Helen Hanison was a high-flying PR executive with a passport full of stamps, million-dollar campaigns, and a board-level title. But after 20 years in the industry, she found herself questioning everything. Motherhood collided with her career, success lost its sparkle, and the feeling of being “stuck-but-still-good-at-it” became suffocating.In Part One of this two-part conversation, Helen shares the moment she realized her success was seducing her into staying in the wrong life. She opens up about the subtle signs of misalignment, the “lost years” between knowing something’s wrong and doing something about it, and how her pivot into psychology laid the groundwork for a new career—one that finally fits. If you’ve ever felt competent but not alive in your work, this one’s your mirror.Key Highlights of Our Interview:When High Achievement Turns into Quiet Misery“I was flying everywhere, leading campaigns—and I still felt hollow.”Helen unpacks the disconnect between outer success and inner dissatisfaction, especially when you’re too good at a job that no longer excites you.The Motherhood Collision“I hadn’t seen it coming, but it hit hard.”Becoming a mother didn’t just change her home life—it cracked open the illusion that her career and identity were truly aligned.Good At It, But Dead Inside“I wasn’t unhappy… just not lit up.”Helen describes the in-between phase where nothing is obviously wrong, but everything feels subtly off—a quiet crisis that many professionals ignore for too long.The Clues Were Always There“I was coaching before I knew what coaching was.”Helen reflects on how her leadership style—taking colleagues out for coffee, asking them what they wanted—was already pointing toward her next calling.Seduced by Success, Trapped by Titles“It’s a long way down when the ladder’s leaned against the wrong wall.”She reveals why people get stuck in senior roles they don’t love, and how fear of the unknown keeps them climbing in the wrong direction.________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Helen HanisonHelen's website: https://www.helenhanison.com --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What happens when success feels like a trap?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. What happens when your shiny successful career starts to feel like a trap? Helen Henderson has the answer. She went from board level PR executive to career coach.
after realizing that the ladder she was climbing was leaning on the wrong wall. In this two-part series, Helen shares how she hit pause, got unstuck, and built a career that actually fits. We'll talk about career detour, tough choices, and why midlife isn't a crisis. is a chance to redesign. If your job looks great on paper, but feels like sandpaper, this one is for you. Let's get into it.
Helen, good morning. Welcome to our show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer.
Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here, sitting in that blue chair behind you.
Chapter 2: How did motherhood impact Helen's career?
Let's start with your story. You've gone through quite a transformation yourself, from public relations to branding and now coaching with a focus on career. We'll dive into the why, the how, and everything in between.
Yeah, sure. My name is Helen Hannison. You've already said I'm in the UK. I think what's probably more relevant for your listeners to know about me, though, is that I used to think that I was defined by that thing I did, my PR career. It was a 20-year tour of duty, as I call it now, in global PR firms. So always enormous budgets and global remits and market-leading brands.
It was fantastic and I loved it all the way up to when I didn't. And for me, I hit this career crossroads that is a big part of why I now do what I do today. Success is really what it looked like from the outside. I was on the board. I was on and off planes all the time. I know people looking in felt it was successful and glamorous even. For me, I was bumping into
A wall, I don't know how else to explain it. It was very incompatible with becoming a mother for the first time and that junction of mothering and careering was tough to navigate and I hadn't seen it coming, which might be my own naivety, but there you go.
Chapter 3: What signs indicate a career misalignment?
I had thought a lot about replacing myself at home because I assumed in the opposite direction and then found it excruciating not to be present hardly at all for my little one. So what do you do with that? Those jobs are the most important. That's an incredible amount of conflict to live with if you believe you're defined by the one that is less important to you.
So that's where that started for me, that sort of pain barrier and puzzle that I had to figure out. There were a number of lost years in the figuring out, and I think we will probably come to some of those as the conversation goes on. But long story short, I created a second jumping off point eventually and worked out that I needed what I did to be meaningful to me, to have congruence.
with my career and life. And that integration was the secret sauce to defining success for myself, actually. So the psychology degree going all the way back was what began that second career. And today I coach people who find themselves stuck or struggling in work that feels wrong, overwhelmed, or disconnected, or perhaps they've been laid off.
So whatever their crossroads might be, and they can be many different things because we're all situated differently, what I help them do is redesign their careers so it realigns with the things that actually matter to them most. And sometimes that's a little shift, and sometimes that's a great big aligned career transformation, but it's never about throwing out
all that experience and knowledge that they've gained along the way so far.
You mentioned spending 20 years in public relations. I'm curious, why did you choose that path back then, right off college? It was seen as a glamorous, traditional career. What was going on in your life at the time that led you to it?
I think even that career in public relations I fell into, I had briefly been in human resources before that. And I think that had shown me that I was interested in people. Unfortunately, being junior in human resources is a lot about admin rather than the people themselves. It turned me off fairly quickly because I was frustrated and had all this ambition and I didn't want to wait.
I went to do my first degree was in media and communications and really my love of writing my love of communicating the idea of planned campaigns that really speak to your target audience getting into the psyche of that target audience that was what tipped me into public relations in the first place and I think when you're junior and your career building days no matter what sector you choose
You're there to absorb the institutional knowledge, the career skillset, grow your own sense of gravitas within whatever field you are. It's not a lot about being choiceful. Certainly within public relations, you could be in so many different areas. I was in quite a broad area called consumer, and even that can be split into so many areas. But it was clear that I wanted to be people-focused.
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Chapter 4: What led to Helen's career transition?
of where i was on that sort of energy matrix and riding the waves and it was often about people so i started to notice what is now obvious to me either the campaigns have to be people focused in a real way hence health it feels like the most direct lane line you could possibly have to having a meaningful impact on people's lives and at the time i was launching
that functional food for with cholesterol lowering my uncle was going through some heart health issues so it really that to me says it all there was a personal significance within what I was doing now I could also say I was propelled along by promotions and that is also true and I think the career builders that's what happens and that's how actually we don't notice sometimes for years
often I'm coaching people who for 20 years have, much like I was, have built to a place of seniority and realize they're at the top of a ladder they actually don't want to be on because they've been
seduced a bit by those success markers until then and I think for me the other piece that kept me going and I hear this a lot as well in my coaching is the people that I worked with so the leadership aspect of it because I was becoming more serious and fostering a culture where people thrived and wanted to work with me and we all got energy from each other and there was a certain amount of succeeding in a different way in an interpersonal collaborative
culture and what i would say is even back then without all this awareness of psychology or organizational psychology or any of it i would move in as a director to a new team and take every single person off-site to coffee from the most junior graduates right through to my number twos and ask them what would they like to happen in their career after this stop
And it's really interesting to me when I look back on that now, that even then, the emotional awareness or intelligence was there to understand that people need to feel purposeful about what they do. That wasn't special to me. People lit up and leaned in because I had asked. And that is a thread that carries through to this sort of career two of mine.
You used the phrase seduced by the success markers. And I think that is so relatable because sometimes people might actually feel stuck in their own version of success. And even though it looks good on the outside, that stuckness doesn't feel good on the inside. Before we dive into your approach and how you help others, I want to go back to your own story.
After spending 20 years in public relations, what triggered your move? What was going through your mind at the time that led you to make that transition?
So I think what happened for me is what happens for a lot of people. We, professional people, and I really, my top tier work is one with seasoned professionals. And seasoned professionals are excellent at persevering, even when they are, as you say, stuck in work that is feeling off, that is no longer feeling aligned, because they can do it.
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Chapter 5: How can professionals redesign their careers?
Feeling like that, knowing it's going downhill and affecting everything is actually the bigger risk than protecting the status quo. And that's what happened for me. It just felt undeniable and untenable and suddenly clear that I had to make change happen. Having said that, there were the lost years I alluded to earlier, and it wasn't a smooth process.
And that's actually where an awful lot of my formula for purposeful career redesign came from. There was a lot of throwing mud at the wall and seeing what stuck. It wasn't a great process and it took too long, but it also taught me everything I know today and have distilled in the book and the course and coached people through. So it's also hard to say I regret any of it.
We might have a good degree of self-awareness, but that doesn't always mean we see everything with total clarity. Looking back on your journey, after all the moves, the risks, the uncertainty, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced along the way? And despite all that, what made it all worth it for you?
Oh, it's absolutely all worth it because really, once I had the clarity about what I was aiming for, and I think that came for me in the final year of the psychology degree, where I was still stimulated and more lit up than I had been for years learning, but it was very challenging learning compared to my first degree, for sure. It was tough.
And there was definitely a point quite early on where I thought, oh, have I done this wrong? Maybe I should go and pivot to a journalism master's or something that is more logical with what I did before. And then by the time I'd gone through the motions and spoken to the people involved that could have made that happen for me,
The next electives had come out for psychology and I happened to have a word with myself and I was bumping into clarity almost by accident that I was not prepared to look away from those psychology electives no matter how hard it was. I had to solve it and back myself actually.
So I did what I do for my kids and put a bit of extra support in place and got over the challenging curve with statistics and neuroscience and never looked back. So I think that's a really important lesson. And I think you're right. The self-awareness isn't just there for anybody.
And the irony is not lost on me that I'm now collecting degrees and have a psychology, but also positive psychology certifications, my narrative therapy, and I'm still learning. And I will always be learning. And I accept that. And I think coming at your own life when you're in deep, is probably one of the hardest things we do because it's tough to have perspective on that.
That's I think probably the very biggest benefit of having a coach is that you have somebody on the outside who's invested in illuminating for you so you can see for yourself what's going on and if there's a disconnect between what you say you want and what your actions are supporting. That was really where the clarity came.
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Chapter 7: What does it mean to be seduced by success?
We might have a good degree of self-awareness, but that doesn't always mean we see everything with total clarity. Looking back on your journey, after all the moves, the risks, the uncertainty, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced along the way? And despite all that, what made it all worth it for you?
Oh, it's absolutely all worth it because really, once I had the clarity about what I was aiming for, and I think that came for me in the final year of the psychology degree, where I was still stimulated and more lit up than I had been for years learning, but it was very challenging learning compared to my first degree, for sure. It was tough.
And there was definitely a point quite early on where I thought, oh, have I done this wrong? Maybe I should go and pivot to a journalism master's or something that is more logical with what I did before. And then by the time I'd gone through the motions and spoken to the people involved that could have made that happen for me,
The next electives had come out for psychology and I happened to have a word with myself and I was bumping into clarity almost by accident that I was not prepared to look away from those psychology electives no matter how hard it was. I had to solve it and back myself actually.
So I did what I do for my kids and put a bit of extra support in place and got over the challenging curve with statistics and neuroscience and never looked back. So I think that's a really important lesson. And I think you're right. The self-awareness isn't just there for anybody.
And the irony is not lost on me that I'm now collecting degrees and have a psychology, but also positive psychology certifications, my narrative therapy, and I'm still learning. And I will always be learning. And I accept that. And I think coming at your own life when you're in deep, is probably one of the hardest things we do because it's tough to have perspective on that.
That's I think probably the very biggest benefit of having a coach is that you have somebody on the outside who's invested in illuminating for you so you can see for yourself what's going on and if there's a disconnect between what you say you want and what your actions are supporting. That was really where the clarity came.
And I think the aliveness came in year three, where I was explaining to my professor, look, I've been approached to go and do a master's, but it's, I don't know, it was in the therapeutic space. It was... For young adults, it just didn't sound quite right. In England, we operate with the NHS system, and it was like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg to me.
I went through the motions and got offered the opportunity, but every bone in my body was saying, I don't agree with this. And having lived in the States for a few years and seen people have experience of something so different, I just knew that was wrong. not going to have synergy, not going to be in alignment for me. So again, the self-awareness, you bump into it.
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