Career transition coach in Lisbon for professionals who’ve outgrown the career they built, and have thought about it for years without moving. Sessions online worldwide.
I spent a decade in tech in Australia and Europe, collecting companies, titles and salaries. From the outside, everything looked fine, and I should have been content, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t how I wanted the next thirty years to go.
I didn’t quit straight away. Instead, I adjusted to smaller companies, a move overseas, remote work, freelancing, portfolio career and a four-day work week. It was four years of changing the external conditions before finally admitting that no amount of rearranging was going to fix what I’d outgrown. The problem was that I was trying to build a career that belonged to a younger version of me, and the person I'd become valued different things.
It’s several transitions arriving at different depths. The professionals I work with are somewhere inside their own four years of adjusting. It usually arrives as a career problem, through the question, what next?
Underneath that question, a set of beliefs that have started to shift. Beliefs about who you are, what you owe other people, what counts as a serious life, what you're allowed to want and what happens when you stop being the person everyone relies on. Work just happens to be the place where the pressure shows first.
What makes this particularly difficult for capable people is that thinking well is often what keeps them stuck. You can describe your own situation with precision, name your patterns, trace it back to childhood, and still remain exactly where you are.
Waiting to feel certain is a sophisticated form of procrastination. Some people are lucky enough to feel a genuine calling. The rest of us have to engage with the world in a way that produces something to evaluate. Direction comes from acting and reading what comes back, not from thinking harder in private. You don't need answers coming in, but you do need a willingness to be honest with yourself.
There's no external authority that is going to issue you permission. The only person who has been withholding permission is you.
There is an enormous amount of support for building a career and almost nothing for the moment you outgrow it, so something ordinary and recurring is experienced as a private failure — usually in silence, usually by someone succeeding by every external measure. What's happening is a shift in where your authority sits: from a self assembled out of other people's expectations to one that can hold its own view. That takes longer than a job search and it asks more of you. You cannot make decisions on behalf of a person you haven't properly met. Work Worth Doing is built for the transitions no one prepares us for.
I can't tell you which decisions are right for you. What I do is ask the questions underneath the one you brought, reflect back what you said quickly and moved past, and press where you'd usually let yourself off the hook.
This is where the work departs from mentorship and “creator” coaching. A mentor gives you their route, which is useful when the problem is information — how to price, how to find clients, what to do first. When the problem isn't information, someone else's route just becomes another set of shoulds to measure yourself against. There's no curriculum here and no pace but yours.
Insight on its own is sometimes just a more articulate version of being stuck. Understanding a pattern is not the same as being free of it and more intellectual processing rarely moves the needle. Much of what keeps people stuck is relational — how you learned to be around other people's expectations — which means it shows up in our conversations too. You'll defer, or perform competence, or check whether I approve. That’s the pattern arriving live, which is where it can actually be worked with. This is where Internal Family Systems, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt Therapy and Somatic Experiencing come in.
Originally from Australia, born into a bi-racial family with an Indonesian mother and Ecuadorian father. I’ve lived in a Portuguese surf town with my Chilean partner for the past six years. Living between cultures has been the running theme of my life, so questions of who you are and where you belong have never been abstract for me.
I've come to trust literature, art and music to reach places explanation can't. While I love learning about psychology and neuroscience, I find reading fiction much richer than the self-help genre. Here's a growing list of books that have shaped my thinking.
Embodiment predates my coaching. Yoga was an important part of my life when I went through my own career transition. It helped reconnect me to my body and built my capacity to notice and feel again. I’m trained as an Ashtanga, Vinyasa and Yin yoga teacher and completed an immersion with Ty Landrum in Purple Valley. I’ve also completed 10 days of Vipassana meditation through Dhamma Sacca.
I previously worked as a product designer for Google, Deloitte, PhantomBuster and Unbabel for 9+ years, and I still consider myself a creative.
I can only take people as far as I've gone myself, which is why I'm in ongoing supervision, coaching and therapy of my own.
For people who’ve outgrown their professional career and aren’t sure what comes next. I write about meaning, self-authorship and reinvention.
By subscribing you agree to Substack's Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Information collection notice.