Why Knowing Yourself Is the Secret to Success
By Helen Wada with Helen Pamely
Self-Knowledge and Sustainable Success. If you are disconnected from yourself, how can you ever truly connect with another human being, let alone build a career or a business that sustains you?
In the latest episode of Human Wise, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Helen Pamely, a former city law firm partner and Magic Circle litigator turned executive coach, entrepreneur, and one of the most courageous voices currently reshaping the conversation about leadership and wellbeing in professional services.
Helen is the founder of Lawyer Unleashed, a podcast dedicated to the off-the-record conversations that the legal world rarely allows, and has built an extensive audience through her writing, coaching, and thought leadership.
Helen and I met four years ago through our shared passion for coaching, and what struck me afresh in this conversation is how much our paths, though different, have been driven by the same conviction: that knowing yourself is not a luxury or a personal development indulgence. It is the foundation of everything, commercially, professionally, and as a human being. Here are the key insights from our conversation:
You Cannot Connect With Others Until You Connect With Yourself
When I asked Helen what being human at work really means to her, she went straight to the root of it. Not to organisational culture or leadership frameworks, but to the individual, and to the question that most busy professionals never stop long enough to ask themselves.
Helen's journey through law, through witnessing colleagues disappear into burnout and breakdown, through training as a therapist and then a coach, has given her a very clear-eyed view of what is happening beneath the surface of high-achieving professional environments. And what she sees, consistently, is disconnection.
Helen Pamely: "We're so caught up in our heads, and we're disconnected first and foremost from ourselves. If you're disconnected from yourself, how can you connect with another human being? We don't have enough time to connect with ourselves. We're scared of what we find underneath. When you're busy all the time and you've poured your life into work, what is left underneath all that? Where's the joy? What is it you really want from life? Are the decisions you're making coming from a place of inner alignment?"
That question, whether your decisions are coming from a place of inner alignment, is one I come back to constantly in my coaching work. It sits at the heart of the first chapter of Human Wise: HOW YOU SHOW UP. Not the performance of showing up, but the genuine, grounded version of it that only becomes possible when you have done enough work on yourself to know who you actually are.
The Permission We Wait For, and the Work We Have to Do Ourselves
Helen shared a story from 2018. She had been a top, global lawyer, and had witnessed things across the City that, as she put it, you cannot unsee, had moved firms hoping things would be different and discovered that things were not much different. On a cold January morning, she decided that she could not do it anymore and called her father.
His response, simple and immediate, changed everything: then you will have to leave. And in that moment, she felt a weight lift. What struck her later was that she had been waiting for permission that, in truth, she had always had the power to give herself.
Helen Pamely: "We are responsible for everything in our own lives. I'm not saying it's easy to jump ship and leave a job, but if something isn't good for you, it's on you to take the steps you need, to have boundaries, to stand in your own power. One of the most dangerous mindsets we can lean into is a victim mindset because we disempower ourselves. How you show up is within your power. And what you do next is also within your power."
This is not a comfortable message for everyone to hear, and Helen acknowledges that. She is not minimising the reality of toxic environments or difficult managers. But what she has learned, through therapy training, through deep self-inquiry, and through coaching hundreds of lawyers and leaders, is that the moment you reclaim your agency, however small the first step, something shifts. The world does not change immediately. But you begin to.
Building the Mindset Muscle: Small Shifts That Change Everything
Helen and I found ourselves in complete alignment on one of the themes I am most passionate about in my commercial coaching work: the idea that transformation does not happen in a single day of training or a single insight from a coach. It happens through consistent, deliberate practice, built one small shift at a time.
Helen referenced the neuroscience behind this directly. Neurons that fire together, wire together. The thought patterns we repeat become the lens through which we see everything. Which means that changing how you show up is not about willpower or a dramatic reinvention. It is about rerouting, gently, persistently, and with support.
Helen Pamely: "You start saying thank you for everything. You start seeing the positives. You can shift your own mindset even in the harshest of realities. It's like rerouting a river in your brain. Actually, it becomes easier and easier, and you start thinking creatively. Your mind starts to say, how could I make this a different opportunity? And you wire your brain to think differently, and everything around you starts to change."
I shared my own version of this. During lockdown, I started training with weights. Small sessions, consistent practice, and I lost ten kilos while most people went the other way. The discipline was the same discipline I bring to mindset work: not a dramatic overhaul, but building one muscle at a time, and trusting that the compound effect is real.
Helen Wada: "Sometimes what we're talking about, when you're feeling in a world that feels hugely stressful and anxious, find the one thing that you can do. Rather than thinking about the ten things you need to do or the big shift that seems insurmountable, how do you build your mindset muscle for doing one thing differently and build on that before you do the next?"
The Organisations That Ignore This Will Not Survive What Is Coming
Helen has spoken to enough senior partners and managing directors through her coaching and podcast work to see what is happening at the top of professional services firms with clear eyes. The old model, which has run on burning through junior talent in order to sustain profits at the upper levels, is breaking down. Not because leaders have suddenly developed a conscience, but because the economics of it no longer hold.
Helen Pamely: "Leaders right now are being forced to take a step back, and it's going to be a redesign whether they like it or not. The ones who don't move with the times will not do well. You've got AI moving forward. You've got a generation coming through into the workforce who no longer will just accept, I'll work any hour you want, I'll break my physical health, I'll break my mental health for it. The ones who are in denial will come to realise this."
I see this as the opportunity that those of us who are passionate about human-centred leadership have been building towards. AI is not the threat to humanity at work. It is the catalyst that finally makes the business case for investing in human skills undeniable. When machines can do the technical work, what becomes most valuable is the uniquely human capacity to build trust, to lead with curiosity, to coach rather than command. The organisations that have invested in those capabilities will have a structural advantage that cannot be bought off the shelf.
Connection Is the Commercial Skill That Matters the Most
We discussed the power of genuine connection in building business: not the agenda-driven, business card approach, but showing up as a real person, being open-hearted, and seeing what emerges.
Whilst this is more comfortable for some than others, reminding yourself of who you are and why you do what you do helps to bridge the conversation towards an open and engaging dialogue. It takes practice and self-confidence, but ironically it is those people that are less focused on themselves who are much better at focusing on others.
Helen Pamely: "Stop trying to sell people something. Stop having the agenda. Show up as a person. A real person. If you can, speak twenty percent of the time and listen eighty. It will change your conversations. It will change everything."
This is precisely what I mean when I say coaching skills are commercial skills. The ability to take yourself out of a conversation and put the other person genuinely at the centre is not a soft skill. It is the skill that builds the trust that generates the referral that wins the work. And it starts, as Helen so powerfully put it, with getting out of your own way.
Helen Wada: "When people ask me what coaching is, it's about thinking about the other person. As a coach, we take ourselves out of it. It's not about you anymore. It's about curiosity. It's about getting under the skin of what's important to people. And that's why I get so passionate, because these coaching skills are commercial skills. They're not just a nice to have anymore."
Helen's Top Tip and Reflection Question
As we drew to a close, I asked Helen for one top tip and one question for listeners to sit with. Her tip was something she wishes she could go back and give to her younger self, a practice simple enough to begin today and powerful enough to change the trajectory of a career.
Helen Pamely: "Be grateful. Every single day, find three things you are grateful for. Write them down, speak them out loud, or say them in your head. You start to do that, and the world around you changes. If you're in a team dynamic and you think, I hate my boss, I hate my team, start being grateful for three things that happened every day. You start to change the way you feel, the way you show up. It's the simplest way to start to actually shift your relationship with everybody and everything around you."
And for the reflection question, Helen offered something that cuts straight to the heart of what holds most high performers back:
Helen Pamely: "At the end of each day, ask yourself: where today could I have got out of my own way? If you do that, you'll start to realise you have so much more power than you ever thought you did."
That question deserves to be written down and returned to. Because in my experience, the gap between where people are and where they want to be is almost never about capability. It is about the internal barriers, the assumptions, the self-doubt, the habits of thought that keep them from showing up as the leader, the colleague, or the person they are fully capable of being.
Final Thoughts
This conversation with Helen Pamely is a reminder that knowing yourself is not the starting point of a personal development journey. It is the starting point of every meaningful professional conversation, every client relationship, and every attempt to lead other people well.
The self-knowledge that Helen found through therapy training, through deep inquiry, and through the courage to leave twice before finally building something of her own, is the same self-knowledge that underpins every commercial skill I write and teach about in Human Wise.
As Aristotle said, and as I return to regularly in the programmes we run: knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. And in a world that is asking more of its leaders than ever before, wisdom is the advantage that will not be automated away.
For a deeper dive into our conversation, listen to the full podcast episode with Helen Pamely here, or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
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Connect with Helen Pamely on LinkedIn, listen to Lawyer Unleashed on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and find out more about her coaching work at helenpamely.com.
Human Wise releases new episodes weekly and is available on all major podcast platforms.