Episode 0: Why This Work Exists

EPISODE 0

Why This Work Exists

Radical Recentring with Nonie White

This is Radical Recentring with me, Nonie White. The show for ambitious women who are done pushing, proving and performing, and who are ready to build something unshakeable from who they are at their authentic best. If you're at an inflection point, ready for your next level of success, personal power and impact, and you want to do it differently, you're in the right place. Let's go.

Before we begin, a quick note, especially if you've been here before. This podcast used to be the AMotherBrand podcast. Four years ago, I recorded an episode closing down that chapter of my life and my work. And at the time, I explained it in terms of capacity, sustainability and needing space, all of which was true. And I don't think I fully understood what was going on then. And now I do. Later in this episode, I'm going to take you back to that moment, what it actually felt like, and what I can see now that I couldn't see then.

Because I see this pattern time and time again with the people I work with. And it's not usually a strategy problem, it's an identity problem. You've outgrown the version of you that built your current success and you're still operating from it. And that's where things start to feel hard and heavy and you can feel a bit stuck. This is Radical Recentring, putting yourself back in the centre of your life and your work so that you can step into the version of you that your next level actually requires. So whether you're new here, or you've been with me from the beginning, welcome. You're in exactly the right place. Let's begin.

Hello, I'm Nonie White. Welcome to Radical Recentring. I'm a positive psychology practitioner, researcher and coach. And I'm completely obsessed with helping ambitious leaders and entrepreneurs understand how they can access their highest potential so they can lead themselves and others with unshakeable high performance and unshakeable confidence, so they can make the world a better place and enjoy their life along the way.

I support people who are at an inflection point in their life. They're ready to step into their next level of personal power, authority and impact without any more pushing, proving or performing. But I don't wheel out any old leadership strategies or theories. I help you discover who you are at your best, at your core, and build the next version of you from that place. Because here's what I've learned, both in my own life and working with people at turning points in theirs.

Your next level of leadership, authority and impact doesn't come from doing more. It comes from becoming more of who you already are at your authentic best. Stepping into the identity of ultimate alignment of you at your best. This is where unshakeable performance, unshakeable confidence and unshakeable leadership are born. I call the journey and the process of becoming unshakeable, Radical Recentring.

Because it's all about putting yourself deliberately and strategically at the centre of your own life, work and leadership. Everything builds out from you. And this podcast is where I'm going to share everything I know about Radical Recentring with you.

A bit about me. When I think of my professional life, I also always think of that great line by Steve Jobs that you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.

Looking backwards, my life so far has been a series of evolutions as I've got to know myself better over the years and changed my path accordingly. Perhaps you can see that same pattern in your life too.

Rewinding some years, I love beauty, art, impact and stories about people. So after reading English at university, I went straight into a career in television, excited by the prospect of making beautiful, impactful films that changed the world.

I was a documentary maker for over a decade, freelance producer, and then a director. I worked on programmes for Channel 4, Sky Arts, the BBC. I directed on an Emmy award-winning series and a BAFTA nominated one. Working in TV in your 20s is a lot of fun. And from the outside, I was living the dream. I was making films that millions of people watched. When I could, I was telling sensitive, important stories that the world might not otherwise hear. I was doing work I was genuinely proud of, some of the time.

For many years, I loved everything about my career and I relished saying I was a documentary maker. There was always a lot of sacrificing your personal life for your professional life, working weekends and evenings. But at first, I didn't really mind this at all. It made me feel purposeful and important. Being a busy filmmaker was my identity.

But over the years, I grew less comfortable in my career. On the one hand, my desire for autonomy and flexibility to control my own life and look after my wellbeing increased. I suddenly had things in my life that were more important than my current projects, such as friends getting married or christenings or myself and my husband starting a family. On the other hand, I was also very aware that it wasn't always possible to get work making the meaningful sorts of films that I really wanted to be making.

I remember one day seeing an old uni friend and moaning about my work to her. She told me that she'd still think I was awesome if I didn't work in TV, if I had a different career. She thought I was awesome before I started working in television and she'd think I was awesome afterwards, because my identity was far greater than my job title. This sounds really simple, but the separation of me with a stable character before and after my first career from my professional identity felt really profound at the time. Sort of blew my brains. Actually, she's right. Nonie is not just the filmmaker, the TV documentary maker. There's a Nonie before and after and in the future.

The moment things cracked open. There wasn't really one moment that I decided to change careers, but there were a number of things that really pushed me into taking action. I remember one phone call. I'd just finished producing a sensitive documentary about women with late onset eating disorders. I spoke to my director on the phone who had just been in the edit, pulling it all together, the final version of the film. So for context, the two of us had spent months, I don't know, three, four months in the lives and in the homes of these women as they courageously shared their most vulnerable life story with us. And these women had made real progress by the end of filming. It was a hopeful, true story featuring these wonderfully honest, brave, open women.

And my director had edited the film and then she'd gone to the broadcaster and showed it to them. And the broadcaster didn't like it. And they forced her to recut the ending of the film. So instead of being honest and hopeful, it was sad and sensational. And my director had to take the film to the contributors and show it to them to get sign off. And at the viewing, one of the contributors turned to my director and said, nice story, shame it's not mine. And I just couldn't get over how awful this whole thing was. The complete lack of honesty, the prioritising of ratings over real human beings who trusted us, and the lack of control over the integrity of what we were trying to create.

And then the final moment came when I pivoted to a desk-based role briefly while I was planning my wedding. I was developing ideas for films rather than going out and running around and making them. And suddenly, because of this new change in my role, I could exercise regularly. So for the first time in over a decade, I suddenly had control over my own life and my wellbeing, and it felt wildly disproportionately exciting. And I felt, whoa, is this what everyone else has? What have I been sacrificing all this time? My wellbeing, my autonomy, my relationships, my integrity, for an industry that just didn't feel aligned with me anymore at that time in my life.

So I had data that I could no longer ignore and it was time to take action and to recraft my life accordingly. So I remember I sat on the tube one evening on the way home from work with my Moleskine and I decided to make notes on what actually gave me a sense of purpose. And I realised that the most important thing for me about my whole career, about everything I did, was trying to make positive social impact, making a direct and measurable difference. And I wanted to build something that could work with my life, not against it. So I decided to go into business and become an entrepreneur and make a business that works for me.

So I left television and I did a Master's in Social Entrepreneurship. And as soon as I finished my Master's, I started to try to build my first business. First, an ethical babywear brand. I had really ambitious plans. I worked with a branding company, created a beautiful logo. I worked with a designer. We came up with a whole range of really, really stunning pattern designs. And then finally I got to speak to an ethical fabric production consultant. I'm sure that's not her name. I'm sure it was a lot neater than that. I sat down with someone who actually knew what they were talking about in essence. And she helped me understand what building this business and making it a success would require of me. And I realised it didn't match the life that I wanted to be living with my first baby.

So this first foray into business made me realise how hard it was to be an entrepreneur as a woman and especially as a mother. I didn't know anyone else trying to build a business around having babies. And at that time, the internet was quite a different place. There wasn't the community, all these different communities you could tap into. So then my second business, I started building one. I set about building a co-founder matchmaking and tech platform that supported mothers to build businesses around their families. It was built on a shoestring and a lot of optimism. It was called AMotherBrand. And I was mega passionate about redressing the entrepreneurial balance in the UK and helping more women create businesses that they love so they could also be the parent they wanted to be.

I hustled really hard. I poured everything into this business, but I was working every possible hour trying to do everything at once with zero budget. I was building out tech on rickety foundations. I was creating and editing masterclasses with experts. I was hosting co-working twice a month. I was looking after members. I was trying to find new members. All of this around two tiny children, one of whom was only part-time at nursery, and my husband who was away for work most of the time. And what happened was I began neglecting my rest, my relationships, my space and myself. I was getting increasingly burned out, self-critical, disillusioned. It wasn't great.

I remember my lowest moment. I'd just launched a podcast, which I hoped would help build my membership some more, and had a VA who was helping me with blogs and transcripts and all the other bits and pieces. And she sent me an invoice for all the work that she'd done to support the launch. And I realised that that invoice was going to completely drain my business account, plus the savings that I'd just put aside for my pension. I put my head in my hands and cried. There it was again, the discomfort and the data that I couldn't ignore. I was so tired of it all. This way of operating, living, working, that identity that I was living had stopped fitting me and something had to change.

What was actually missing? Looking back, I can see what was missing, although I couldn't name it at the time. I hadn't understood, owned, or honoured my needs at that specific time in my life. I didn't even have a strong sense of what I needed or what was right for me. I knew I wanted to build a business around my kids. I knew I wanted to be there with them, having fun with them, picking them up from nursery. I wanted to be really present with them and build this business that would change the world for the better. So even though I knew all of that and my business was based on building work and a life that works for me, I was still making choices based on my kind of default, what I thought I should do operating system.

I was following external voices. So it was either advice of mentors who weren't living my life, or it was ancient conditioning telling me things like to work harder, to be perfect, to prove myself. I wasn't making intentional choices aligned with who I was and who I was growing into. I was coping and surviving rather than being aligned and thriving. So ambition without alignment doesn't flow easily and it just doesn't feel good. So even though at this stage I knew positive psychology, I'd studied CPDs in it and I was sharing it with my members, sharing it online, was practising it to a certain degree on myself, I hadn't fully embodied those learnings yet.

How I got here. While I was trying to make the platform work, I also started training as a coach with the ICF, partly as a fallback, partly because I'd always loved group work in my membership and I wanted to know how to coach properly. During that training, I did deep work on myself as you do in coaching, self-awareness, my needs, my strengths, what lit me up and what drained me. And I realised that I love the transformative power of working with growth-oriented people who are ready for change. That's what energises me, not the endless challenges of working with developers or building the rickety tech platform. It was the human growth activation that really, really lit me up.

And so I made a super tough decision. And after all of the time, energy, money that I'd invested in that business, I closed it down and I reframed it as tons of learning about myself and tons of learning about entrepreneurship in the wild. And then I went back to basics, a simple one-to-one coaching practice focused on what actually gave me energy. I built it around my life, not against my life or in spite of my life. So I began to make choices that were aligned with who I am and who I was growing into.

Two years later, I completed the life-changing Level 5 qualification as a Positive Psychology Practitioner and Coach with the Guild of Positive Psychology. And during that time, I learned how to better embody all of the learnings that I share with others.

What kept showing up? After I had all my qualifications and I was working all the time with female entrepreneurs, largely, what showed up was a pattern. They all wanted to step into their next level and they felt stuck. Stuck in familiar patterns, stuck in the weeds, stuck in ways of operating that perhaps used to work for them, but definitely didn't seem to be working anymore. They knew that they either had a really lovely version of themselves that they knew they wanted to be, or it was a bit hazy, but they knew the sort of person they wanted to be. And they knew that they were at an inflection point. Something had to change to help them get there.

And I realised the issue wasn't strategy. It wasn't that they needed more information, more instruction, more discipline. The issue was actually at an identity level. The stories that they were telling themselves about how they were supposed to operate, like me in my previous iteration. They were trying to grow, but they were still operating from an old version of themselves, an identity built from an earlier chapter that was keeping them exactly where they were. These protective patterns were preventing their progress.

Then my work became really, really clear, combining a person-centred coaching approach, really speaking to the person in front of me and what's going on for them in their lived experience, with a strengths-based, hope-oriented, evidence-based science of positive psychology to help them to uncover how they function at their best and who they are at their authentic, unique best, to help them understand what's been driving their patterns, those external narratives, stories, beliefs, and thoughts that get into us and control how we move without us questioning it, to help them discover exactly what their best possible self in the future looks like, and help them step one intentional move at a time into that next level identity powered by them at their best, guided by their future rather than held back by their past.

And over time, I honed this into a proven five-step framework, which I call the Unshakeable Method. It starts with your foundations, your energy, your wellbeing, and your resilience. And then it takes you all the way through to owning and expressing your unique authority from the inside out.

So what Radical Recentring actually is. So this work is built on a simple principle: leadership is internal first. And I want to be clear about what I mean by leadership. I'm not talking about managing other people. Not as a starting point. I'm talking about self-leadership, leading yourself first, your sense of identity, your self-concept, your self-trust, your personal power, your authority, your capacity to influence and create impact. Because unshakeable performance, confidence and success, they don't come from strategies or skills alone. They come from who you are and who you're becoming.

And here's what the research actually confirms, something you probably already sense in truth. Your identity is not fixed and it was never meant to be. Developmental psychology shows that we continue to evolve throughout our entire lives. Our self-concept shifts as our circumstances change, as our needs change, as we grow and change. And when things feel uncomfortable, a bit crunchy, like you've outgrown where you're at, this isn't a bad thing. It's one of the most adaptive features of being human.

Carl Rogers is a mid-20th century psychologist and one of the fathers of humanistic psychology, which informed positive psychology. He talked about being a fully functioning person. And he talked about the journey of becoming a fully functioning person as an exciting, sometimes disturbing, but never ending adventure. He said that the good life is a process, it's not a state of being. So it's a direction, not a destination. You don't wake up one day already the authoritative leader that you're meant to be. You keep on becoming her or him.

We're all on this journey of becoming. And you're not starting from scratch every time. So every version of you carries the wisdom of every version that came before. You build on it, you evolve, you become more aware, more aligned, more fully yourself.

And that's actually what authenticity means. It comes from the Greek, which I'm not going to say because I'll say it wrong, but roughly it means self-originating. So one who comes from their own authority. That's the sort of leadership that I'm really interested in. Not doing everything as you think you should do or following someone else's playbook, performing a version of success that's never actually yours. I am talking about leadership that's built from you. Your values, your strengths, your way of being, your authority.

Most leadership and business advice focuses on strategy, skills, behaviour, what to do, how to do it. But when you've outgrown the way you're operating, when things feel heavy, stuck, unsustainable, the missing piece is rarely strategy. It's self-awareness, self-understanding, self-knowledge. It's all about your identity. It's all about who you believe yourself to be, the rules that you're unconsciously operating by, the patterns that you learned long ago that are still running in the background, a whole lifetime of systems and structures telling you the way you should do things. So there's a ton of unlearning to do to remember that the way you actually do things is the right way.

Without self-trust, clarity and internal authority, success becomes heavy and exhausting. You achieve, but it costs you more each time. We don't want that. We don't want a life where everything is heavy and depleting and there's not enough passion, joy, or actual life in your life.

Radical Recentring starts somewhere different. It starts with you. You as the source of your performance. You as the source of your confidence. You as the source of your authority. And when you understand that, when you build from who you actually are at your best, rather than who you think you should be, everything shifts.

The core principle is simple. Know yourself, own yourself, honour yourself, lead yourself, and then lead at your next level.

Why this matters to me. I do this work because I've lived it, as a human, as a mother, as an entrepreneur, as a researcher, as someone who's built identities that stopped fitting and had to learn painfully, slowly, how to build something better and more aligned. I understand the plight of the highly driven person who wants to make a difference, who juggles ambition, passion, and the reality of looking after themselves and, let's face it, almost everybody else. I understand the person who tries to do everything to the best of their ability with often insufficient resources, who takes systemic failures as personal failings. And I understand how the system makes everything harder, especially for women, especially for mothers, and how easy it is to burn out trying to meet impossible standards that we set ourselves.

And let's face it, it is all phenomenally hard. And there are things that we can do to support ourselves to excel and flourish. That's what I'm talking about.

I meet my clients where they are. I'm on this journey alongside you, this never ending adventure. I want you to come to sessions as your whole self. I'm not one of those coaches who wants high vibes only. That's not what positive psychology is about at all. All of you is welcome.

Who this is for. This work isn't for beginners. It's for people who've lived a little, who've built success, who have established themselves, and who want to expand. People who are ready to step up and out. People who want to cultivate their own personal power that's not dependent on any sort of external validation, that feels deep rooted and unshakeable. People who are ready to build a body of work that reflects their evolution, not their past. People who are ready to go against the grain and create a way of working and living that truly works for them. If you've been building that next version of yourself and there's been a bit of friction, I've built this place for you.

What you'll get from this podcast. I want to share how I think, how I work and what I've learned or am learning, both from my own journey and from working with extraordinary people at turning points in theirs. I'm going to share things that aim to inspire, stretch and support you. Some episodes will be me teaching the core ideas behind Radical Recentring that help you to find your authentic, unshakeable edge. Some will be client stories, what transformation actually looks like. Some will be me thinking out loud about what I'm learning. Because we're all evolving, and as a recovering perfectionist, I'm trying to embrace messy progress over perfection and trying to embrace building and growing out loud to help more people.

How to work with me. If this resonates and you're curious about working together, I have a four month one-to-one programme following my proven framework, the Unshakeable Method. It helps you build real clarity, confidence and authority, giving you the self-belief and self-trust to pursue your greatest ambitions, powered by you at your unshakeable best. So you can lead with authentic edge to create success that feels as good as it looks. This is deep work, it's not quick fixes. We work through all five stages of the Unshakeable Method together, from your wellbeing and energy foundations all the way through thinking patterns, authentic leadership, and how you embody and express your unique authority. I work with a small number of ambitious people each year. There's a link in the show notes to learn more and there's also a short video that explains how it works. And you can also take the Leadership Identity Quiz, which in two minutes will show you which identity patterns might be keeping you stuck right now.

So that's me. That's how I got here and that's why this work exists.

Every version of you you have ever been and every version of you you will ever be is already inside of you. The question is whether you're ready to stop coping and start aligning instead, to stop surviving and start thriving instead. Whether you're ready to be guided by your future rather than held back by your past. Whether you're ready to lead in ways that honour who you truly are. Your voice, your vision, your why, your way. Because leadership is internal first and your next level starts with who you're becoming.

So please subscribe and join me for Episode 1 where I'll introduce you to something I call the gateway moment. I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring. See you soon.

Thank you for being here. If today's episode resonated with you, check out the Leadership Identity Quiz. The link is in the show notes. It's free, takes two minutes, has 10 questions, and it will show you exactly how you're leading yourself and others now, as well as which patterns might be stopping you from reaching your next level of success. And if you know you're ready to do this work, there's a link to find out more about the Unshakeable Method, my four-month one-to-one coaching programme. I'm Nonie White. This is Radical Recentring, and I'll see you next time.