# Louise's Client Story — From AI to the Arts

- **Episode:** [117](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/117.md) (2024-07-23)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** client-story, ai, career-change
- **Time:** 45:20–48:58 (start 2720s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/117?t=2720](https://truthliesandwork.com/117?t=2720)

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[45:20] Louise Kershaw: I've had a client who was in the space of AI and really, really thought that she wanted to move into the arts. You know, what was lacking from her life was a sense of beauty. It's a really interesting value for her, was beauty, that was missing. But as we explored it together, she realized there were other ways she could get that in her life. It didn't actually have to be in her career. And so she's exploring that in different avenues. In other ways, we've been halfway through coaching program, and somebody has just quit their job in customer service and said, I'm not doing this anymore, and is now exploring a shift into either personal training or running their own shop of some kind. And it's about that combination of entrepreneurship and being of service to people, but having autonomy and freedom and choice baked into that. And that's what mattered to that client. You know, there are certain ways to understand what's going to light me up, what's missing, where the disconnect feels, and therefore, what do I want to do about that? It's not a predetermined conclusion that you will make a transition, and it's not predetermined what that transition will look like and how long it will take. You know, sometimes people have shifted quite quickly into interviewing for something, something different, you know, from a sales manager into a partnership manager, and just the interview started happening. You think, oh, okay, that happened quite, quite rapidly because the transferable skills are really quite close, and it was just possible. And others have said, you know, I'd just like to take the time and maybe over the summer, you know, do some temporary work while I get some headspace from this and explore it. My long-term goal is this. It's not having a deadline in mind, but it's understanding what your unique journey needs to look and feel like to give you the life and the career that would feel right for you. It's just a journey. Everything is. And so, assuming that I'm just going to delay any of this, I'm going to put my life on hold until I figured this out, is misguided, because this is your life. These experiences you're having now, these matter just as much as the eventual landing in a role that would light you up. It's all just one experience after the next. And again, it ties into perhaps the way that we were raised and the internal scripts that we got about success and failure, and what success means, and whether failure is tolerable, and even encouraged in some ways, or whether it's absolutely unacceptable. And so, sometimes you need to unhook yourself from the script that you have around what failure means, and lean into a space of understanding that failure is data acquisition. That's all it is. I don't know if you listen to How to Fail by Elizabeth Day, one of my favorite podcasts, and she interviews people who failed. She does the top 3 failures of life. And it's so normalizing for us to see that failure is not only okay, but it's really important. Because how can you succeed if you haven't first figured out how not to do this thing?
[48:30] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[48:31] Louise Kershaw: I would not have been able to shift into career coaching, which I now love, if I hadn't gotten to a point in my HR career where I thought, I'm not enjoying this anymore. Now, some people would say, oh, so your HR career failed? Well, I guess if you want to put that spin on it. I don't. I think I learned what was and wasn't working for me anymore, and I moved forward. So, it's just taking the lesson from it, taking the data from it, having that growth mindset, and then—