When I was 23 I started a new job in a small publishing company. By 10.00 am on Day One I realised I had made a mistake. It wasn’t the right job or the right place for me.

That night when I got home there was a letter from Vogue magazine, inviting me to interview. Amazing.

But imagine this…..…I DIDN’T GO!

I DIDN’T EVEN REPLY! I thought that by accepting the publishing job I had made an unbreakable commitment and I had to stick with it. And I was too inexperienced to realise that I could talk to anyone about it.

When we are young our parents give us guidance to help us navigate the world. But because we are young we often misinterpret and internalise this guidance as a set of unbreakable rules. Somehow I had taken ideas of duty and honour and applied them to day 1 of a probation period in a new job where I spent two miserable and frustrated years.

It’s why I believe so passionately in coaching and its value to young people. If we help them uncover which values are their own, and which they have absorbed and internalised in an earlier part of their lives – if we give them the confidence to know they can make their own decisions – they will make truer and more meaningful choices for their futures. We will all benefit.

‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ – Carl Jung