Auriel Majumdar, following her heart

Auriel Majumdar is a coach, thinker, speaker, teacher and poet. She is a regular broadcaster, recently featuring on the BBC's Naked Podcast.

Formerly a senior manager with a local authority she gave up a well-paid secure corporate job to follow her heart and pursue a more satisfying portfolio vocation. She describes the pivotal event that catalysed the change. It was liberating, fabulous and traumatic in equal measure.

Several years on she has a newfound sense of creativity and playfulness. She describes her new role as "creating space for people to do great thinking and reflection and connect with their values." Teaching at Sheffield Hallam University is another thing she has fallen in love with. She says "My art is my living."

She is currently completing a PhD on coaching creative businesses, with a particular emphasis on conceptual artists. In the process she has developed an empathy with the artistic experience. "That feeling of being rejected that artists know from day one." Part of the lasting difference she is trying to achieve has an "emancipatory" quality to it. "Leaders ... are demanding something different."

She reflects on the contribution art can make to coaching.

We discuss the challenge of maintaining the balance between working and motherhood. She compares the current stage of the climate crisis to the end of the phoney war.

We close with some sage advice for aspiring leaders. "If you can give as you go ... for me it has come back in buckets ... don't be jealous and proud with your resources."