About Pauline Harley

My background spans more than 20 years in financial services and nine years as a Company Director and Consultant, alongside a first-class M.A. in Leadership in Workplace Health & Wellbeing. My work has taken me through career change, neurodivergence, workplace wellbeing and self-advocacy, while my life has included chronic illness, miscarriage and loss, caregiving, burnout, education, writing, art and the ordinary responsibilities that accumulate across a life.

After my dad died in January 2026, I deliberately stepped away from paid work and began closing my company. The pause gave me something I hadn't had much of for a long time: space to consider what I wanted the second half of my own life to look like.

My dad has influenced much of the thinking that has emerged since. He lived relatively simply and wasn't a wealthy man, but he understood something about enough. As he aged, I watched someone who valued his autonomy, knew what mattered to him and seemed increasingly content with the life he actually had. He wasn't endlessly looking for more.

I don't romanticise that. Material circumstances matter. Financial insecurity cannot be coached away, and having enough stability to exercise meaningful choice is itself a privilege.

But sufficiency isn't necessarily the same thing as wealth.

I'm increasingly interested in what happens when some of the roles and responsibilities that have organised our lives begin to loosen. Career. Parenting. Caring. Providing. Achieving. Being useful. These things can remain deeply important without having to organise every part of who we are or what we do next.

What happens when we have enough autonomy to become curious about what comes next?

For me, that currently means writing, making art, working towards publishing my Master's research and selectively returning to one-to-one work. Some of what I create will be commercial. Some won't be, because it doesn't need to be.

I'm not particularly interested in reinvention, relentless self-improvement or turning the second half of life into another productivity project.

I'm interested in creative agency: loosening our attachment to what we've been, deciding what deserves our attention now and allowing ourselves to choose something without requiring its success to validate the choice.

Sometimes that means doing something new.

Sometimes it means doing less.

Sometimes it means recognising that enough really is enough.

That's where Advocating Autonomy is moving.