Can I help you?
When you think about your work, something doesn't feel right. It might sound something like this:
"I like my work. I tend to enjoy doing it and I think it's contributing something useful to the world ...but I sometimes wonder if this is really what I want to be doing with my life."
"I want a good, full life and I am trying to fill it with my chosen kind of work but it's not working out as I hoped."
"I want a good, full life and I think work can be a big part of that but I can't figure out what kind of work it should be."
"Work is work. It's not great, but that's just how life is. I don't see the point of dwelling or daydreaming ...but sometimes I wonder if something more is possible."
Ultimately you hope this isn't as good as it's going to get, but you're not sure where to go from there.
How it works
My approach is based on active, collaborative dialogue. In a series of conversations, we would explore the values, affinities, and abilities that have driven your decisions so far and help you use them to greater advantage: to understand your past and to navigate future choices in ways that will bring a greater sense of meaning and pleasure to your relationship with work. Although we start from work and return to work, we would explore it as a (more or less) integrated element of the life that it's a part of so that the focus is always on enriching your life as a whole.
Who I am
Hi, I'm Marina Peneva and I am part coach, part counsellor. I got to this role largely because I realised early on that "off the shelf" living doesn't suit me so I set out to create a tailor-made life - and discovered that's not easy to do. I often found myself preoccupied with not knowing how to get what I want, even as I didn't know what I wanted. In my mid-20s I decided to take a more systematic approach and started by writing a master's thesis. That's where I came across a mention of richness and felt instinctively that it was what I'd been missing: a quality worth pursuing and engaging with. Only it was more of a notion than a defined concept and so I followed it further... and further. And that's how I got to here.
If this looks interesting, book a free starter session and let’s have a chat. There are no strings attached and you don’t need to have any answers ready, just bring your questions and thoughts and we’ll go from there.
Testimonials
I think that very early on in my life I gave up on the idea that my work should be in line with who I am as a person - it was about bread and butter. And now for the first time I understand the value of aligning my work with who I am instead of just focusing on current market needs, not only for how I feel at work but also for what it contributes to other aspects of my life.
Even though I spent the last 15 years working on my personal emotional development and understanding myself better, I never applied the same kind of thinking to my professional life. I never gave work the attention it was due. It was something that one does, a part of life, no further analysis needed. With Marina I changed this for the first time - I analysed my past decisions, thoughts, the route I took to where I am today. I became more consciously aware of what was behind my choices, and I think that's the key difference between whether you are making deliberate choices about your life or just floating with the current. I now have a process for how to approach the next crossroads I come to, so that the decision about where to go is mine rather than "Eh, this thing happened, what can you do."
My partner had been trying to convince me for years that I should do something I love, but Marina helped me get there by working out with me what I actually want to do, and showing me that it's possible. We've gone from a one line wishful thinking scenario to seeing that all of this is actually doable, and how. We split my fear into smaller pieces until it became manageable, and we split my ideas into smaller steps until they became doable. I went from "How would I do that, it seems too difficult" to "Actually, I think I can do it." It's not that impossible things became possible - my mindset changed, and I changed.
Miljana P.
The approach Marina takes is very wide-ranging but also grounded. It's easy to get advice like "maximise your income" or "explore your needs," but it's hard to find both. The question of how to support a spiritual life while also making money is millennia old, and the sessions have grounded how I think about work in the conditions of life. The biggest indicator of progress for me is that I now have greater clarity in decision making. I have a better understanding of what I actually want to do and more commitment to doing it.
There is a quote I got through Kim Scott: "Only about five percent of people have a real vocation in life, and they confuse the hell out of the rest of us." I really wanted to have a vocation that also pays all the bills and I don't know why I'm surprised I don't have it, especially since I never pursued it. I focused on paying bills. In that context it's easy to just get a hate-on on work and focus on life outside of it, but then it becomes like a cognitive black hole, which makes it hard to engage with the problem. Because Marina got me to talk about work, it allowed me to forgive work in a way and also to engage with it on sensible terms. Removing the sense of existential dread allowed me to look much more closely at what my options really are, and how I feel about them.
I used to think that doing things for money was bad. Now my feeling is: if I could quit tomorrow and not have money worries, I would - but money allows me to afford things that are of true value to myself and my family, and that's important to me. I understand better what my constraints and my values are, and I'm much clearer about why I'm making the particular commitments I'm making. At the same time, I have a more nuanced understanding of the kind of work that truly resonates with me and this allows me to be alert to opportunities to make changes in the right direction even within external constraints.
Timothy H.