardest part isn’t the workload. It’s the quiet erosion. The way you stop noticing you’ve gone flat is because you’re too busy performing, alright. The way you start measuring your worth by your output, and then wonder why you feel so empty when the output is technically fine.

I caught myself doing something recently that stopped me in my tracks. I was sitting at my desk at 10 pm, dissertation tab open, Teams notifications coming in, half-eaten dinner going cold beside me, and I thought: I don’t actually remember the last time I did something just because I wanted to. Not because it was on the plan, not because it moved something forward, not because it served the business, the thesis, or the trainees. Just because I wanted to.

That was the moment I knew I needed to rebuild. Not an overhaul. Not burn it down and start again. Just rebuild. Quietly, deliberately, from the inside out.

Momentum isn’t something you either have or don’t have. It’s something you rebuild, deliberately, in small increments, until the engine catches again. And spring, more than any other season, rewards the people who are willing to start.

I’m not writing this from the other side of the rebuilding, by the way. I’m writing it from the middle of it. Which means this isn’t a highlight reel. This is the actual curriculum, the one I’m following right now, the one I’m asking you to follow with me, the one that doesn’t require you to be a different person or have a different life. Just this one. Made more intentional.

This is your Spring Momentum Curriculum.

Nine practices. All of them are honest. None of them is perfect. Let’s go.

Subscribe now

Read more

It’s 9:47 pm.

I’ve closed my laptop. I’ve made the tea. I’ve even done the whole “phone face-down on the kitchen counter” thing that the wellness girlies swear by.

And yet.

I am still mentally marking a lesson plan that isn’t even mine. I am still replaying that awkward moment in the team meeting where I definitely said something, and nobody responded, and I spent the next forty minutes wondering if I’d said it out loud or just thought it very loudly. I am still, somehow, at work. In my kitchen. In my pyjamas.

I’ve been told, by well-meaning colleagues, by productivity accounts, by people who clearly have never had a job they actually care about, to “just switch off.” To “leave work at work.” To “be present.”

And I want to be. I genuinely do.

But here’s what nobody told me, and what I need to tell you: the reason you can’t switch off is not a character flaw. It’s a cognitive one. And once you understand what’s actually happening in your brain, the advice to “just switch off” starts to sound exactly as ridiculous as it is.

What the research actually says

Let’s talk about cognitive load theory, specifically, what happens to your working memory when you’ve had a full, complex day.

Working memory is the part of your brain that holds and processes information in real time. It’s limited. It’s finite. And according to research by Sweller (1988, significantly updated through the 2010s), it can manage only roughly four chunks of information at once before it starts to buckle.

Now think about your average day.

How many things are you holding simultaneously?

Your to-do list. Someone else’s problem you’ve taken on. A conversation you haven’t finished. An email you opened and closed without responding to because you didn’t know what to say. A deadline that’s not technically tomorrow but is taking up today’s brain space anyway.

That’s about forty-seven.

Here’s the critical part: cognitive load doesn’t dissolve the moment you stop working. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology found that employees with high cognitive job demands, teachers, managers, and anyone in a role requiring sustained mental effort and decision-making showed significantly elevated levels of evening rumination even after physical work had ended. The brain keeps processing unresolved tasks. It’s not procrastination. It’s architecture.

There’s also something called the Zeigarnik effect, named after Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who observed in the 1920s that unfinished tasks are remembered far more persistently than completed ones. Your brain flags open loops. It keeps returning to them. Not to punish you. Because it genuinely doesn’t know you’ve “finished” until the task is closed.

So when you lie on the sofa trying to watch Netflix, and you can’t stop thinking about that thing, that’s your brain doing exactly what it’s designed to do. It’s not failing. It’s functioning.

The advice to “just switch off” assumes your brain has an off switch. It doesn’t. It has a resolution system.

The myth of the clean boundary

I see so much content online (from people I actually like, which makes it more frustrating) telling women in demanding careers to “create firm work-life boundaries.” And look, I’m not against boundaries. I coach people on them.

But the version being sold is too clean. It imagines the brain as a filing cabinet. Work goes in the drawer at 5 pm. Drawer closes. Personal life begins.

That’s not how cognition works, and it’s especially not how it works for people who are building something, a career, a side project, a master’s degree, a brand, alongside their job. When your work is also your growth, when it’s identity-adjacent, when it genuinely matters to you, the “drawer” never fully closes. Because it’s not just tasks in there. Its meaning.

Research on recovery from work (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007, still one of the most cited frameworks in occupational psychology) identifies four key recovery experiences: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control. The interesting thing is that psychological detachment, genuinely not thinking about work, is the hardest to achieve and the most dependent on whether cognitive load has been properly processed before the attempt to switch off begins.

You cannot detach from something unresolved. You first have to resolve it.

The Brain Dump Protocol

This is what I actually do.

The premise: give your brain evidence that the open loops are closed. Not done, just contained. Your working memory doesn’t need to be completed. It needs documentation.

Here’s the protocol in full:

Step 1: The Total Offload (10 minutes, non-negotiable)

At the end of your working day, or at the point where you want to transition out of work mode, open a blank document or a notebook. Not your to-do list app. Something fresh.

Write everything that’s in your head. Every task, worry, unfinished thought, micro-decision you haven’t made, email you need to send, thing you said to someone that you’re still thinking about. Write it ugly. Don’t organise it. Don’t prioritise it. Just get it out.

The goal here is not organisation. It’s an evacuation. You are physically moving information from your working memory into an external system. The brain registers this. The rumination loop quietens because the information has somewhere to live that isn’t inside your skull.

Step 2: The Three Categories (5 minutes)

Once it’s out, sort it into three categories only:

Tomorrow’s non-negotiables: two or three things that genuinely must happen. Not a full list. Two or three.

This week, but not now: things that matter but have time. They go on the list; they leave the brain.

Not my problem tonight: this is the important one. Everything that belongs to tomorrow’s version of you, or to someone else entirely. Write them down and consciously park them. This act of acknowledgement, naming them and placing them somewhere, is what closes the Zeigarnik loop.

Step 3: The Transition Ritual (2 minutes)

This is the one people skip and then wonder why the protocol doesn’t work.

You need a physical, sensory signal that work has ended. Not just logistically, but neurologically. Your brain learns through repetition and association. The transition ritual is how you train your nervous system to recognise that this moment marks the end of the working day.

It doesn’t have to be elaborate. I'm making a specific drink and putting on a specific playlist. Some people change their clothes. Some people go outside for five minutes. Some people close every tab and shut the laptop lid with intention rather than just wandering away from it.

Whatever it is, it needs to be consistent. The ritual teaches your brain what “done for today” feels like. Over time, not immediately, but over time, the cognitive load actually starts to release on cue.

Step 4: Protect the Recovery Window (30–60 minutes)

For the first thirty to sixty minutes after the transition ritual, resist the urge to fill the space with consumption that requires interpretation, social media, news, and email. Your brain is still in processing mode. Give it something genuinely low-demand: movement, music, a walk, cooking, a conversation that isn’t about work.

This is not laziness. This is how recovery actually functions. The research calls it a “low-effort activity” and consistently finds it more restorative than passive screen time, which activates the same neural pathways involved in information processing.

The thing nobody says

“Just switch off” is advice that works perfectly for people whose jobs are contained, whose work doesn’t overlap with their identity, and who aren’t actively building something beyond the 9-to-5.

That’s not most of us reading this.

We are people who care. People who are doing multiple things on purpose. People who have chosen lives that are full rather than convenient.

The answer isn’t to care less. It’s to process better. To give your brain the systems it needs to release what it’s holding, so that when you are off, you’re actually off. Not performing rest while still working in your head.

You’re not bad at switching off. You just haven’t been given the right tools.

Now you have one.

Your one thing this week: do the brain dump tonight. Not perfectly. Just do it. Ten minutes, a blank page, everything out. See what happens to the evening.

Want the full system?

The Quarterly Review Framework drops for paid subscribers on Wednesday.

Subscribe now

It’s the structured version of everything above: how to review your cognitive load across a whole quarter, identify the recurring open loops that are costing you energy, and build a reset ritual that actually sticks across the term.

If this resonated, you already know you need it.

See you soon.

Shana x

Hey readers,

I want to share something more proactive today, which might help anyone who is feeling a little stuck. This is all about setting your non-negotiables, and if you do not know what these are, build this from the floor up (let’s create your barrier wall together).

I used to think I knew my non-negotiables.

I had a list. It was neat, confident, borderline inspirational. “Respect my time.” “Align with my values.” “Growth over comfort.” Very journal-cover energy. Very 2021.

Then I actually started building my life, the coaching business, the master’s, the content, the training, and the list fell apart in about three weeks.

This was never really mine.

Now, what I am about to say, I say this with love, because I did it too; most of us build our non-negotiables list from what sounds good. From what we think a strong, self-respecting woman would write. It’s basically a vision board in list form.

“I won’t shrink myself for a room.”

“I prioritise my mental health.”

“I only work with people who match my energy.”

And I’m not saying those things are wrong. I’m saying they’re decorative until they’re tested. Until a senior colleague questions your credibility in a meeting and you have to decide, in real time, whether you actually won’t shrink. Until a deadline collides with your training block. Until a client opportunity comes in that pays well but feels slightly off.

That’s when the list reveals itself as either a value or a vibe.

Most non-negotiable lists are aspirational. The real ones are forged under pressure.

Subscribe now

Read more

And then I started using it this year to set my goals and ACTUALLY achieve them, and suddenly my life made a little bit more sense.

So, here we are. Q2. April through June. The bit of the year where the January motivation has either turned into real habits or quietly died in a notes app you haven’t opened since February. No judgement. I’ve been both.

This letter is me pulling back the curtain on exactly how I’m planning my next three months, as a 30-year-old senior lecturer, coach, master’s student, and girl who takes her Hyrox training very seriously. And if you’re somewhere in the middle of your own multi-passionate life, wondering how to actually structure this season, I want you to read this with a blank page next to you. We’re doing this together.

Subscribe now

Step One: I’m Being Ruthlessly Honest About Q1

Before I set a single goal for Q2, I’m sitting down with Q1 and asking it some hard questions.

Because here’s the thing: if you skip the review, you just repeat the same quarter with different dates. And I’ve done that. It’s not growth, it’s just busy.

So the first thing I’m doing is a proper Q1 audit. Three questions, no fluff:

1. What actually worked? What moved something, a metric, a feeling, a relationship, a result. Those things get carried forward.

2. What didn’t move the way I needed it to? This is where most people go quiet. I’m not going quiet. If something didn’t work, I want to know whether it was the strategy, the timing, the effort, or whether I was just not ready for it yet. Those are four very different problems.

3. What am I carrying forward anyway, and why? Some things didn’t deliver results yet, but they’re part of a longer play. Those stay. Everything else gets reviewed.

Q1, for me, was a foundational quarter. Routines were built, ideas were trialled, and content started going out into the world. Not everything landed. But I know what I’m working with now, and that’s the whole point.

Your turn: block out 20 minutes before you read the rest of this. Literally just write: what worked, what didn’t, what’s staying. Don’t overcomplicate it.

Step Two: Goals Per Life Area (Because You Are Not Just Your Job)

This is the part where most planners lose me. They give you a box called “goals”, and they mean career goals. Maybe fitness if they’re being progressive.

I refuse.

I use Notion as my Q2 command centre and plan across six areas because I am a Full Character, and Full Characters don’t have only one dimension that counts.

Here are mine:

Career. Business. Health. Personal Growth. Family & Friends. Finances.

Every single one of them gets its own goals for Q2. Every single one of them gets a clear outcome attached, not a vague intention, but an actual outcome I can point to in July and say happened or didn’t.

Q2 for me is an action and progress quarter. Q1 was about learning what I was working with. Q2 is where I actually build.

Your blank page invitation: draw six boxes. Label them with your six life areas (they don’t have to be mine; maybe yours include creative practice, community, travel, or faith). Then give each one one to three outcomes for Q2. Just one to three. Not twenty.

Step Three: My Career Gets Focused, Not Fragmented

As a senior lecturer, my Q2 career priority is about depth, not expansion.

I know what needs to happen between now and July. My dissertation is mapped. My academic commitments are in the diary. That’s not where my energy goes in Q2.

What I am focusing on is my leadership. I want to deepen my impact in my current role, not just do the job, but lead it better. There are CPD courses I’ve been eyeing that align directly with where I want to take my practice, and Q2 is when I actually attend them rather than just saving the tabs.

This feels small. It isn’t. Leadership development is the long game. And I’m playing the long game.

The question to ask yourself:

1. In your career, what needs to deepen this quarter, not expand?

2. Where do you want to be better at what you already do?

Step Four: My Business Moves From Foundation to Action

I use Asana to manage my business tasks completely separately from my academic work. This is non-negotiable. When work bleeds into business and business bleeds into work, everything suffers, and nothing grows.

Q2 is the quarter my coaching business gets serious.

I’m focused on three things:

1. Growing my audience with consistent content

2. Showing up in a way that actually represents what I stand for

3. Building out my coaching packages properly, so they’re ready when the people who need them find me.

The most important structural decision I’ve made is this: every week, I have a protected business hour on my calendar. One hour. Non-negotiable. And in Q2, I’m treating that hour like it’s the most important meeting of my week, because it is. It’s the meeting with the version of my life I’m building.

If you’re building something alongside your career, what is your protected hour this week? Not eventually. This week. Put it in your calendar right now.

Step Five: Training Is Non-Negotiable (And I Mean It This Time)

My Hyrox competition is at the beginning of Q2. After that, my next event sits in the middle of Q3. Which means Q2 is a significant training block, base-building, consistency, and preparing the body for what comes next.

I want to be clear about something: movement is not what I compromise when life gets full. It is what keeps me functional when life gets full. These are completely different relationships with exercise. One treats it as a reward for having enough time. The other treats it as the infrastructure that makes time feel manageable.

My sessions are planned. My rest is built in, not because I’m being soft, but because rest is part of the programme. The goal is clear. The process is clear.

Ask yourself: Is your movement practice something you do when everything else is handled, or is it something that makes handling everything else possible? That answer will change how you schedule it.

Step Six: Trusting My Own Timeline Is the Work

This one is the most personal, and it’s the one I almost didn’t include, which is exactly why I’m including it.

The specific personal development goal I have for Q2 is this: trusting my own timeline. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

I spent too much of Q1 second-guessing. Second-guessing my decisions, my content, my pace, my readiness. And I don’t want to carry that into Q2.

So here’s what I’m doing practically: I’m reading intentionally (not collecting books, actually reading them with a purpose). I’m in the final stretch of my master’s programme, and I want to be present for that, not just endure it. And I’m documenting my growth in real time so that on days when I feel unmotivated or like nothing is working, I have evidence. Written, timestamped evidence that I have done hard things before and I will do them again.

I’m also embedding a weekly Sunday reset, twenty minutes, nothing more, to review the week and set one clear priority for Monday. Just one. Because clarity is a habit I’m building deliberately.

Your one thing: What is the story you keep telling yourself about your own timeline that isn’t actually true? Write it down. And then write the truth next to it.

The Short Version (For When You Need to Come Back to This)

Q2 planning, broken down:

1. Review Q1 honestly: what worked, what didn’t, what’s carrying forward

2. Set goals across all six life areas: not just career

3. Go deep on your career: pick one area to develop, not expand

4. Protect your business hours, and treat it like your most important meeting

5. Plan your training block: and build rest in from the start

6. Pick your one personal growth focus, and make it specific

That’s it. Six areas, clear outcomes, protected time.

This quarter gets to be different. Not because the circumstances are different, but because you’re going into it with intention instead of just momentum.

Save this. Come back to it. And if you want to talk through your own Q2 planning, you know where to find me.

— Shana

P.S. If you enjoyed this lystical action plan, I go deeper in my Full Character curriculum, available to paid subscribers each month. Here you will find more detailed action steps, specifically why trusting your own timeline is a Full Character non-negotiable, and what it actually looks like in practice when everything in you wants to compare your chapter three to someone else's chapter ten. Come find me.

Upgrade to paid

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I need to get it out.

There’s this thing that happens when you come from teaching and move into other spaces, coaching, leadership, business, where people look at your background and kind of gloss over it. Like it’s a starter job. A noble one, sure, but not exactly a launchpad for anything else.

And for a while, honestly? I let that narrative sit with me. I kept the lecturer part of me in one box, the coach in another, the creator in a different one entirely. Like each version of me had to justify herself separately before she could take up space.

But here’s what I’ve been sitting with recently: teaching didn’t just give me a career. It gave me a set of skills so embedded in how I operate that I couldn’t separate them from myself even if I tried.

And I think if you’ve ever come from a profession that gets underestimated, one where people nod politely when you mention it but don’t quite clock what it actually takes, this one’s for you.

Subscribe now

Read more

Click here to watch/listen to the latest episode on my podcast

I wasn’t going to write about the Oscars.

Genuinely. I had something else half-drafted, something about systems and seasons and all the behind-the-scenes shifts I’ve been navigating lately. But then Sunday night happened. And then I found myself watching Ryan Coogler stand at that podium with an Oscar in his hand, the second Black man in history to win Best Original Screenplay, asking his entire cast and crew to stand so he could pay his respects to them, and I had to put my phone down.

Because it hit different. As someone who has spent the last decade walking into rooms that weren’t built for me.

Subscribe now

Let me give you the picture, in case you missed it.

Sinners went into the 98th Academy Awards with a record-breaking 16 nominations, the most in Oscar history. Ryan Coogler’s film, a story about twin brothers returning to Jim Crow-era Mississippi to open a juke joint, exploring Black culture, survival, and the roots of the blues, had dominated the entire awards season. And yet, it didn’t win Best Picture. Best Director went elsewhere. The night belonged to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which swept six categories.

But here’s what Sinners did walk away with:

Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay, only the second Black American writer ever to do so, following Jordan Peele for Get Out in 2018.

Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor.

And Autumn Durald Arkapaw won Best Cinematography, becoming the first woman ever to win in that category in the Academy’s nearly 100-year history. The first Black person. The first Filipina. All at once.

Every single one of those wins came through a film directed by Ryan Coogler.

What I keep thinking about isn’t the wins.

It’s the acceptance speech. Coogler stands at the podium with his first Oscar, and one of the first things he does is ask everyone to stand. Not to bask, to pay his respects. To say: I didn’t get here alone, and I want everyone watching to know who was in the room with me.

And then there’s Autumn Durald Arkapaw. First woman. First Black person. First Filipina. In the cinematography category. In 2026. That’s what it means to expand a room. Every single milestone Sinners created behind the camera came through a Black director, betting on people who were ready, who had always been ready, who just hadn’t been given the room.

And yes, Coogler didn’t win Best Director. The room didn’t open all the way. 16 nominations and still, the ceiling held in certain places.

That’s also part of the story.

Now you are probably thinking. Shana, why did you just tell me all of this, and what does this have to do with your content?

Well, actually, it has everything to do with my content and who I am

Subscribe now

My little Story

I came into teaching through Physical Education (PE).

The sports and education world in this country is predominantly male-led, predominantly white British, and there is a very specific image of who belongs there. I walked in as a young Black woman. From day one, there was this quiet pressure. A constant low-level awareness that I was different. That I had to work harder, prove more, take up less space, just to be taken seriously.

What nobody tells you is how exhausting it is. Not just the extra effort, but the mental load. The code-switching. The constant monitoring of how you come across. The wondering whether you were passed over because of your idea, or because of something else entirely.

That weight is real. And it deserves to be named.

I consistently had to jump through hoops, impress the big boss more than my peers, and work my ass off just to get my middle leadership role.

And yes, I do think it was worth it, as I would not be here sitting today as a senior lecturer and module leader at the age of 30.

But…There is still part of me that ponders, could this have been easier?

Now, I might not have had the same experiences or struggles as these leading figures, but there is one thing we all have in common. Trying to be seen in a room that was originally not made for us. Now, looking at my own journey and reflecting on the history that has just occurred. I’ve been sitting with three things. I want to offer them to you.

01: Your difference is not a deficit.

Sinners could only have been made by Ryan Coogler. He came at it from a completely different angle. His great-uncle’s stories. His family’s migration from the South to Oakland. A love for the blues that most directors in Hollywood simply don’t carry in their bodies. He didn’t try to be like others; instead, he used his uniqueness to shine.

Now, as I sit here writing this newsletter, I am reflecting on how I spent years trying to blend in. Softening my voice. Second-guessing my instincts. Laughing off things that didn’t sit right because I didn’t want to be labelled difficult.

What I’ve learned, slowly, sometimes painfully, is that the very things that made me feel ‘other’ are the things that make me effective. My perspective. The questions I ask that nobody else thinks to ask. The people I notice being left out, because I’ve been that person.

02: You don’t have to earn your place. You occupy it.

Michael B. Jordan stood at that podium and said Coogler gave him a space to be seen. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Not a space to prove himself. Not a space to earn the right to exist. A space to be seen. There’s a difference, and most of us have spent our careers performing our way into belonging instead of simply occupying the space that was already ours.

I’ve walked into rooms over-prepared, over-qualified, and still felt like I was one mistake away from someone questioning whether I should be there. That fear is real. But the people who have always seen themselves reflected in leadership aren’t doing that calculation. They just sit down. They just speak.

You do not have to perform your way into belonging. You already belong.

03: You are not just in the room. You are expanding it.

Autumn Durald Arkapaw is the 22nd Black woman to ever win an Oscar. Twenty-second. And every single historic win she collected on Sunday, first woman, first Black person, first Filipina in cinematography, came through a Ryan Coogler set.

He didn’t just make it into the room. He expanded it. He changed who gets to stand in it.

I used to think my job was to get through. Survive the room. Don’t stand out for the wrong reasons. And then I started noticing the younger women coming into the spaces I’d worked so hard to get into, watching. Not in a pressure way. Just noticing that I was there.

Your presence, even when it feels invisible to you, is signalling something to someone else.

Every time you show up fully, the whole complicated, multi-passionate, uncontainable version of you, you shift what that room thinks is possible. You quietly rewrite who belongs here.

The rooms you enter will never look the same because you were in them. And that is not a small thing. That is a legacy.

Before I let you go.

It’s okay if you’re not there yet. It’s okay if you’re still figuring out how to be yourself in spaces that weren’t designed for you. Growth is not linear.

Some days you will walk in and own it. Some days you’ll go home and cry in the car. Both are valid. Both are part of it.

Sinners didn’t sweep the Oscars. Coogler didn’t get Best Director. The ceiling didn’t open all the way. And he’ll be back. Because that’s also what making a room fit around you looks like.

You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just have to be present and visible in a way you haven’t let yourself be yet.

Shana x

Subscribe now

There are some rooms you can learn to navigate.

And then there are rooms you will never belong in, no matter how soft you make your voice, how carefully you dress, or how perfectly you perform.

For a long time, I didn’t want that to be true.
I told myself that if I just worked harder, spoke better, achieved more, became “less much,” I could eventually earn my way into the places that always felt one step away.
Fit the mould. Learn the rules. Make them forget you were ever different.

On paper, I did everything right.
I got the qualifications.
I stepped into leadership.
I worked in institutions and industries that were never designed with people like me at the centre.
I became the person who “made it” into the spaces I had grown up watching from a distance.

And still, deep down, I knew:

I was allowed to be there.
I just wasn’t ever going to belong there.

That is a very specific kind of pain, when your access and your belonging don’t match.

Subscribe now

The cost of constantly performing “acceptable”

We don’t talk enough about the performance required to survive in certain spaces.

There’s that second voice in your head constantly checking:

Was that too direct?
Did I sound “unprofessional”?
Did I prove what they were already thinking about people like me?

You start editing yourself in real time.

The laugh that’s a bit too loud.
The opinion that might land “the wrong way.”
The cultural references nobody else in the room will recognise.

So you sand down your edges.
You learn the jokes.
You study the unspoken dress code.
You practice a version of yourself that will be easier for everyone to accept.

And for a while, it works.
You get invited back.
You’re praised for how “professional”, “polished”, or “grounded” you are.
You become the example. The story they tell when they want to prove that “it’s possible.”

But there’s a quiet grief that comes with being celebrated for a version of you that isn’t fully you.

It’s the exhaustion you feel on the journey home.
It’s the way you replay every conversation, scanning for that one sentence you wish you could reword.
It’s the way your body never really relaxes in those rooms, no matter how long you’ve been sitting at that table.

From the outside, it looks like you’re thriving.
On the inside, you know you’re surviving, and that’s a different thing.

Overachieving to compensate for underbelonging

Some people respond to not belonging by shrinking.
I did the opposite: I over‑achieved.

If I couldn’t belong, I could at least be undeniable.

Be the one who works the hardest.
The one who delivers.
The one who knows the system so well that they can’t ignore you even if they want to.

But here’s the problem: when you’re an outsider in an industry or institution, your achievements don’t always translate into ease.

You can be respected and still not fully seen.
You can be needed and still not truly included.
You can be praised and still feel like a guest in a house you helped build.

You become that strange combination: an outsider who over‑achieves and under‑belongs.

You’re good enough to rely on.
You’re good enough to front the project, deliver the keynote, and coach the team.
But somehow, you’re never quite close enough to relax with.

That’s a very particular kind of loneliness.

You’re in the room.
Your face is on the website.
Your work is in the strategy.

But the jokes aren’t really for you, the assumptions were never made with you in mind, and the culture doesn’t bend around your reality.

Standing out and still feeling shut out

People love to romanticise standing out.
They talk about “owning your difference” and “being the only one in the room” as if it were always empowering.

What they skip over is how heavy it can feel to be the only one who looks like you, sounds like you, or carries certain lived experiences, especially in industries that prize “culture fit” over actual inclusion.

Standing out is not always glamorous; sometimes it’s exposing.

You become the unofficial spokesperson for people who look like you.
You become the uncredited diversity consultant in the meeting.
You become the person everyone turns to when they don’t know “how this might land.”

You’re constantly scanning the room, doing calculations other people never have to do:

Can I say this honestly?
If I push back here, will I be “difficult” or “brave”?
Is it safe to bring my full context into this conversation, or do I nod and keep it moving?

And still, even after all of that invisible work, you can feel like a guest, never quite fully “of” the place you’re pouring so much of yourself into.

That’s the part that’s hardest to swallow:

Realising you can pour years into a system and still know, deep down, that it will never fully see you as home.

When you realise the room will never love you back

For a long time, I treated belonging as a test I hadn’t passed yet.

If I just improved enough, the way I spoke, the way I wrote, the way I managed my face and my feelings, one day it would finally click.
I thought belonging was something I could earn.

The more I worked, the clearer it became: the problem wasn’t that I was doing it wrong.

The problem was that some rooms were never designed for me to bring my full self to the table.

That realisation hurt.
It meant I had to grieve the fantasy of one day walking into certain spaces and finally feeling like I’d “arrived.”
It meant accepting that there are industries, institutions, and communities that love what I do but will never be fully comfortable with who I am.

There is a real grief in that.
Grief for the younger version of you who thought this was the finish line.
Grief for all the parts of you that had to stay outside so you could be “welcome” inside.

But after the grief, there is also something else: a tiny bit of freedom.

Because once you stop making belonging in the wrong places your life’s assignment, you get to ask a different question:

What would it look like to build, seek, or step into spaces where I don’t have to audition for my own seat?

Choosing where to belong, instead of begging to be chosen

I’m learning that I can respect an industry without worshipping its rooms.
I can acknowledge what those spaces gave me, the skills, the stories, the opportunities, without basing my entire identity on whether they accept me as one of their own.

Some spaces will always see me as “impressive but different.”
That doesn’t make me less valuable; it just means they’re not my home.

Home, for me, is starting to look like this:

Being able to tell the truth about my experience without worrying if it’s “too much.”
Not having to translate my entire existence just to be understood.
Knowing I can get something wrong without feeling like I’ve confirmed a stereotype for an entire group of people.

It doesn’t mean I only stay where it’s easy.
It means I’m more intentional:

There are rooms I will still step into strategically, to learn, to influence, to disrupt.
But I no longer hang my whole self‑worth on whether those rooms decide to embrace me fully.

Instead of asking, “How do I finally belong here?” I now ask, “Is this somewhere I actually want to belong?”

They are not the same question.

Giving back what those spaces gave me

Here’s the unexpected part:

Even if you never truly belong in certain spaces, you still take something with you when you leave, and you still leave something behind.

You carry the skills, the resilience, the insight, the emotional intelligence it took to survive in those rooms.
You bring that into the communities you later build, into the younger people you mentor, into the systems you choose to design differently.

You also leave something behind:

You leave a trace of your being there.
You leave a memory in someone who saw you hold your ground.
You leave a crack in the idea of what a “typical” person in that role or industry looks and sounds like.

Even when a space never felt like yours, you were never pointless in it.

For the ones who know they’ll never fully belong

If any of this hits a nerve, this part is for you.

Maybe you’re the only one in your office, department, or industry who looks like you, sounds like you, or thinks like you.
Maybe you keep being told you’re “so impressive,” but you still feel like you’re pressing your face against the glass of a world you can’t quite enter.

I’m not going to tell you to “just be yourself” in environments that have proven they don’t make that easy.
You deserve more than advice that ignores the reality you’re navigating.

What I will say is this:

Some rooms will never love you back.
That’s not a reflection of your worth; it’s a reflection of their limits.

The work now isn’t to keep begging those rooms to see you.

The work is to keep building, finding, and choosing spaces where you can finally put the performance down, and still be invited to stay.

And if nobody has said this to you yet: there are people, communities, and rooms you haven’t met yet where you will not be the exception, the explanation, or the “only one.”

You will simply be you.

Shana x

You know that feeling when life is technically “fine” on paper, but something in you knows you can’t keep doing work the way you’ve always done it?​
That’s the season I’m in right now: not at rock bottom, not at the shiny “I’ve made it” peak, but in the very un‑Instagrammable middle where you’re quietly asking yourself, “Am I allowed to start again?”​​

If you looked at my CV or my social media bio, you’d probably assume I’ve got a clear plan.​​

I’ve built a career in education and leadership, moved into senior roles, worked as a digital business manager, coached professionals, and created content for brands.​​
From the outside, it can read like a straight, confident line. From the inside, it feels more like a series of chapters that no longer fit neatly together, and now I’m writing a new one without a draft.​​

Subscribe now

The quiet fear of starting again

The fear I’m sitting with at the moment isn’t about failing in the beginning. It’s about starting again after you’ve already invested years of your life into becoming “someone” in your field.​​

There’s a very specific set of questions that come up: Will this new direction actually work, or am I about to waste more time and money? Have all the courses, coaching, tools, and long nights I’ve already poured into my business really moved me forward, or did they just keep me busy? If I reinvent what I do, will people think I’m confused, flaky, or “doing too much”?​​

I know I’m not the only one who has these thoughts. We don’t talk about it publicly, but so many of us are quietly wondering whether the thing we built is still the thing we want, and what it means if the answer is “not really.”​​

When your business no longer feels like you

At one point, my work felt very clear: I offered coaching, managed digital business, created content, and worked with brands. All of that is still technically “true,” but it doesn’t feel like the full picture of who I am or what I want my work to be now.​

I don’t want a business that feels like a job I tolerate between weekends, but I also don’t want a hobby that drains my energy and never gives anything back. What I want is a business that feels enjoyable and creatively fulfilling, positions me more deeply in my industry, and creates real growth and financial stability. In other words, it needs to feel like me and work. And that’s where the tension lives.​​

We’re constantly told to niche down, pick one thing, and stick to it. But as someone about to turn 30, with enough energy and flexibility to explore, I’m not ready to shrink my entire identity into one offer or one job title. I want to expand, experiment, and see what’s possible while I still have the room to do it.​

Imposter syndrome… even after you’ve “proven yourself”

Imposter syndrome doesn’t magically disappear once you’ve collected enough receipts. If anything, it can get louder when you pivot, because now you’re risking the version of yourself other people already recognise.

For me, it sounds like: “Who are you to reinvent your business again?” “People know you for X, will they follow you into Y?” “You’re supposed to be the one with clarity; how can you admit you’re still figuring it out?”​​

There’s also a more practical layer to it. I think about the coaching I’ve paid for, the tools I’ve subscribed to, the time I’ve spent learning and experimenting, and sometimes I worry: Has this really added up to something meaningful, or have I just been rearranging the same pieces?​​

When that voice gets too loud, I come back to one simple reminder: I’m not starting from zero, I’m starting from experience. Every classroom I’ve taught in, every client call, every project plan, every content experiment… all of it becomes data. Data about what works for me, what doesn’t, what drains me, and what lights me up. And that data is what I’m using now to design a business that fits who I am today, not who I was five years ago.​

Refusing to make myself smaller

Right now, I’m giving myself permission not to have the perfect one‑sentence answer to “So, what do you do?” Instead of desperately trying to sound neat and niche, I’m more interested in being honest and intentional.​

I know my work will always sit somewhere at the intersection of helping ambitious young professionals and educators feel seen, confident, and capable; turning real lived experience into practical strategy; and building systems that make life and business feel more sustainable, not more overwhelming.​

Some seasons, that might look like more coaching. In other seasons, it might be deeper digital business management or more storytelling‑led content. The point isn’t to pick one forever; it’s to build a body of work that feels aligned, useful, and grounded in who I really am.​​

If you’re in a similar place, I want you to hear this clearly: wanting to explore more than one passion doesn’t make you scattered. It makes you human.​​

If you’re scared of starting again, too

Maybe you’re reading this on your commute, in your lunch break, or at home scrolling between tasks, quietly thinking, “This is me.” You’ve outgrown the way you work, but you’re not sure what comes next, and you don’t feel ready to throw everything away.​

Here’s what I’d say to you if we were sitting together with a coffee: You are not behind because you want to pivot. You are not flaky because you’re curious about what else you could build. You are not failing just because your path doesn’t look linear.

The fear is real, and it doesn’t disappear just because someone on the internet tells you to “bet on yourself.” But fear is also a sign that this matters to you. You don’t get scared about things you don’t care about.​

You don’t have to burn your old life down to start again. You can carry forward the parts of your past that still feel alive, the skills, the relationships, the lessons, and let the rest go slowly.​

What this Substack will become

This Substack is where I’m going to keep telling the truth about what it’s actually like to build a life, career and business on your own terms, especially when everyone else seems to want neat, tidy answers. I’ll be sharing the behind‑the‑scenes of designing work that feels good, supports my lifestyle, and makes an impact, without pretending that I’m not still figuring things out as I go.​

If you’re also in a season of re‑thinking your career, your business, or the kind of life you want to build, you’re in the right place. We’re not just “starting over”; we’re starting again with more wisdom, more data, and a lot more self‑awareness.​​

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for letting me be honest in real time. If this resonated with you, feel free to share it with someone who looks like they’ve got it all together, but might secretly need to hear they’re not alone.

Shana x

Subscribe now

I need to tell you about a conversation that’s been on my mind since the start of 2026.

I was at a professional development workshop last month, and during the break, I overheard another professional explain why she hadn’t applied for a leadership role she was clearly qualified for:

“I’m working on my work-life balance right now, so I’m not ready to take on more responsibility.”

And everyone nodded supportively. “Good for you for setting boundaries!” “Self-care is so important!” “You can’t pour from an empty cup!”

But here’s what I wish I had said (but didn’t, because I didn’t want to be the villain at a networking event):

Sometimes “work-life balance” is just a socially acceptable way to avoid the discomfort of ambition.

I know that’s going to make some people very uncomfortable. Good! We need to have more uncomfortable conversations about what’s actually holding young professionals back, rather than what we pretend is holding us back.

So here’s what I want to address today, a question nobody’s asking, but everyone’s thinking...

“What career advice are we all nodding along to that’s actually keeping us stuck?”

A lot of the “wisdom” we’ve accepted as truth is either outdated, oversimplified, or actively harmful to ambitious young professionals.

And many of the approaches we’ve been told are “too aggressive” or “unrealistic” are actually exactly what separates people who advance from those who plateau.

I’ve spent the past year watching which young professionals are thriving and which are stuck. And the patterns are clear, but they’re not what the LinkedIn motivational posts would have you believe.

Here are my ins and outs for 2026 for young professionals who are serious about making changes.

Subscribe now

OUT: The Work-Life Balance Conversation Nobody’s Having

Let me be very clear about what I’m saying here, because I can already feel the replies coming...

Work-life balance is important. Burnout is real. Rest is productive.

But.

Sometimes we hide behind “work-life balance” language when what we actually mean is “I’m scared”, or “I don’t think I’m ready”, or “I’m avoiding the hard parts of growth.”

I did this for months when I was offered the opportunity to lead a module. My first instinct was to say, “I’m focusing on my master’s right now, so I don’t think I can take this on.”

The truth? I was terrified I’d fail.

The young professionals thriving are strategic about when to sprint and when to rest.

INS: Why Intellectual Humility Is Your Superpower

You know what’s become incredibly rare? Intellectual humility.

We’ve created a culture where everyone’s expected to have an instant take on everything. A hot opinion on every trend. A confident position on every industry debate.

But some of the most impressive young professionals I know have mastered the phrase: “I don’t know enough about that yet to have an informed opinion. Let me look into it and get back to you.”

Last week, someone asked me about AI’s impact on educational assessment. My instinct was to offer some vague, confident-sounding opinion based on half-remembered articles I’d skimmed.

Instead, I said: “That’s a complex issue I haven’t researched thoroughly yet. Give me a few days to look into it properly, and I’ll share my thoughts.”

The person looked genuinely surprised. Then impressed.

We’ve confused confidence with expertise. Real confidence is knowing the limits of your knowledge and being willing to admit them.

OUT: Stop Waiting for Permission

Nobody’s going to tap you on the shoulder and say, “You’re ready now. Here’s a leadership opportunity.”

That’s a fairy tale we tell ourselves to avoid the discomfort of stepping up before we feel “ready.”

I waited two years for someone to ask me to lead a teacher training initiative I knew needed to exist. A year of watching the gap, seeing the problem, having the solution and just sitting there waiting.

Finally, a colleague asked me: “Why do you think?

So I shared my ideas. I drafted a proposal, presented it to leadership, and volunteered to lead it. They said yes immediately.

Turns out they were waiting for someone to care enough to drive it. They assumed if it was important to me, I’d make it happen.

The young professionals are getting opportunities they made for themselves (which closely links to my next point below).

INS: Create the Role You Want

My current position is as a Senior Lecturer focusing on digital pedagogy and teacher training. That specific combination didn’t exist as a formal role when I started advocating for it.

I saw a gap between traditional teacher training and the digital skills new teachers actually needed. I started filling that gap informally, creating resources, running workshops, and building expertise.

Then I went to leadership and said, “I’ve been doing this work informally for six months. Here’s the impact it’s had. I’d like to formalise this as part of my role.”

They created the opportunity around what I’d already proven I could do.

Stop scanning job boards for the perfect role. Start building the skills and track record that make organisations want to create a role for you.

OUT: The LinkedIn Performance We Need to Stop

You know the posts I’m talking about:

“Three years ago, I was rejected from my dream job. Today, I’m thriving in an even better role. Here’s what I learned...”

Followed by 10 responses that are just thinly veiled self-congratulation with no actual actionable insights.

Or the classic: “I’m humbled to announce...” before listing impressive achievements that are clearly not humble at all.

We’ve created this weird performative humility culture where you’re not allowed to just celebrate wins. You have to wrap them in false modesty and pretend it was all accidental.

If you did something impressive, just own it. “I’m proud to announce...” “I worked really hard on this, and it paid off.” “This achievement matters to me.”

Authenticity beats performative humility every time.

INS: Your Career Is a Business

Here’s where I’ll lose some people...

Your career is a business where you’re the product, and you need to strategically build value, market yourself effectively, and negotiate for fair compensation.

This doesn’t mean you can’t love your work.

It means stopping romanticising your career and starting to manage it strategically.

This is how I got started:

• What’s my value proposition?

• Who’s my target market?

• How do I differentiate from competitors?

• What’s my pricing strategy (salary negotiations)?

• How do I market my capabilities?

• What’s my growth strategy?

Suddenly, career decisions became clearer. Less emotional. More strategic.

OUT: Stop Explaining Yourself

Why did you leave that job? Why are you pursuing this path? Why aren’t you following the traditional route? Why, why, why?

And we feel compelled to justify every decision to people who have no stake in our success.

Stop explaining yourself to people who aren’t invested in your career.

When someone questions my career decisions now, my response is simple: “It’s the right move for my goals.”

If they’re a mentor, close colleague, or someone genuinely invested in my success? I’ll explain further.

If they’re just being nosy or judgmental? That’s all they get.

You don’t owe strangers, distant acquaintances, or judgmental relatives a detailed explanation of your strategic career decisions.

INS: Projects Over Titles

The “climb the ladder step by step” career model is dead.

The young professionals advancing fastest aren’t climbing ladders. They’re building portfolios of increasingly impressive projects.

Instead of thinking “How do I get promoted from Coordinator to Manager to Senior Manager?” think “What projects can I lead that demonstrate the capabilities of a Senior Manager?”

I didn’t get promoted because I put in my time. I got promoted because I’d led projects that proved I could handle senior-level responsibilities.

Your project portfolio matters more than your job titles.

OUT: Own Your Priorities

We all do this. “I’m too busy to exercise.” “I’m too busy to learn that skill.” “I’m too busy to network.”

What we actually mean: “It’s not a priority right now.”

And that’s fine! But let’s be honest about it.

When I say “I’m too busy to attend that event,” what I usually mean is “I’ve decided that event isn’t worth my time compared to other things I could be doing.”

The shift is from owning your priorities to hiding behind false busyness.

“I’m not prioritising that right now” is more honest and more powerful than “I’m too busy.”

INS: Strategic Selfishness Is Necessary

This is the one that really makes people uncomfortable...

Not every opportunity deserves your yes. Not every request deserves your energy. Not every relationship deserves your time.

Being strategically selfish with your resources doesn’t mean. It’s necessary for achieving anything significant.

I used to say yes to every coffee chat, every networking request, every “pick your brain” meeting. I thought that’s what you were supposed to do as an ambitious professional.

I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and making no real progress on my actual goals.

Now I’m ruthlessly protective of my time and energy. I say no to most requests. I only say yes to opportunities that clearly serve my strategic goals or involve people I genuinely want to support.

So I hope that helps.

And if you’re sitting there thinking “some of this resonates, but I’m not sure how to actually implement it without coming across as aggressive or selfish”...

Hit reply and tell me which “IN” or “OUT” hit hardest for you, and we can take the first few steps together

Let me know what would be most helpful.

Shana

P.S. The young professional who said she wasn’t ready for that leadership role because of “work-life balance”? Someone else took the opportunity, excelled in it, and got promoted six months later. Meanwhile, she’s still in the same position, still talking about balance, still waiting for the “right time.” Sometimes the right time is now, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Social: @shanafrancisofficial | Website: shanafrancis.com

Subscribe now