Date · Friday, 8 May 2026, 20:30 to 21:30 CEST
Hosted by · UNDP
Session page · UNOG learning
Speakers
- Liz Oseland · Account Director and Coach, 10Eighty · Bio
- Hannah Nash · Director, Business Development Executive and Coach, 10Eighty · Bio
- Peter Sonerell · People Development Specialist, UNDP Office of Human Resources, Talent Development Unit · Bio
This one hour session is designed to help you take ownership of your future and understand how to make your role truly matter. Whether you are in a transition or looking to re-energise your current position, discover techniques to build your confidence to take the initiative. Connect your own personal why to that of your organisation and adopt a mindset to make a lasting impact and drive your career forward. Hear Peter Sonerell’s (People Development Specialist at UNDP) success story. Discover how he takes ownership for his career by embracing change, preparing for the future and keeping himself and others engaged.
Key takeaways
- 95% of career success is driven by mindset. Treat the work of correcting your own reactive language (“I can’t / if only / that’s not my job / I’ll wait to be recognised” → “I can / I will / I can take the initiative / I can speak to”) as a career investment, not as self-help.
- The only things you actually control are your behaviours, actions and responses. Run the Circle of Control exercise on paper to stop spending energy on what sits outside it. Use influence, not control, on everything else.
- Use the Five Whys on yourself. Start with “why do I get out of bed in the morning” and chase it four levels deeper. Do it with a trusted person, not alone, because the pause around why number three is where the value is.
- Write a personal purpose statement in plain language you would actually remember. Liz’s example: “to inspire others to think differently about their career and life plans.” This is the anchor you return to on bad days.
- Name your 3-5 Key Result Areas: the activities only you can do where your hours produce results. If you cannot list them, that is the gap. If you can, link each one upward to your team, agency and overall UN mission. The NASA cleaner test.
- Build the four-loop alignment between you and your organisation: Values, Purpose, Motivation, Impact. You will not align on all four. Find the connection points and use them deliberately. The connection itself drives engagement, which drives confidence, which drives success.
- Tell people about your successes. The session’s audience overwhelmingly does not. Visibility is part of doing the job, not separate from it. If you cannot name the people who would speak up for you, that network is your priority, not a side project.
Hannah Nash
Hannah opened the session by reframing what people typically think drives a career. She put a number on something most listeners know intuitively but rarely act on: roughly 95% of career success is driven by mindset, and the people who hold a more positive, proactive mindset have substantially higher success rates in whatever they set out to achieve. She used this not as motivation but as a justification for spending time on something many treat as too soft to schedule.
The most actionable thing she gave participants was the Intelligent Career Model boiled down to three questions you can run on yourself in any career conversation: Why do you do what you do (values, energy, what gets you up), How do you do it (skills you have and skills you need), and Whom do you do it with (your network, who knows about your purpose). She returned to the “whom” repeatedly throughout the session, framing it as the part most people underuse.
She walked participants through a four-loop alignment exercise: take your personal Values, Purpose, Motivation and Impact, write them down beside your organisation’s, and look for the intersections. Her point was concrete: you do not need to align on all four to feel engaged. You need to find the connection points and lean on them deliberately. She also reframed the standard “I can’t / if only / that’s not my job / I’ll wait to be recognised” reactive language into proactive equivalents (“I can / I will / I can take the initiative / I can speak to”), arguing that this small linguistic shift changes behaviour because language reveals where you have given up agency.
She gave a practical answer to the “no one will help me” objection: ask yourself if you would help someone who came to you with the same request. If yes, then assume the same of others, and act.
Liz Oseland
Liz delivered the session’s two strongest analytical tools. The first was Stephen Covey’s Circle of Control: a paper exercise where you draw three concentric circles, label the centre “control” and the outer ring “no control”, then list what falls in each. Her observation was that participants almost always overstate what they control. In reality the only things you control are your behaviours, your actions, and your responses. Everything else, including other people’s thoughts and decisions, sits in the no-control ring and is influenced rather than controlled. The point of the exercise is not philosophical; it is to stop wasting energy reacting to things you cannot move and to redirect that energy to where you have full agency.
Her second tool was a question sequence built on the Five Whys. Start with “Why do you get out of bed every morning?” then ask “why” four more times. By the third or fourth iteration you stop giving surface answers and arrive at values, energy sources, and the impact you want to make. She suggested running this with someone you trust rather than alone, because the discomfort of the pause is what produces the depth. From the answers you can craft a personal purpose statement (her own example: “to inspire others to think differently about their career and life plans”) that you can return to on bad days.
She introduced the concept of 3-5 Key Result Areas: the small set of activities only you can do, where your time actually produces results. Her test for whether your role matters is whether you can name those three to five things and link them upward to the organisation’s vision. She illustrated this with the JFK-NASA cleaner story (when asked what he did, the cleaner said “I’m helping to put a man on the moon”), framing it not as motivational lore but as a clarity test: if a cleaner can connect a mop to a moonshot, you can connect your daily work to your agency’s mission, and if you cannot, that is the gap to close.
Her final practical contribution was a Five Ws + How scaffold for getting unstuck (Who can help me, What tasks could I take on, Where can I get visibility, When are opportunities coming, Why does it matter, How do I move). The point is not the questions themselves but getting them out of your head and onto paper, which converts vague anxiety into a list of things to find out.
Peter Sonerell
Peter’s contribution was a lived case study rather than a framework. The most useful thing he offered was a distinction between change you choose and change imposed on you: in both cases your only real lever is how deliberate your response is, and being deliberate is rarely easy. He talked about coming to UNDP mid-career and starting his academic studies mid-life, and was open about the fact that during those transitions his mindset went negative, he felt uncertain, and he did not know which foot to start with. His way out was relationships: managers, friends and family who helped him back into a frame where he could decide.
He reframed feedback in a way that was more useful than the standard advice. Early in his career he wanted things to be perfect and could not take feedback. He learned the hard way that feedback is the only thing that grows you, and that the trick is to seek it from people you trust, who may not be your direct manager. Trust is the gating condition; without it feedback bounces.
He gave one specific operational tip: the walk and talk. When he has a difficult conversation to have, with a supervisor or supervisee, he proposes walking. The mechanics of moving forward side by side, rather than facing each other across a table, change the conversation. Hard feedback becomes actionable because the body is already in forward motion. This is the kind of small, transferable practice that participants can use the same week.
His closing line (“I have to own my future, no one else will. I don’t want anyone else to own my future, I certainly don’t want to rent it, so I better invest in it”) gave the session its signature phrase. He also redefined recognition: it is not only your manager noticing. Someone you helped being pleased with what you did is recognition too, and is often the one that lasts.
Frameworks and models
| Name | What it stands for | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Intelligent Career Model | Three questions to run on yourself for any career decision: Knowing Why (values, energy, what gets you up), Knowing How (current skills and skill gaps), Knowing Whom (network, who knows about your purpose). | Use as a checklist before any career conversation. If you cannot answer all three, work on the weakest first. The “Whom” is the most underused. |
| Circle of Control (Stephen Covey) | Three concentric circles: control (centre), influence (middle), no control (outer). The only things truly in your control are your behaviours, actions, and responses. (Cross-session page covering Day 3 S7, Day 5 S5, Day 5 S8.) | Do the exercise on paper. List what you think you control, then what you have no control over. Re-sort honestly. Stop spending energy on the no-control ring. Use influence, not control, on the rest. |
| Five Whys (applied to purpose) | A questioning sequence that starts with one “why” and chases the answer through four more iterations, surfacing values and motivators most people cannot name on the first pass. The output is a personal purpose statement. | Start with “Why do I get out of bed every morning?” Ask “why” four more times. Do it with a trusted person, not alone. Use the result to draft a personal purpose statement. |
| Four-Loop Alignment (Values, Purpose, Motivation, Impact) | A diagram that puts your personal values, purpose, motivators and impact alongside your organisation’s, and looks for intersection points. | Write yours on the left, your organisation’s on the right. Mark the connection points. You will not align on all four. Lean on the connections you do find; that is where engagement comes from. |
| Vision-Mission-Goals-Team-Individual cascade | A top-down line of sight from organisation vision through mission, goals, team objectives, to your individual job description. The reverse arrow is the test of whether your daily tasks make impact. (Documented as the upstream-check section of the Four-Loop Alignment page; the cascade is a structural sanity check that pairs with the four loops.) | Walk down from your agency’s vision to your job description. Then reverse: do my daily tasks visibly contribute back up the chain? If not, reprioritise. |
| 3-5 Key Result Areas | The small set of activities only you can do (because of technical ability, expertise, or role) where your time actually produces results. | List no more than five. If you spend a working hour on something not on this list, you are being busy, not effective. Use it to defend your calendar. |
| Reactive vs Proactive Mindset (language shift) | A direct mapping from disempowering phrases (“I can’t / if only / that’s just how I am / that’s not my job / I’ll wait to be recognised”) to proactive equivalents (“I can / I will / I can take the initiative / I can learn by doing / I can speak to”). (Documented as a concrete operationalisation of the Reframe move on the cross-session Reframe, Adapt, Lead page.) | When you catch a reactive phrase coming out of your mouth or your inner voice, swap it for the proactive equivalent on the spot. Repeated enough, it shifts behaviour because it shifts the assumed agency. |
| Five Ws + How (career questions scaffold) | A six-question structure (Who, What, Where, When, Why, How) for breaking analysis paralysis into a list of things to go find out. | When you feel stuck, write every question that comes to mind under the right column. Then go answer them. Converts vague anxiety into a finite list. |
| Walk and Talk | A meeting format for difficult conversations: walk side by side instead of sitting opposite. (Documented as the Walk and Talk format section of the cross-session Career Conversation Playbook page.) | Propose it for tough feedback or hard conversations with a manager or report. Forward motion physically changes the tone. Useful for both giving and receiving feedback. |
Resources
| Resource | What it is / What it’s for | Link |
|---|---|---|
| 10Eighty | UK-based career coaching company that Liz and Hannah work with. Many UN agencies partner with them; staff can ask their HR or learning focal point about access. | https://www.10eighty.co.uk |
| 10Eighty on LinkedIn | LinkedIn page for follow-up, materials and direct outreach to Liz and Hannah. | https://www.linkedin.com/company/10eighty |
Last updated 2026-05-10.