The Toolkit I Didn’t Know I Was Building

I’ve done a lot of things for money.

Clown. English teacher in Taiwan. Insurance consultant. Travel agent. Concierge. Virtual assistant. And somewhere in between all of that, the person who sits in front of you now: empowerment coach, author, and accidental expert in life falling apart and being rebuilt.

If you’d asked me at any point during those years whether it was all adding up to something, I’d have laughed. It felt more like channel-surfing than a career plan.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: every single thing I did was adding pieces to a toolkit. I just couldn’t see what I was building yet.

The clown years taught me how to hold a room, how to read an audience, how to make someone feel seen in under 30 seconds. The Taiwan chapter taught me how to explain complicated things simply, and how to be genuinely comfortable being the odd one out. The travel industry taught me how to hold someone’s dream carefully and help them shape it into something real.

And the losses. Six pregnancies that didn’t end the way I needed them to. Those broke me open and rebuilt me into someone who could actually do this work.

All of these things are added to my toolkit that comes with me into coaching sessions.

Every Experience Builds the Toolkit

I spent time selling gas and electricity door to door in London. It rains a lot in London, all year round, and we had clipboards and briefcases and company pens we had to use at every house. Holding an umbrella on top of all of that just felt like too many things, so we wore raincoats and hoped for the best.

One particularly miserable day in Wimbledon, most of the houses were too big to even qualify for what I was selling, but I had to tick off my section. I remember standing at the entrance to this huge, beautiful house with rivulets running down my face and into my shirt, feet squelching in my shoes, thinking this was the most ridiculous thing I had ever done for money. Then the door opened and the warmth hit my face. The owner knew he didn’t qualify, but he insisted I come inside anyway. He just wanted to be a decent person. I dripped off in front of his fire and we chatted while I dried out.

That evening, our team lead explained the concept of going for the no. That every no takes you closer to a yes. It’s the same stubborn optimism that had me going from hotel to hotel in Durban with 20 CVs in my bag, hoping someone would give me a chance. The same delulu that kept me trying for a baby through 8 pregnancies and 6 losses. And it’s the same persistence that has me showing up as a coach today, over and over, even when it feels like all I’m hearing is nos.

None of it was wasted. Even the stuff that felt embarrassing at the time, or irrelevant, or like evidence that I couldn’t commit to anything. Especially that stuff, actually.

I made a video about this, and it turned into one of those ones where I surprised myself a bit. I’d intended to just run through the career timeline, but somewhere around the Taiwan section I started talking about what each chapter was actually teaching me. I hadn’t planned to go there. Sometimes the camera pulls the real thing out of you.

If your own path looks wiggly from the outside, I want to offer you this: wiggly is not the same as wasted.

The pieces are there. They’re all the pieces you’re going to need.

Want more of the behind-the-scenes version of this? I share that in my weekly newsletter, Lines from Bianca. You can subscribe at the bottom of this page.