GET THE CLIENT
Professional Self-Coaching for Networking and Building Professional Relationships
Tell the Three Stories That Reveal How You Think, What You've Learnt and What Drives Your Work — and Why That Makes People Want to Work With You.
Turn Networking Conversations Into Relationships, Collaborations and Clients
You know your next client, collaboration or opportunity will come through people. You have the expertise, the experience and the commitment to your field. What this resource gives you is the ability to help people see it — so that conversations which used to fade after thirty seconds become the beginning of professional relationships.
Professional connection rarely fails because someone lacks credibility. It fails because credentials describe what you do without revealing who you are professionally — and people connect with, collaborate with and refer work to professionals they feel they understand. This self-coaching takes you, step by step, from your experience to three prepared professional stories that create that understanding: how you think, what you've learnt, and what drives your work — and Why That Makes People Want to Work With You.
Get the Client distils more than twenty years of professional coaching, writing and practice into a structured method that enables you to coach yourself through one important professional challenge. It captures the thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work — and places them in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
Who This Is For
Someone whose next opportunity depends on being understood — by a client, a collaborator, a partner, a room. You may have a conference next week, a client meeting tomorrow, or a professional world you're ready to stop being invisible in — it works to your timeline. Everything in it is designed to be completed by you, in your own space and time. All you need is somewhere to write — paper or screen, whichever is your preferred way of working. You finish ready for the next room you walk into.
What You'll Learn
- Why people remember professionals through their stories more clearly than through credentials, job titles or project lists
- How to identify the failure, success and passion stories within your own experience — and dig past your first answer to the insight underneath
- How to build each story for the spoken moment — short, natural, and in your own voice
- How to connect your three stories into one complete picture of how you think, what you've learnt and what drives your work
- How to enter conversations naturally and share the right story at the right moment — at networking events, in client meetings, and in collaboration conversations
- How to invite other people's stories — so telling becomes exchange, and conversations become professional relationships
How This Self-Coaching Resource Works
Get the Client is built in three parts, nine steps.
Part One — Identify Your Three Stories
- Step 1 — Identify Your Success Story
- Step 2 — Identify Your Failure Story
- Step 3 — Identify Your Passion Story
Part Two — Build Your Stories for Conversation
- Step 4 — Craft Your Stories for the Spoken Moment
- Step 5 — Connect Your Three Stories
- Step 6 — Enter the Conversation
Part Three — Turn Conversations Into Connection
- Step 7 — Adapt Your Stories to Different Professional Contexts
- Step 8 — Invite Their Stories
- Step 9 — Turn Connection Into Collaboration
Every step asks the questions that bring clarity, and every step ends in writing — that's what self-coaching means here: you find your own answers, and the work is yours. By the final page you will have three completed professional stories that didn't exist before you began — ready for the next room you walk into.
Throughout, you'll follow Lisa, an accomplished sustainable energy consultant who used to leave networking events feeling invisible. Her conversations followed a pattern: "What do you do?" — "I'm a sustainability consultant. I help companies reduce their environmental impact." — polite nods, thirty seconds, attention drifting elsewhere. Everything changed at a Clean Energy Forum, the day she stopped describing her job and shared a story instead. By the end of that event she had three follow-up conversations arranged and two potential collaborations — and within weeks, a referral from someone who explained it simply: "I remembered your three stories. This client needs exactly your approach." At each step, you'll see how Lisa worked through it before you work through it yourself.
Why These Three Stories
When people ask what you do, they're rarely asking for your job title. They're trying to work out something harder to see: what it would be like to work with you.
Three stories give them that complete picture:
Your Failure Story reveals what shaped how you work — the learning behind your approach.
Your Success Story demonstrates your distinctive approach — the impact you create, and the thinking that creates it.
Your Passion Story communicates what drives your work — why it matters to you beyond the project.
Any one of these alone is a partial picture. Together, they show how you think, what you've learnt, and why your work matters — and when people understand those three things, they don't just remember you. They know exactly when to call you.
What You Finish With:
- Three completed professional stories — failure, success and passion — each built for the spoken moment, in your own voice
- One connected picture — the links between your three stories, ready to share, so they land as one complete view of your approach rather than three separate points
- Two lengths of every story — a 60-second telling for conversation, and the fuller version for when they lean in — with your insight line for each
- Three natural ways in — entry lines for joining a conversation and offering a story without it landing as showing off
- A context map — your stories adapted for networking events, client meetings, collaboration conversations and partnerships, with the questions that invite other people's stories in return
- Your Connection Page — a single page to review before any event or meeting: your insight lines, your connections between the stories, your ways in and your inviting questions
About Professional Self-Coaching
Self-coaching is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — through stable times and times of change and uncertainty. It is asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Each Professional Self-Coaching resource is created for one important professional moment. One purpose. One challenge. One outcome. The thinking, frameworks and practical guidance within each resource are distilled from the School of WorkLife programmes — a body of work developed through twenty years of practice — and focused entirely on helping you prepare for the moment in front of you. Every resource strengthens the three abilities at the heart of School of WorkLife: self-coaching, self-directing and self-leadership.
Get the Client is drawn from The Art of WorkLife Storytelling: Creating Three Fundamental Stories That Define Your Identity — the complete programme exploring how the stories we tell shape the way we communicate who we are at work: our values, our thinking, our experiences, and what we stand for.
About School of WorkLife
School of WorkLife creates story-based learning resources that help people think more clearly about the challenges, conversations, and decisions that shape a working life.
Each story is drawn from real WorkLife situations and developed into practical learning experiences that combine narrative, reflection, and structured application.
Author's Note
The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O' Reilly. www.schoolofworklife.com