I used to have a list. Not written down, not formal. More of a running commentary in my head, built up over years of watching other people and deciding what I was... and wasn't.
"I'm an engineer. I don't do people stuff."
"I'm not a speaker. I leave speaking to extroverts."
"I'm not writing a book. Who am I to write a book?"
"I'm not going into HR. Engineers don't end up in HR."
You know the list. You have one too.
The Lines We Draw
Every career line I drew started with a reason I convinced myself made sense. I liked building things, not managing them. Speaking in front of audiences made me want to disappear. HR departments, in my experience as an engineer, felt like the enemy of getting things done.
These weren't arbitrary limits. They came from real observations. I'd seen engineers promoted into management and lose everything making them good at engineering. I'd watched speakers who seemed performative, hollow, in love with the sound of their own voice. I'd filed paperwork and waited for approvals and felt the friction of HR systems designed for compliance, not for people.
So I drew the lines. And I called them self-awareness.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Self-Awareness
Here's the uncomfortable truth about those lines. They're not always self-awareness. Much of the time, they're fear wearing a smart-sounding disguise.
"I'm not a manager" is sometimes "I'm afraid I won't be good at it."
"I'm not a speaker" is often "I'm terrified of being judged in public."
"I'm not an author" means "I don't believe my story is worth telling."
Roland Butcher, the first Black cricketer to play for Middlesex and England, spent his career on the pitch. When he moved into coaching, he said he hated the idea of it. Hated it. Until coaching became his next great chapter.
I've thought about his story often.
The List Started to Crack
The first crack came when I stopped being a solo engineer and started leading a team. I didn't want to. My manager at the time didn't give me much choice. I resisted it as long as I managed, before realising I was... decent at it. Not because I'm naturally suited to people management. Because I'd been an engineer long enough to know what engineers needed, and I cared enough to try giving it to them.
The "I don't do people stuff" line cracked.
Then someone asked me to speak at an internal event. Twenty people. Not a conference, not a stage, a room with folding chairs and bad lighting. I said yes before I talked myself out of it. I spent two weeks wishing I hadn't. Then I did it, it went fine, and the world didn't end.
The "I'm not a speaker" line cracked.
The book took longer. I sat on the idea of writing for two years. I had material, notes, stories, a clear angle. I found every possible reason not to start. Too busy. Not a writer. Who reads books by people who aren't already famous?
I started anyway. Bad Bosses Ruin Lives came out the other side.
Then Step It Up HR came along. An HR and L&D company, and they needed someone to lead the technical and product side. An engineer in an HR company. Everything I'd told myself I wasn't. I said yes.
Now I deliver keynotes at HR and L&D conferences across Europe. Croatia. Iceland. The UK. Rooms full of people professionals, and there's a software engineer at the front talking about leadership, bad bosses, and what decent management looks like.
It's not what I expected my career to look like at all.
Why We Keep the List
People ask me whether standing on those stages feels strange. It doesn't anymore. What feels strange is remembering I once thought none of it was possible. I'd sorted myself into a box, labelled it "engineer," and treated anything outside it as not mine to touch.
We keep the list because the list keeps us safe. If you never try speaking, you never fail at speaking. If you never write the book, you never get rejected. If you never move into a different kind of work, you never find out whether you're good at it.
The list is protection. Against risk, against embarrassment, against discovering your limits.
It's also a prison.
Every item on your "never" list is a version of yourself you've decided in advance doesn't exist. And you made most of those decisions in your twenties, when you had limited information and a strong need to know who you were. Those decisions don't age as well as you think.
What Crossing the Lines Taught Me
I'm not telling you to do everything you're afraid of. Plenty of things are outside your wheelhouse for good reasons. Not every line is fear in disguise.
But some of them are. Those are worth looking at honestly.
Here's what I learned from crossing mine:
Skills transfer more than you think. Engineering gave me systems thinking. Systems thinking made me a better manager. It made me a cleaner speaker, because I build presentations the same way I write code. It made Bad Bosses Ruin Lives more readable, because I edit ruthlessly and cut what doesn't need to be there. Nothing from my earlier career was wasted. It all showed up somewhere else.
The thing you hate about it often isn't the thing itself. I hated management because I'd seen bad management. I hated the idea of HR because I'd experienced bad HR. When I did those things with intention and care, they were different from what I'd observed. The problem wasn't the role. It was poor examples of the role. I was rejecting bad implementations, not the work itself.
The discomfort is the point. Every time I've crossed one of my own lines, the discomfort was real and temporary. Every time I've stayed inside them to avoid discomfort, the regret was real and lasted much longer.
You find out who you are when you stop defining yourself by what you're not. This one surprised me most. I thought my identity was "engineer." It isn't. It's "someone who cares about people being treated well and builds things to make them happen." Engineering was one expression of it. Speaking is another. The book is another. The podcast is another. They're all the same thing, arriving in different forms, through different doors I was convinced weren't mine to open.
So What's On Your List?
You have lines too. Things you've decided aren't for you. Some of them are right. A lot of them are comfortable untruths you've told yourself for so long they feel like facts.
What did you decide you weren't?
What if you were wrong?
Roland Butcher hated the idea of coaching. It became his next great chapter. I hated the idea of speaking to rooms full of HR professionals about leadership. It became mine.
Your next great chapter is likely sitting right behind the line you drew in your head sometime in your twenties and never questioned since.
Go look at it. Seriously. Go look at it.
And if you're not sure where to start, I'd ask you this: What's the one thing people keep suggesting you do... the thing you keep dismissing because it's not you?
Start there.