#401 Helen Hanison: Success Isn’t Always Success — Part One

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Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.

I'm Viz Chen,

your ambitious human host.

Our show

is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world.

What happens when your shiny, successful career starts to feel like a trap?

Helen Hennison has the answer.

She went from board-level PR executive to career coach.

After realizing that the ladder she was climbing was leaning on the wrong wall,

in this two-part series, Helen shares how she had paused, got unstuck, and built a career that actually fits.

We'll talk about career detour, tough choices, and why midlife isn't a crisis.

It's a chance to redesign

if your job looks great on paper but feels like sandpaper this one is for you

let's get into it

helen good morning Welcome to our show.

Welcome to Chief Change Officer.

Thank you so much for having me.

Happy to be here sitting in that blue chair behind you.

Let's start with your story.

You've gone through quite a transformation yourself.

From public relations to branding and now coaching with a focus on career.

We'll dive into the why, the how and everything in between.

Yeah, sure.

So

My name is Helen Hannison.

You've already said I'm in the UK.

I think what's probably more relevant for your listeners to know about me though is that I used to think that I was defined by that thing I did, my PR career.

It was a 20-year tour of duty, as I call it now, in global PR firms.

So always enormous budgets and global remits and market-leading brands.

It was fantastic and I loved it all the way up to when I didn't.

And for me, I hit this career crossroads that is a big part of why I now do what I do today.

Success is what it looked like from the outside.

I was on the board, I was on and on playings all the time.

I know people looking in felt it was successful and glamorous even.

For me, I was bumping into

a wall.

I don't know how else to explain it.

It was very incompatible with becoming a mother for the first time.

And that junction of mothering and careering was tough to navigate.

And I hadn't seen it coming, which might be my own naivety but there you go i had thought a lot about replacing myself at home because i assumed in the opposite direction and then found it excruciating not to be present hardly at all for my little one so what do you do with that Those jobs are the most important.

That's an incredible amount of conflict to live with if you believe you're defined by the one that is less important to you.

So that's where that started for me, that sort of pain barrier and puzzle that I had to figure out.

There were a number of lost years in the figuring out.

And I think we will probably come to some of those as the conversation goes on.

But long story short, I created a second jumping off point eventually and worked out that I needed what I did to be meaningful to me, to have congruence with my career and life.

And that integration was

the secret source to defining success for myself, actually.

So the psychology degree going all the way back was what began that second career.

And today I coach people who find themselves stuck or struggling in work that feels wrong, overwhelmed or disconnected, or perhaps they've been laid off.

So whatever their crossroads might be, and they can be many different things because we're all situated differently, what I help them do is redesign their career so it realigns with the things that actually matter to the most.

And sometimes that's a little shift, and sometimes that's a great big aligned career transformation.

But it's never about throwing out all that experience and knowledge that they've gained along the way so far.

You mentioned spending 20 years in public relations.

I'm curious, why did you choose that path back then, right off college?

It was seen as a glamorous, traditional career.

What was going on in your life at the time that led you to it?

I think even that career in public relations I fell into.

I had briefly been in human resources before that and I think that had shown me that I was interested in people.

Unfortunately, being junior in human resources is a lot about admin rather than the people themselves.

It turned me off fairly quickly because I was frustrated and had all this ambition and I didn't want to wait.

And then I went to do my first degree was in media and communications and really my love of writing, my love of communicating, the idea of planned campaigns that really speak to your target audience, getting into the psyche of that target audience.

That was what tipped me into public relations in the first place.

And I think when you're junior and you're career building days, no matter what sector you choose, you're there to absorb the institutional knowledge, the career skill set, grow your own sense of gravitas within whatever field you are.

It's not a lot about being choiceful.

Certainly within public relations, you could be in so many different areas.

I was in quite a broad area called consumer and even that can be split into so many areas.

But it was clear that I wanted to be people focused.

That stayed.

Over the course of the career and the 20 years you're quite right i discovered at a few different points that i still wasn't doing anything that was actually intrinsically motivating to me so if i tell the story of sometimes pring cars i mean i drive i'm not ever so interested in cars that didn't turn me on or light me up and it was the same with

something like Yellow Pages, which I mean doesn't I don't think even exist in the Spain way now because it was before the internet days, if you can even imagine, a great big book of contact phone numbers and details.

It just wasn't

making me feel alive at all.

So, this is where I started to notice, not that I could have articulated it this way at the time, that being competent at something, building a career on strengths alone, is not the right way to go if you want to feel lit up by what you do.

So, I moved in the sort of more senior end of my PR career into food food and health and nutrition because I was engaged.

And I think one of the most important campaigns I ever worked on and led was launching the first functional foods to market in the UK and Europe.

And it was all about cholesterol lowering benefits.

So it really had some meaningfulness infused through it, as well as being a big budget and a big sexy sort of thing to introduce functional foods against the backdrop of a lot of fear, actually, about genetically modified organizations back at that time.

So, I started to feel lit up and really notice the difference then.

And I never looked back.

I specialized in food and health right to the end of my PR career.

I was thinking about your journey in connection with your book.

The subtitle talks about building a purposeful career.

And it got me wondering: back in your PR days, were you already consciously consciously searching for that sense of purpose?

Or is it more something that came into focus later as you gained more experience and perspective over time?

So I think hindsight is a beautiful thing, isn't it?

Everything is obvious with the benefit of that vantage point.

But I think at the time...

I was onto something.

I wouldn't say it was as conscious as I've probably explained it to you today.

I think I was very self-aware.

I could could tell my own energy levels, my own sort of appetite, that aliveness, as I call it now, was either up or down.

There was no denying it.

So I was very aware of where I was on that sort of energy matrix and riding the waves.

And it was often about people.

So I started to notice what is now obvious to me.

Either the campaigns have to be people focused in a real way, hence health.

It feels like the most direct line you could possibly have to having a meaningful impact on people's lives.

And at the time I was launching that functional food for with cholesterol lowering, my uncle was going through some heart health issues.

So it really, that to me says it all.

There was a personal significance within what I was doing.

Now, I could also say I was propelled along by promotions and that is also true.

And I think for career builders, that's what happens.

And that's how actually we don't notice.

Sometimes for years,

often i'm coaching people who for 20 years have much like i was have built to a place of seniority and realize they're at the top of a ladder they actually don't want to be on because they've been

seduced a bit by those success markers until then And I think for me, the other piece that kept me going, and I hear this a lot as well in my coaching, is the people that I worked with.

So the leadership aspect of it, because I was becoming more serious and fostering a culture culture where people thrived and wanted to work with me.

And we all got energy from each other.

And there was a certain amount of succeeding in a different way, in an interpersonal, collaborative culture.

And what I would say is, even back then,

without all this awareness of psychology or organizational psychology or any of it, I would move in as a director to a new team and take every single person off-site to coffee from the most junior graduates right through to my number twos and ask them what would they like to happen in their career after this stop.

And it's really interesting to me when I look back on that now, that even then the emotional awareness or intelligence was there to understand that people need to feel purposeful about what they do.

That wasn't special to me.

People lit up and leaned in because I had asked.

And

that is a thread that carries through to this sort of career too of mine.

You used the phrase seduced by the success mockers

and I think that is so relatable

because sometimes

people

might actually feel stuck.

in their own version of success.

And even though it looks good on the outside,

that stuckness doesn't feel good on the inside.

Before we dive into your approach and how you help others, I want to go back to your own story.

After spending 20 years in public relations, what triggered your move?

What was going through your mind at the time that led you to make that transition?

So I think what happened for me is what happens for a lot of people.

We professional people and I really, my top tier work one is one, one with seasoned professionals.

And seasoned professionals are excellent at persevering, even when they are, as you say, stuck in work that is feeling off, that is no longer feeling aligned because they can do it.

So it's a very ambiguous line.

And it feels like it's a high risk line to draw.

If you believe you can only do what you've always done and it's a long way down from the sort of the heights that you've achieved in your career, that is a massive decision.

And I think what happened for me is what I still see in my clients today and recognize for them.

In the end, it's such an undeniable feeling to feel that disconnected from what you do every day, that

stagnant, that it bleeds out of the career space and into the rest of your relationships and life generally.

And it becomes undeniable so that in the end, the fear of inaction, the fear of staying stuck another year, every year until you retire, feeling like that, knowing it's going downhill and affecting everything is actually the bigger risk than protecting the status quo.

And that's what happened for me.

It just felt undeniable and untenable and suddenly clear.

that I had to make change happen.

Now,

having said that,

there were the lost years I alluded to earlier and it wasn't a smooth process.

And that's actually where an awful lot of my formula for purposeful career redesign came from.

There was a lot of throwing mud at the wall and seeing what stuck.

It wasn't a great process and it took too long, but it also taught me everything I know today and have distilled in the book and the course and coped people through.

So it's also hard to say I regret any of it.

We might have a good degree of self-awareness, but that doesn't always mean we see everything

with total clarity.

Looking back on your journey, after all the moves, the risks, the uncertainty,

what were some of the biggest challenges you faced along the way?

And despite all that,

what made it all worth it for you?

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Oh, it's absolutely all worth it because really once I had the clarity about what I was aiming for and I think that came for me in the final year of the psychology degree where

I was still stimulated and more lit up than I had been for years learning, but it was very challenging learning.

Compared to my first degree, for sure, it was tough.

And there was definitely a point quite early on where I thought, oh have i done this wrong maybe i should go and pivot to a journalism masters or something that is more logical with what i did before and then by the time i'd gone through the motions and spoken to the people involved that could have made that happen for me the next electives had come out for psychology and i happened to have a word with myself and i was bumping into clarity almost by accident that I was not prepared to look away from those psychology electives, no matter how hard it was.

I had to solve it and back myself actually so i did what i do for my kids and put a bit of extra support in place and got over the the challenging curve with statistics and neuroscience and never looked back so

i think that's really important lesson and i think you're right the self-awareness isn't just there for anybody and the irony is not lost on me that i'm now collecting degrees and have psychology but also positive psychology certifications my narrative therapy and I'm still learning and I will always be learning and I accept that.

And I think coming at your own life when you're in deep

is probably one of the hardest things we do because it's tough to have perspective on that.

That's, I think, probably the very biggest benefit of having a coach is that you have somebody.

on the outside who's invested in illuminating for you so you can see for yourself what's going on and if there's a disconnect between what you say you want and what your actions are supporting.

So

that was really where the clarity came.

And I think the aliveness came in year three where I was explaining to my professor, look, I've been approached to go and do a master's, but it's, I don't know.

It's, it was in the therapeutic space.

It was

for young adults.

It just didn't sound quite right.

In England, we operate with the NHS system and it was like putting a band-aid on a broken leg to me.

I went through the motions and got offered the opportunity but every bone in my body was saying I don't agree with this and having lived in the States for a few years and seen people have experience of something so different I just knew that was

not going to have synergy not going to be in alignment for me so again the self-awareness you bump into it and I think it's a duty we have to ourselves to tune in and listen and shape our actions from there.

And this amazing coach said to me, professor said to me, there is something that is less about problems and more about solutions.

It's called coaching.

And that's what started this whole journey.

And she introduced me to people and I moved into that hook line and sinker.

And for me,

Even at the beginning, before I'd jumped into what was a very rigorous training with CTI, it was the hope I'd found it.

I knew I had found it.

And I knew I could bring everything I'm so passionate about, all my real life experience, but also the psychology and the neuroscience to help people get over their immunity to change when that's really hard.

And I honestly have that aliveness every time a client of mine has a breakthrough.

And it doesn't always have to be the big, dramatic, transformative ones.

It's the shift for them that does it for me, that they move out of that oppressive feeling of stuckness

and

see a possibility for a different future and trust themselves to build forwards towards it.

Was the reason you wrote the book

because it's one of the most

effective and cost-effective ways to reach a wider audience?

Did you see it as a way to scale your message and help more people beyond one-on-one coaching?

Yes and no.

I would measure the impact I hope to have on people

by the number of individuals I help.

But for me, it's not about scale.

So

I will always have one-to-one work at the heart of what I do because I feel so strongly that is

such a deep texture.

And that yeah, that's really important to me.

The reason I wrote the book was it came out of lockdown.

I was being asked

by, I was at capacity.

It was a very busy time for coaching.

And I thought that was a fantastic thing.

Obviously, lots of people are in a very different situation with their work and mine just went seamlessly online.

And I loved that.

But I'd got to a point where I just couldn't have taken on any more.

coaching clients and was being asked because I suppose a lot of coaches do have a book and a course and I didn't have any of that.

So

that was where it came from.

I put together a very quick and dirty course with just obviously nobody could meet with anybody.

So I just recorded it on Zoom and put it together and let people have access to it.

And that became a pilot test of sorts.

And what I realized was in structuring my online course, I'd actually written a book outline and I'd even called what other people might call modules or lessons, I'd call this.

And I thought, wow,

this could be a book.

So I started approaching sort of publishers and trying to work out as a whole new landscape.

How would I do that?

So the learning curve began there.

I picked it up last year when I'd had a health hiccup.

And I came back to work with this sort of fresh energy, renewed appetite, and thought, that's unfinished business for me.

I want to get this book out of my head and into the world.

I always meant to, was always too busy to.

That's a shame.

So that was it.

I found a publisher who would help me do it easily and quickly.

And Game Changer Publishing were fantastic at doing that.

Amazing coaching, although they wouldn't call it that.

And there we are.

The book was into the world and launched to bestseller within a few days last summer.

So that was the motivation.

Lots of different reasons.

And I do hope that anybody who feels

that work isn't 100%

right.

So that's, there are an amazing amount of statistics out there that about 85% of us, if not more, feel that.

So it's not that they're desperately and deeply, tragically unhappy.

It's the beginnings of that sort of tug on the sleeve that work is feeling wrong.

They're struggling.

They're overwhelmed.

They're disconnected.

I would hope for those people

to reach out.

and get this kind of a book that will introduce new concepts, very actionable concepts.

Every chapter has QR codes that lead to exercises or me talking through a tool or a way to get traction would be an easy lift.

And that's the first step to getting unstuck is to start engaging with ideas that can help you do that, which of course is the title of the book.

Before we dive deeper into the book itself, you mentioned earlier that you had already created courses and that eventually led you to turn those ideas into a book.

It sounded like a natural progression.

But speaking from experience, I published two books myself about 10 years ago.

Even with a publisher and all the content in hand, it was still a huge undertaking.

Honestly, one of the most challenging things I've done, not just in terms of writing, but everything else around it

how would you describe your experience writing this book did it flow smoothly or were there unexpected challenges that first-time authors should be aware of

yeah the first thing i would want to say to anyone listening i'm feeling a bit daunted but if that sounded too smooth was everything sounds smooth after the event and it's a bit like childbirth you immediately forget all the pain

no it wasn't that smooth it was incredibly immersive and you're right that was even with those ideas already formed i knew exactly what i wanted to get down into this book and in what order and it was still took absolute immersion four months and i think the point of going with game changer was they say that timeline can be quite quick which it was they were right but therefore immersive

i had to stop not stop i had to look away and here's an irony to watch for I've had to look away from important people and my relationships to have the time to get the book done.

Now, I think you probably understand at this point in the conversation how important people are to me.

And that's where my energy comes from.

So that's what's meaningful.

So it was a trade-off.

It was a trade-off I accepted to get it done.

The challenges were

you're on a learning curve.

And although the publisher was fantastic at supporting me, the decisions

are mine to make.

It's my book.

There's a discomfort in any growth, I always think.

And I certainly had several points that I was very stressed on making decisions.

And

actually, if I hold it up, the cover was one of them.

I found this image, which I absolutely love because to me, it...

It just says everything.

This person's walking or these people are walking, they're moving.

It's not necessarily the same as taking action.

The analogy with that and what people often explain, they don't necessarily use the word stuckness, but they explain they are stuck in a cycle of solving the same career problem over and over again on their own.

And they can't figure out how maybe they've achieved situational change.

They've moved from one corporate home to another.

And maybe nine months down the line, they've noticed the same or similar story seems to be unfolding.

They've carried the problem with them.

but they're solving the wrong problem but it takes a couple of goes of that and remember we i only really work with very bright competent careerists so of course they're going to have tried a bunch of things before they tip into sort of a coaching relationship so

once i saw that image come together it made sense whereas before that the designers were

quite understandably showing me things with tape that was peeling off because that was unstunk and all kinds of other ideas that made that just weren't resonating for me.

And I was struggling to explain

what I meant.

I don't think I'm very visual.

I think I'm all about words.

So it was a difficult thing.

And actually, the technical bits and bobs of almost anything to me is very stressful.

So

there was quite a bit of that.

It wasn't really about the writing.

To me, the writing was the organic bit that just, it was almost therapeutic to get it out.

But yeah, it's a journey.

And I think to do it with support is clever as a debut also because I think otherwise you're shooting in the dark a bit.

And to have the thought partnership and guidance of someone who's been there before or many times before

takes a load off.

Let's dig into the boat now.

You structure it into three acts:

Act 1, alignment.

Act 2, career redesign.

And Act 3, transformation.

First,

why did you choose these three as the core structure?

Why start with alignment?

Why follow that with career redesign?

And then end with transformation?

And second, for each of these acts, what are the key takeaways or core messages you would want readers?

to walk away with

let's start with act one the act of alignment To me, the act of alignment is an important foundational step for everyone in career redesign.

And

I'm pretty insistent actually that we give this proper time and attention at the beginning of working with somebody because otherwise, if we don't hesitate there on purpose and take inventory, what happens is

I'm helping somebody kick the can down the road of what they think or assume the right problem to solve is.

That's it for part one.

Helen's journey from global boardroom to career coach showed us that success without alignment just doesn't stick.

But how do you actually get unstuck?

In part two, Helen walked us through her framework for career change.

From the three acts of redesign to the power of a hope map.

It's practical, honest, and full of aha moments.

Don't miss it.

Thank you so much for joining us today.

If you like what you heard, heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media.

I'm Vin Shen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care.