There are only so many times you can keep hitting your head against the same pillar.

For much of my career, my desires and my confidence couldn’t have been further apart.

I always had big plans. What I didn’t have was the confidence to put myself at the top of them.

I also thought I lacked the ruthlessness required to be a company head.

I’d seen enough of business to associate leadership with a certain amount of callousness, and I didn’t want to become that person.

So I did what seemed like a perfectly reasonable alternative.

I tried to climb the ladder while dodging the bits of the ladder I didn’t want to stand on.

As career strategies go, there may have been a small flaw in this.

Eventually I reached a point where I seemed to be experiencing all the negativity I associated with seniority and remarkably few of the perks.

And that’s when I realised I’d been approaching it all wrong.

I’d spent an enormous amount of energy trying to navigate around the parts of working life and leadership that didn’t sit comfortably with me.

What if, instead of concentrating on what I wanted to avoid, I put that energy into helping create the kind of businesses I wanted to see?

I already had decades of experience across business strategy, marketing and communications. I’d worked with large organisations, agencies, SMEs, charities and start-ups, and had seen business from enough different angles to know that the problem in front of you isn’t necessarily the real problem.

What I wanted to change was where I put that experience.

I began working with B Corp and the Organisation for Responsible Businesses (ORB), becoming a B Leader and Responsible Business Standard Specialist, because I wanted to understand how businesses could build decency into the way they operated, rather than leaving it to the personality of whoever happened to be in charge.

I qualified as a coach and mentor and continue to volunteer with the Help to Grow Management Mentoring programme because I’d become equally interested in the people expected to lead those businesses.

And perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself particularly drawn to confidence, imposter syndrome and resilience.

I knew something about the distance that can exist between what you’re capable of and what you believe you’re capable of.

This was the business I actually wanted to create.

Not as my opportunity to finally become the ruthless company head I’d spent years avoiding.

Quite the opposite.