When success stopped looking the way I planned

The phone call lasted less than four minutes. The voice on the other end was polite, professional, and absolutely final. I sat in my car outside the studio where I had worked for nearly two decades, watched the security light blink from green to red, and realised I had absolutely no idea who I was without the job that had been telling me for so long. Learn more about The Value Of Saying Sorry And Moving On.

For years I had treated success like a ladder. Each rung was a contract renewal, a primetime slot, another glossy cover, a new follower count to chase. When the rung beneath my feet vanished, I expected to fall. Instead I landed somewhere far more uncomfortable: I landed in truth. What followed was a long, often messy reckoning with the meaning of success itself, shaped in part by conversations I had only just begun to have with audiences in Australia, where honesty travels faster than polish and nobody has patience for pretending.

The morning the studio lights felt cold

The studio I had driven to that morning was the same one I had walked into a thousand times. Same coffee machine humming in the green room, same producer jogging past with a clipboard, same warm lights angled to flatter whoever happened to sit in the interview chair. Only this time the chair was not for me. The light fell on a younger face, and the producers smiled the way people smile when they are trying not to look at you.

I had been warned something was coming, the way you warn someone about rain when the clouds are already overhead. The formal meeting was gentle, almost kind. There were words like "restructure" and "fresh direction" and "thank you for everything." I heard none of them. I heard a door closing so loudly it took the breath out of me.

When I got home I did what most British people do in a crisis: I put the kettle on, opened a tin of biscuits, and told no one. My partner noticed the red eyes. My mother rang twice. I told them both I was fine, in the voice that everyone in the United Kingdom recognises as the opposite of fine. Australians have a name for that voice, by the way. They would tell me, much later, "Don't come the raw prawn with us, love."

How a Bondi morning reset my definition of success

Australia has a way of bringing you back to size. The light at Bondi at six in the morning makes everyone look the same: tired, hopeful, a little salty. I walked that beach for a week after my first speaking trip to the country, and I kept thinking about the women I had met in Brisbane the night before. They were teachers, nurses, founders of small businesses, mothers juggling school pick-ups and board meetings. They were not interested in whether I had been on the cover of a magazine. They wanted to know whether I had survived, and how.

That is the thing about Australian audiences. They do not want the polished version. They want the version that turns up in thongs, pours another flat white, and admits it nearly didn't make it. I learned more about real success in a corporate boardroom in Melbourne than I ever did in a primetime meeting in London. The chief executive there told me, with the directness Australians are famous for, "We have all been punted out the door at some point. The trick is not pretending it didn't happen."

Melbourne's laneway coffee culture deserves a mention here, because so many of the conversations that reshaped my thinking happened in those narrow streets, hunched over a tiny table while trams rattled past. There is no glamour in those moments, and that is precisely the point. Success, the real kind, does not announce itself with a soundtrack. It arrives quietly, usually in a dress you have owned for ten years, holding a cup of something hot.

For nearly twenty years my definition of success had been written by other people. It lived in the schedules, in the press reviews, in the quiet moments before a live broadcast when the floor manager counted down from ten and I held my smile until the camera found me. Success meant being chosen. Success meant being on the telly. Success meant being asked back. I had confused recognition with worth, and the two are not the same thing, although it takes a sledgehammer to the ribs to discover the difference.

Measuring what actually matters

Once the schedule no longer had my name on it, I had to build a new measuring stick. I sat down one afternoon with a notebook and wrote two lists. The first list was everything I had been using to judge my life. The second list was everything I actually wanted to feel. The contrast was so stark I almost laughed, because the two columns barely recognised each other.

That table still sits on the wall above my desk. Some weeks I fail every single row on the right-hand side. Some weeks I manage most of them. The point is not perfection. The point is that I am now measuring the things that actually keep a life stitched together, rather than the things that simply look good on a press release. Australians, who tend to be deeply unimpressed by fuss, helped me see this faster than anyone. There is a cultural suspicion, quite healthy in my view, of anyone who confuses being busy with being useful.

Building This Girl Is On Fire from the wreckage

The platform I now lead did not come from the setback, but it could not have happened without it. When the studio door closed, another door opened, slowly, into rooms full of women who were hungry for the same thing I was hungry for: a frank conversation about midlife, menopause, money, confidence, and starting again. We built This Girl Is On Fire together, women supporting women, and the appetite for honest storytelling has not slowed down.

Speaking on stages across Australia taught me how to do this properly. From a hangar-sized ballroom in Perth to an intimate dinner in Hobart, I have watched hundreds of women nod, cry, text their best friend under the table, and decide to stop apologising for taking up space. There is a particular courage in Australian women, shaped by a country where the distances are vast and the communities are small. When you live five hours from the nearest big town, you learn very quickly that other women are not your competition. They are your survival kit.

If you want to follow the work, read about the next events, or simply see what I am building next, Andrea McLean is the place to do it. The site gathers the broadcasting story, the books, the advocacy work, and the ongoing projects under one roof, and it is updated whenever there is something worth saying.

What I take into every room now

When I am asked to host a conference in Sydney, facilitate a leadership retreat in the Barossa, or keynote a women's health summit on the Gold Coast, I no longer arrive with a script designed to prove I belong in the room. I arrive with the truth of what happened and the small, hard-won understanding that success is something you build in the quiet hours, not something you collect on a red carpet.

One of the most quietly powerful lessons from that period was about how to handle the moments after a public failure. I wrote about it at length, including value of an apology and the harder art of actually moving on without dragging the apology behind you like a piece of wet carpet. Australians, perhaps more than any other audience I have spoken to, refuse to wallow. They want the apology, they want the lesson, and then they want everyone to get on with it. That is a healthy kind of pressure, and I have come to rely on it.

The setback gave me back my own voice. It stripped away the job title and left only the person underneath, and that person turns out to be far more useful to other people than the previous version ever was. If you are standing in your own car park right now, watching the security light blink from green to red, know that the next chapter is rarely the chapter you would have chosen. It is usually the one that knows your name better than you do.