My two worlds collided.

A few years back I was driving home from work when I got a call from a friend I hadn't spoken to in a couple of months.

She had a job offer on the table and wanted my feedback. After the pleasantries about our families we got right into it. The role, the base salary, incentives, team size. I usually have a spreadsheet I plug things into but I was driving, so we winged it. She walked me through where she'd landed.

Then she said, "When it came through, the first thing I thought was, what would Ceaneh say?" I laughed and brushed it off. Then we got back to the analysis.

That's it. That's the whole reaction. I moved us right along to the next thing.

I'd been having these conversations for years. Careers. Bosses. The move somebody was scared to make. People came to me with the decision they couldn't make and left with clarity.

I never once called it work.

A few years after that call, I was talking to a coach about what I actually liked doing. I told her about those conversations and how much I enjoyed helping people get unstuck. She asked the obvious question. Why don't you go down this path? And I said, "I don't know. I guess if I make it a job and get paid for it, it won't be fun anymore."

I believed that. It was a story I'd been telling myself for a while.

Then in 2024, on my way out of my final corporate role, someone told me I'd make a great coach. I said, "I guess we'll see where it goes." This time I heard. I wasn’t claiming it yet.

Three people across almost a decade. Every one of them handed me the same information and I found a way to put it on the back burner.

Right after leaving corporate I sat down to work on my resume for a project. IT lead. R&D program manager. Global head of procurement. Everything that fits neatly on an org chart. Nothing on the page about the thing three people had named for me over the past decade.

Here's the part that gets me. I didn't leave it off. Leaving it off would've been a decision. It never occurred to me that it belonged there.

It wasn't work. It was fun.

Psychologists call it the effort heuristic. We judge what something's worth by the effort it takes to get the result. The painting that takes a year beats the one that took an afternoon. The strategy that takes six months of analysis is serious. The one somebody saw immediately is a hunch.

We do it to our own skills too. If it costs you something, it counts. If it comes easy, it's a hobby. Those conversations were easy for me. No preparation. Somebody would start talking and I'd hear the assumption underneath what they were saying, and I'd ask about that instead. It felt like nothing. It felt like being a friend.

So I filed it under fun and left it there.

Nobody kept that work off my resume. I did that. And "if I got paid for it, it wouldn't be fun anymore" was the story I used to do it. As long as it stayed fun, it couldn't fail. Nobody's grading the thing you do for free.

For years I thought I was building two separate worlds. One was organizations, budgets, and getting from strategy to results. The other was people, and the gap between the life they were living and the life they wanted.

The connection became clearer when I stopped trying to find one label broad enough to describe everything and started paying attention to the question I kept asking.

Whether I was working with an organization or talking with one person, I was usually trying to understand:

I used to think stories were personal. I need one more certification. I need more clarity. I need to feel ready. If I get paid for it, it won't be fun anymore.

The more I worked with organizations, the more I saw they have stories too. This is how we've always done it. That department's the problem. Change takes years here.

The stories you accept influence the decisions you make. Those decisions shape your behavior. Repeated behavior becomes the life you've built. Then you look at the result and treat it as proof the original story was right.

That cycle runs for years unless something makes you question it.

The same is true for organizations. The assumptions leaders believe shape the organizations they build.

So here's what I'd ask you.

What are you calling fun? The thing people come to you for. The thing that shows up nowhere on your resume because it never occurred to you it belonged there.

Then ask yourself: what assumption am I treating as fact?

You may find you don't need another plan.

You may just need to stop letting an old story make the decision for you.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh