Introducing your club founder

Hello, I’m Laura Cloke, a career fulfilment coach and founder of The Unconventional Career Club. For the last 10 years I have been doing my career differently, letting go of what I thought it should look like, and instead following what feels good for me.

I burnt out at work when I was 27 and developed a chronic illness. It was awful, but it was also avoidable. Looking back, I wish that someone had taught me about having boundaries, prioritising rest, and all the other things I now know about how to feel good at work. Burning out was a defining moment in my career and it has shaped everything I have done since.

In 2016, I completely reinvented my career. After a life-changing solo trip to Portland, USA, I said goodbye to 15 years working in retail and embarked on something new and different. I trained as a coach, whilst finding a new career in choral concert production, and started to do things my own way.

I believe that everyone has the right to feel good at work, and you are the person responsible for making that happen. I am also a big believer in being unconventional, not for the sake of it, but because challenging the norms we have been told about what work has to look like is liberating. We are all unique and many aspects of the narrow view of what success is won’t work for most of us.

In 2020, I started my newsletter The Inbox Coach as a way to help more people to take charge of their career development. It is weekly reminder that making time to think about what you want and doing something about it is the key to creating a career you love.

I created The Unconventional Career Club so that I could take all the expertise I have shared in The Inbox Coach over the last few years and create a resource you can turn to no matter what is going on in your career.

Whether you are attending a workshop, working through that one thing you have been avoiding in a co-working session, or just reading an article, I want you to know that you can create a career you love. Career fulfilment isn’t about the big highlight events; it happens in the small everyday moments. When you join The Unconventional Club, you are saying that you want to create a career you love and you are willing to do the work to make that happen.

There are so many resources to help you figure out what you want from work, and as your club host I am ready to support you to create a career you love.

I can’t wait to meet you, so say hello in the comments.

And if you haven’t joined yet, find out more about club membership here.