Coffee with journalist turned career coach, Rachel Schofield
Rachel Schofield
Career Coach, Rework your Life
Age 45
London Zoom Coffee
How I met Rachel
“I know someone who would be great for your project”, said my friend, Anna. “Would you like me to introduce you?” The person was Rachel and Anna was right. She always is!
Rachel is both an example of how you go about reinventing your career midlife and a facilitator for those trying to figure out their next career act. Through her company ‘Rework Your Life’, Rachel focuses on helping women, particularly mothers, reconnect with the working world and find a way back in that feels right.
So much of our conversation resonated with me. Particularly the idea that you can’t wait for the perfect moment - that you just need to start - even in a small way. That confidence comes from action.
I also loved the idea of different threads running through our careers and our lives. The challenge is to identify those threads and use them to tell our story. So much of the struggle is finding the narrative that gets at the heart of who we are and what we can offer, but once we find our voice, everything gets easier!
Please have a read.
Describe your career path including any twist or turns ending with where you are now.
I think of myself very much as a questioner, listener and a communicator - and a little nosey as well! Those are the core threads that run through all of the steps on my career path.
At uni, I read Modern Languages. I loved the idea that speaking another language gave you a window into someone else's world, a way to communicate with others, to hear their stories and understand what they’re living through.
Stories have always been important for me. And that was ultimately what led me to decide to be a journalist.
After uni, I did a postgraduate qualification in Broadcast Journalism. I knew that I wanted to report and present and so I joined the BBC, working first in local radio and TV in the North East and then down to London where I worked on radio for programmes like You and Yours and Woman's Hour as a reporter. Eventually I landed in what felt to me like my dream job, as a presenter on the BBC News Channel.
Where I am today is a pivot, but it still has those threads.
I’ve taken all my skills around questioning and listening and analysing and incorporated them into coaching. So much of the skillset is the same, but just being used for a different purpose.
Perhaps what had happened with journalism was that I was fed up asking questions of people who didn't really want to answer. You know, when you've spent two years asking Brexit politicians the same questions and getting the same answers… it's just so frustrating.
I thought, I want to go back to my roots, my experiences in local journalism which was all about real people telling their stories. I think that's what brought me around to coaching. It's using questions in a way that opens things up and moves people forwards rather than just hitting a brick wall. That's the magic of coaching. So in some ways it's different to journalism, but in other ways, it’s the same. It’s an investigation of people’s lives.
It's about telling a story that makes sense to you and makes sense to other people.
I think there's a lot of work to be done, particularly for women who've stepped out of a career and now feel they have this awful gap… a missing chunk to their story, where they can only lay claim to the word, Mum. And what does that mean?
I think it's dreadful for people to feel that they've lost the ability to define themselves, because society wants to put them in a little box. “Oh, you've been out of the formal workplace, therefore, you don't count.”
I help people to see their career threads. That's why I deliberately tell my story the way I do – focused on my core attributes and not simply a job title. It's taken some time and self-reflection to look carefully at myself, my strengths, my skills and my values. Now I can see those patterns and I realise they’ve been there forever.
But it takes the right questions and it takes some time and the ability to be honest and to try and really get in touch with some of the deeper threads in your life, both in your career and in other areas of your life.
And when you can do that and tell your story, that makes a big difference to your confidence, especially, if you're thinking about a switch.
What decision / experience proved to be the most helpful to your career?
Hilariously, it was to not become a spy! In all seriousness, when I finished my final year at uni, I tried for the Foreign Office through their formal scheme and didn't get through. Then I received a very strange letter, which - long story short - it transpired was from MI6 saying, would you be interested in other opportunities at the Foreign Office?
I was interested in the security services because it plays to those strengths of questioning and listening and getting inside other people's worlds. And I was a linguist. So it ticks a lot of my boxes. But I realised that from my values point of view, it wasn't quite aligning with what was important to me. I wasn't sure I wanted to live this secret double life! Getting clear on your values is crucial to career fulfilment.
Joining the BBC was massive for me in terms of my career and my confidence. Being part of such an iconic brand has served me really well. It's given me confidence and provided a sort of safety blanket for me through my career move into coaching. People can say ‘Oh, she's a serious person. She's a journalist.’ and that’s sometimes helpful when people are sceptical about the value of coaching.
What advice would you give your 20 year old self knowing what you do now? And what advice would you tell her / him to ignore.
To young women particularly I would say, Be Bold.
Speak up, own your voice, say what you want and self-promote a little bit more. Not in an arrogant way, but in a way that lets people know you’d like to step up and try something more. Don't hide your light under a bushel because actually, it doesn't help anybody. Instead, put yourself forward for things and show what you're capable of.
And wear better clothes! Now I’m 45 and trying to get back in shape, I look back and think “Oh my gosh, my 20 year old body was wasted on me. The wonderful daring things I could have worn!”
Where or to whom do you look for inspiration?
I'm a bit of a sucker for old buildings. In fact, my husband jokes that I made him promise to join the National Trust before I agreed to marry him!
I love going around old houses and connecting with lives that have gone before. Especially the ones where you feel like you’re stepping into someone's life, seeing the letters on the desk and an open book on the bedside table. I find this inspiring because it’s very grounding - it connects you to a much bigger world and a sense of lives gone by.
In those times when you are obsessing over your own small corner of the world, it's good to be reminded that everybody's lives are messy and complicated. And that's actually rather wonderful.
There's no pressure then to make your life perfect and brilliant, because you can see everyone's lives are muddled and a mixture of happiness and sadness and confusion and ambition. It's realising you're kind of smaller than you think, which is quite a nice thought sometimes, in that ‘don’t sweat the small stuff way’, because actually, nobody's looking!
When you are feeling stuck or uninspired, what actions do you take or what questions do you ask yourself?
I do all of my own business design work for Instagram and my website on Canva. And it's made me realise the power of working in a visual medium. It’s brilliant when I'm feeling stuck and struggling with an idea. Thinking in pictures can really help me get unstuck. Even if I'm not planning a proper Instagram post, just playing around with images helps me sort my thoughts.
In the last five years, what new belief or behaviour or habit has most improved your working life?
Part of the process of retraining as a coach is learning how to coach yourself. It’s a process of self-reflection and learning how to challenge the negative voice that sits in your head. And realising that sometimes you need to push back against all those self-limiting beliefs that make you feel scared, that tell you can’t or shouldn’t do something.
It’s learning that this voice is not always telling you the truth and that you have a choice in this equation to accept or challenge that voice. That’s been brilliant especially as I build my own business and doubt inevitably creeps in. You start thinking, ‘Oh, gosh, will people think I look stupid? What will other people say?’ Learning to put those thoughts in their proper place has been really important.
Confidence doesn't come before action, you've got to take action and then confidence follows.
And the other thing that's come from my coaching and the work I do with others is understanding that you can't sit around waiting to become confident before you do things. People often say things like, “Well, when I feel a bit more confident, I'm going to launch my own business” or “When my confidence is higher, I'll start reaching out to my old network”. And actually, it's realising you've got to turn that on its head totally.
You need to get some skin in the game and stop just googling and researching and hiding behind a computer screen and actually start doing things to realise that's where all the learning happens.
I think as parents, we talk this really good talk around a growth mindset. About taking risks and how there’s learning in failure. We talk-the-talk but we don't walk-the-walk in our own lives. So sometimes, you need to talk to yourself as if you're a child and go, you know, what's the worst that can happen? Just have a go and see how it turns out. If I can tell this to somebody who's 12, why can’t I tell it to somebody who's 45?
If you could put one quote or piece of advice on a big billboard for everyone over 50 to see what would it be?
This is an easy one. “IF NOT NOW, THEN WHEN?”
So many people are waiting for the perfect time to start something new… thinking ‘when my partner's job is sorted’ or ‘when the kids have done their GCSEs’ or ‘when the refurb on the house is complete’, then life will open up and it will be the perfect time and everything will fall into place for my new career. And that is never going to happen.
Waiting for this moment where the stars align is a fool's game. Because there's never going to be a perfect moment. Even if you start in a small way, you've got something to show in 12 months, rather than looking back and thinking “God, if only I'd started this time last year.”
Recommendations? podcasts books?
The podcast How to Own the Room with Viv Groskop. Viv is a comedian, speaker and a journalist. She interviews high profile women about how to own your voice and command attention. She covers loads of great stuff around confidence and public speaking, which come up in my own client base time and time again.
The other recommendation is How to Fail with Elizabeth Day. It's going back to that issue of the growth mindset and realising that we need to make friends with failure because that's how you grow and how you learn. The idea that failure is not something to be scared of or embarrassed about - that by failing, you get better. You don't get better by sitting on your arse!
