Making Work of Your Own: A Client’s Journey
When Luke reached out for coaching last year, I felt instant resonance. We had parallel journeys of completing a PhD and making the difficult decision to leave the academy in search of work that felt more aligned. I’m sharing his story, inspired by a beautiful account he wrote on our work together and his trajectory of transitioning from the life of an academic to that of a writer. You can read it here. I wanted to provide a perspective from the other side of the coaching relationship—what I saw, what we learned, and what emerged as he carved his own path.
Our early conversations explored Luke’s interests in leaning into emptiness and looking for emergent forms, in both writing and in life. It was a foreshadowing of our work together. We started coaching as one does with writing—by facing the blank page.
Luke was in a period of waiting. A chapter of life had ended and what would come next was unknown. He wanted writing to be at the center of his work, but it was unclear how he would support himself. As he recounts in his article, Luke was asking himself: “Should I plunge into tech to secure maximum financial stability? Apply for editorial positions at university presses? Go for a job in a plant shop while I focused on my writing?” He described the paralysis that came with this: “When every option was open, I felt it was impossible to take a step in any direction.”
The direction, I sensed, was within Luke. I asked him to turn his attention inwards to tap into a core set of desires, proclivities, and passions that were uniquely his. Rather than refashion himself in search of work, I suggested that Luke consider what was already inside him that he wanted to bring out.
We pulled out several threads. His clearest desire was to live as a writer. He wanted to structure his days around writing—reading literature, crafting narratives, editing work. His training for a PhD in English had also sparked an interest in translating philosophy, in making complex concepts accessible to a wide audience. He sensed the gap between the public desire to engage with philosophy and the discursive structures that limit access to academic knowledge. He wanted to bridge that gap. The third thread was Luke’s commitment to congruence, a lining up of ethics, action, and practice. It was important to him that his work reflected his values.
A question arose in our conversations: How could Luke combine these threads to design work that was uniquely his?
From Emptiness to Form
We explored the bridges between Luke’s interests. We spoke of his excitement in seeing a text’s shape emerge through the writing process. We discussed how a form of writing becomes imposed on academics—anthropologists, sociologists, historians and others—with rich and powerful stories to tell. Some feel compelled to condense these stories into snippets of evidence in dissertations and books. Many leave the academy with unpublished work, carrying untold stories from decades of fieldwork and research in dusty archives. As an anthropologist, I knew what it meant to be a keeper of stories—whispered in tea shops, told with trust, and, asked by the tellers to share them with the world. I also knew the heartbreak of holding onto them, unable to give their beauty and power its full expression in the world.
One afternoon, Luke and I looked at each other and wondered: what would it be like to free these stories from the constraints of academic writing, to help scholars discover a new shape and form for them to reach a world wider world?
Something clicked. I could feel the crackle in the air, the kind you hear when an idea shows up, announcing its arrival. We realized Luke could construct a bridge between scholarship and the world. As an academic, he was trained to dive into the thickets of theory and extract the kernel of a powerful insight. As a writer, he knew how to give stories a shape and form. Over several weeks, Luke refined his vision to bring his skills to help scholars—current and former—find the right voice and structure to convey their research to the public.
Luke’s consulting practice, Everyday Worder, was born.
He swiftly brought his vision to life. In Luke’s words: “once things were put in motion, a possibility became reality so fast I almost didn’t know what hit me.” Within a few months, he began working with a wonderful scholar to prepare a text brought together a lifetime of research. We had gone into what seemed like emptiness and found a form that was distinctly Luke’s.
Watching Luke’s journey showed me something powerful—that our work finds its true expression when we lean into the uniqueness of our interests and skills rather than trying to fit ourselves into a mold. Making our work begins with listening for what is already within us that awaits its emergence in the world.