What Shaped Me
By 2018, recruitment had become mundane to me.
I want to be honest about that, because it is not the version of this story people expect. I was not chasing another title. I had stopped caring about titles years earlier.
I remember completing a major recruitment project where we filled nearly fifty positions, followed by an overseas recruitment trip. It had been a successful assignment by every measure. Yet instead of feeling excited, I remember feeling exhausted, and thinking, there is still more to do. That thought stayed with me. The roles I was filling had started to repeat themselves, and somewhere along the way, I had stopped feeling the satisfaction I once did.
What never became boring were the conversations. Sitting across from someone, understanding what motivated them, what held them back, what they hoped for in their careers, that part never got old. It was everything around those conversations that had become routine. So I went looking for something that would challenge me again. Coaching and training felt like the next natural step, not because I had a grand plan, but because I sensed there was more in me than recruitment was asking for.
My intention was not to change other people’s lives. It was to better understand my own self first. I wanted to discover my purpose and work on myself before I ever thought about helping anyone else. I believed that if it transformed me, it might help my family next, and only then could I hope to make a difference in the lives of others. Looking back, that order mattered more than I realised.
Quick Read – The Tea Pan That Taught Me What Inner Strength Really Is
In 2019, I enrolled in a 125 hour coaching programme expecting to learn a new skill. Instead, I spent most of that journey being coached myself. I realised I had been asking candidates powerful questions for years, yet I had never asked those same questions of myself. What was driving me. What was I avoiding. Who was I becoming beneath all the achievements.
As I sat with those questions, something happened I never expected. For the first time in years, I felt my emotions during one of the coaching sessions. I was surrounded by people who had been complete strangers just days earlier, yet I felt safe enough to let my guard down. Until that moment, I do not think I had ever truly experienced what a safe space felt like. Nobody judged me. Nobody interrupted me. Nobody tried to rescue me. They simply listened. In that moment, I realised how rarely we allow ourselves to be seen without feeling the need to appear strong, successful, or in control.
That moment stayed with me long after the programme ended. It was the first time I understood that coaching was not about giving advice. It was about creating a space where people could hear and embrace themselves. I also learned accountability in a completely different way, not as something I expected from others, but as a promise I had to keep to myself, spoken out loud.
By the time I completed the programme, I understood something I could not have explained back in 2018. I did not become a coach because recruitment had become monotonous. I became a coach because my search to escape that monotony led me back to myself. That journey also taught me something I still live by today. Whenever I neglect myself, the people around me eventually feel it too.
Looking back, coaching did not change my profession. It changed the person who came to work every day.
Not long after this, life asked something else of me entirely, something quieter, and in its own way, just as hard to sit with.
The house went quiet in a way I was not prepared for. For twenty-two years, my life had revolved around my two sons, school runs, football matches, university applications, family dinners, late night conversations, celebrations and worries. My identity was never only professional. It was also as a mother.
Then, slowly, life changed. One son left for Toronto, the other for London. There was no single dramatic moment that announced I had become an empty nester. One day I simply noticed the house was quieter than it had ever been, and nobody really prepares you for that kind of quiet.
Suggested Read – Mirror Mirror on the Wall, What Do You See
At first I missed the noise, the shoes left at the door, the conversations across the dinner table, the laughter coming from another room. I realised I was not grieving because something had gone wrong. I was grieving because life had moved forward, and that is a very different thing to sit with.
It was in that season that I understood something about inner work I had never fully appreciated before. None of the practices I had built over the years, not the coaching, not the reflection, not the years of asking myself harder questions, removed life’s challenges. They did not stop the hard conversations, or the uncertainty, or the ache of an empty house. What changed was never my circumstances. It was the way I met them.
Years ago, I would have tried to stay busy, filling every empty space with work or distraction. This time, I let myself sit inside the quiet. I let myself miss my sons and celebrate the lives they were building, both at once, without needing to choose between the two. And I started asking myself a different question. Who am I becoming in this new chapter of my life.
That question changed things. I stopped looking at this season as something I had lost, and started seeing it as something I had been given, time to deepen my coaching, time to write, time to learn, time to invest in myself in ways I had postponed for years while raising a family.
I think that is the part nobody tells you about the seasons that ask the most of you. Coaching did not arrive because I was searching for a new career. The empty house did not arrive because I was ready for it. Both showed up uninvited, and both, in their own way, handed me back to myself.
Looking back, I realise coaching taught me how to sit with someone else’s silence long before I ever had to sit with my own. And perhaps that is what prepared me most, not for a full house or an empty What is this season of your life quietly asking of you?
Usha Nagrani – Executive Leadership Coach
#UshaRunsHerOwnRace
Usha Nagrani, an HR Leader turned ICF Executive Coach, empowers senior management professionals and business leaders to achieve breakthroughs as expats, build cross-cultural teams, and navigate the exciting journey of career acceleration.
