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Living and Working with Purpose
12 Plays5 days ago
Figuring out what you’re here to do, and working so that you can do it
Eloise Skinner joins host Michael Millward for a thoughtful, quietly provocative chat about what it means to step outside of modern life and into a year‑long monastic experience, whilst maintaining a busy legal career.
Eloise reflects on how monastic values—intentionality, community, discipline, and the stripping‑back of identity—can reshape a person’s understanding of purpose and self.
Eloise explains the traditions that informed her experience, noting that monasticism “transcends particular religions… showing up in different cultures and representing different values” . The program she joined at Lambeth Palace, is part of the “new monastic movement,” which adapts ancient practices for contemporary life. Rather than withdrawing entirely from society, Eloise continued her demanding legal career while committing to weekly community life, silent retreats, and a shared rule of life.
The conversation explores the tension between monastic ideals and corporate culture, especially the challenge of disentangling personal identity from professional status. Eloise describes the gradual shifting of her priorities: “finding a different sense of self… then looking back at everything… and choosing differently”. Ultimately Eloise left law and built a portfolio career centred on meaning, purpose, and therapeutic work.
Eloise is a successful author
You will gain insights into:
- What monastic values look like in practice
- How intentional living affects habits, diet, and community
- The difficulty—and liberation—of redefining identity beyond job titles
- Why deep personal change often unfolds slowly, long after an experience ends
This episode invites reflection rather than prescription.
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Books by Eloise Skinner available from Amazon
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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. The all-in-one podcasting platform that just makes making content so easy. Visit Zencastr.com. All the details are in the description.
Introduction to 'Independent Minds'
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm your host, Michael Millward.
Meet Eloise Skinner
00:00:34
Speaker
Today, Eloise Skinner is going to be telling me what it is like to have a monastic experience for 12 months. Eloise is an entrepreneur, author and existential therapist.
00:00:47
Speaker
She is the founder of two businesses, One Typical Day, an education technology startup, and The Purpose Workshop, a social impact consultancy. Eloise is the author of a number of books, including The Purpose Handbook, The Junior Lawyer's Handbook, and her most recent book, Are You Alive?
00:01:08
Speaker
Eloise is based in London, the capital of the United Kingdom. It's an expensive place to visit, which is why when I go to London, even by train now, I always book my travel through the Ultimate Travel Club because the Ultimate Travel Club gives me access to trade prices on flights, trains, hotels, package deals, and all sorts of other travel essentials.
00:01:31
Speaker
There is a link and a membership discount code in the description. Now that I've paid a few bills, we can make a podcast that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:46
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.
From Law to Therapy
00:01:53
Speaker
Hello, Eloise. Hello, thank you so much for having me.
00:01:56
Speaker
It's great. This is the second time that we've had a conversation. You've also recorded an episode of the Abbasida podcast, Rest and Recreation, which I've thoroughly enjoyed. For today, please could we start with you telling us a little bit about your history.
00:02:12
Speaker
Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing? Yes, um definitely. So I am a psychotherapist at the moment. Before that, I was in corporate law. And kind of between those two places. um I've done a few other things, for example, yoga teacher training and meditation teacher training and writing a few books, and working with lots of different people around topics of meaning and purpose.
Monastic Life Explored
00:02:34
Speaker
And as we're going to talk about today, i also had some different spiritual pursuits, including a year spent within a monastic community.
00:02:43
Speaker
What do we mean when we say a monastic community? It's very broad term because monasticism is something that transcends particular religions. So it actually shows up in a lot of different religions in different formats and different cultures and representing different values. um So the monastic path that I was exploring was actually within the sort of Western Christian slash Catholic tradition. So this is drawing on traditions like Benedictine, Franciscan, Ignatian, monasticism. This is maybe what you would think of similar to what you would think of as a sort of a traditional monastic life, which is monastery based, community based, and sort of drawing on these ideas of giving up aspects of your life in order to serve a greater purpose.
Monasteries in the UK
00:03:28
Speaker
The programme I did was part of what is sometimes called the new monastic movement, which is basically taking some of those older ideas and trying to bring them into modern day to see how they could be relevant to people today in different forms.
00:03:43
Speaker
Interesting. Where are the monasteries in the United Kingdom? Because Henry VIII did away with them. There's a few, definitely not as many as it's always interesting when you go to other European countries and you see monasteries often like embedded in the centre of towns, actually.
00:03:57
Speaker
because in in various traditions, it was thought that having a monastery sort of in the center of the town or like aligned with a town could sort of give the influence of monastic life to people who weren't within the community. um So that's always interesting to see. There are some around, a lot of them are like on the coast and like out a little bit in the middle of nowhere. And then there's obviously places that are trying to bring values of monastic life into sort of spiritual communities, for example, Lambeth Palace, which is where our programme took place. though That's right in the centre of London, isn't the opposite that? Well, on the south bank of the Thames, but virtually opposite the Houses of Parliament. So you don't really get much more central than than that. Exactly.
Values of Monasticism
00:04:39
Speaker
So when you talk about monastic values, before we talk about your own experience, so I'm sure there are reams and reams of monastic values, but what are the main things that we can attribute to a monastic style of living? It really does depend on the tradition, but i would say maybe some main ideas.
00:05:00
Speaker
Possibly the most central idea is the sense of giving up your own priorities and choices and decisions in order to serve God essentially. So depending on which religion or cultural tradition you come from, that might be different ways of conceptualizing that, but essentially this um idea of giving up something in order to serve a greater purpose.
00:05:22
Speaker
And that can be reflected in pretty much every aspect of your behavior and identity. So in practical ways, for example, giving up a career or a family or consumerism or any pursuit that you that you might want to do as a human being, and this sense that you could actually give that up in order to give your life to something greater or more meaningful to you.
00:05:46
Speaker
And then some other closely aligned ideas, things like community values are really, really strong in monasticism. So the sense that you live within a community um amongst people that you are treating as your, essentially your family or like your spiritual ah brothers and sisters.
00:05:59
Speaker
Things like stripping away the aspects of your life in order to find the real just core sense of your identity. So stripping away things like possessions, um earning money often, owning things or desiring things.
00:06:14
Speaker
And then some lesser kind of associated monastic values could be things like study or discipline or prayer and like commitment in that sense. The impression I think most people have of monastic life or life in a convent would be that you're taking life back to the basics, focusing on something that is greater than yourself. So there's all sorts of things within that. The big question has to be, how did you end up deciding to have a monastic experience?
From Corporate to Monastic
00:06:45
Speaker
And you've talked about different traditions and different types of monastic life.
00:06:52
Speaker
What sort of options did you have in terms of the monastic life that you and engaged in? Yeah. Yeah. So to answer the question about. I've asked too many questions in one go there. So how did you become aware of this monastic program?
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah, I actually was, um, recommended it Um, so I was within a church, um, a church called Oasis or church community, um, London, which is quite a well known church for its social justice work. It does a lot of kind of practical applications of Christian values in the community. And I was very interested at that time in the way in which religion can be used as a natural tool to shape shape your life. Because I think my experience, I didn't really grow up religious, um but I had become
00:07:40
Speaker
very interested in Christianity just after university or at university. I had been a little bit disenchanted with the way in which I'd seen religion be used as purely just like a value or a principle based activity rather than changing people's lives. So I'd seen people sort of continue to live lives that were pretty similar with or without religion and then just say that they were, for example, um a dedicated christian or Yeah, there can be in in some situations, I think, ah an aspect to religion, which is more, it's part of my social life rather than how I live my life. Exactly. Yeah. Or just the sense of like, this really is only something that's relevant to me on Sunday mornings. And then it really isn't, it doesn't really feed into my choices about how I make money. Yeah.
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah. The churches are full of sinners every week. Yeah. Yeah, but I think also people like don't really necessarily even think of themselves as not applying. I think sometimes ah religion can be a bit of a just disjointed concept because we're quite far removed from it, like our lives in London, for example, of very different to the way that we think about ourselves if we were thinking about attending church and aligning with those values. Like it's just very hard to carry over gospel values into like um a corporate lifestyle, for example. Yes. you You're part of the Oasis Church and somebody comes along and says, have you heard about this?
00:09:07
Speaker
why Did you ask them why they suggested it to you? the church that I was attending was in Lambeth so it was very close it was like very close proximity to the program that was happening I think um because the program was run every year i think maybe they knew so a few people who had been through it um in the in the previous year um and then they were just looking for there was a certain age limit that they were looking for. So they were actually looking 18 to 30 or something. And I fell within that bracket of people who were very interested. Right.
00:09:35
Speaker
They present you with the sort of of information. What was the decision making process that you went through to make sure that it was the right sort of experience for you? Yeah, I think I was almost immediately quite interested in it because I didn't really have any commitments that would have prevented me or would have even given me any hesitation about joining something like that. so I just felt like I was in a place in my life where I was able to explore different things. And I had been really interested to see how religion or like how these religious values, which i personally had said that subscribe you know, joining the church and becoming interested in religion. I felt like they hadn't changed my life in any hugely significant way other than sort of realigning my mental and principles. But I wanted to see, you know, like how would this look if I really tried to live it out in practice?
00:10:25
Speaker
Well, what is on offer when you say a monastic experience? You're obviously not going to go into it forever. there's It's a 12-month program, but what are the what are the sorts of options for being involved?
00:10:37
Speaker
Yeah, there were at the time and i joined the program, there were two main options. One was immersive, which was basically living the monastic life within the communities. They're living full time um on site, and basically living within communities. It would live with other a few other people. i think there are um about 12 people doing that, that part of the program. And then another 12 or so were doing um integrated, which is the track that I did. which was essentially living or committing to the rule of life and the various monastic principles at the same time, living at home or like continuing your life, your job, um and then attending the monastic community every Monday, plus longer retreats, silent retreats and longer commitments on the weekends.
00:11:21
Speaker
Right. And you opted for the second option. Yes. Yeah. Right. yeah I'm going to digress for a slight second because you said at the time, which seems to suggest that things are slightly different now.
00:11:34
Speaker
What is different about the program now? Yeah. So now they have a third track called Dispersed, which is basically like you could join the program more as...
00:11:48
Speaker
like an more overarching commitment of like you sign up to the values, you sign up to the rule of life, you sign up to the commit, you make the same commitments and promises and um intentions as the members of the community, but your physical presence is less commitment.
00:12:03
Speaker
You said from the start, when you heard about it, you were very interested in it, but it's still a big commitment to make. So what sort of practical decisions did you have to make about how you would manage your involvement in the program?
Balancing Dual Lifestyles
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think um a lot of it was around work. So at the time I was working as a corporate lawyer, which was... um taking up most of my time. I really had to see, you know, is this going to be something I can commit to? It's an interesting process to go through, especially in relation to a religious commitment, because obviously i think it would be different or maybe even more difficult to commit to a non-religious commitment that was going to take up that much time. Like if you had decided like, oh, I just have a new passion and that passion is going to mean that every single week I have a different priority, like I'm not going to be able to prioritize work. I'm not sure if that would have been as acceptable as taking on a religious commitment because of the kind of significance of a religious commitment, I i suppose. Yes. So yeah, it was, it was, it was something that I felt was going to be manageable possibly because of the nature of the thing that I was doing, like in how um well personal it was. Yeah.
00:13:14
Speaker
What sort of response did you get from your employer at the time? Yeah, I think they were i supportive. They were actually in the team that I was in, there were a few people who were practicing different types of you know religious commitments. So there was there were people observing the Sabbath and other people who had different you know times and periods um to respect different religious traditions. So it definitely wasn't you know something that was considered to be too like unusual, I suppose.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yes. I think one of the unusual parts of it, so hearing about it now, is you start to think, well, what do you have to give up to to live a Christian life? What do you actually gain from living Christian life? And then you start to think about how casually many Western um religions, sort of how casually it is possible to live in the sort of Western traditions of a particular religion.
00:14:09
Speaker
We can have The churches will be full on particular festivals. we People use churches for marriages, ah christenings, baptisms, and funerals, and won't be in very often. And when you think about the food that we eat, the way in which we live, there's very little connection between our diet and our religion in the same way as other religions would have some sort of connection between things like diet so did your diet change when you adopted this more observant way of living a christian faith yeah this it's i think i mean i think you um really identified the main thing that was most interesting to me about monastic practice because i think it is true that most people's religion um
00:15:00
Speaker
like in Western society, at least, or let's say like people living in um busy city environments and maybe attending church once a week who would consider themselves to be religious. It's difficult to sometimes let that infuse every aspect of your life in the way that religion could like, you know, change everything about your, about your choices, your decisions, the things you wear, the people you meet, the lifestyle you choose and everything.
00:15:25
Speaker
So yeah, it's in answer to your question about food, I think um probably in the Christian tradition or at least the monastic principles that we were following, it was much more about um intentionality. So there was lot of mindful sort of choices about,
00:15:39
Speaker
what you're doing. Yeah, that would extend to what you're eating. and There's a big focus on community values. So one of the factors would be that meals would be eaten together or like times spent together would be cooking and preparing and helping, you know, everyone gets involved in everything in relation to the meal. We did do a few um silent meals um retreats where meals were eaten in silence and that really brings a different quality of intentionality to the things that you're eating um and then of course in terms of sourcing the food a lot of monastic communities especially monastic communities that are not not this kind of program that's like a 12 month sort of um setup but communities that are sort of self-sustaining would pick you know local sustainable foods um in that way
00:16:25
Speaker
Right. So were you healthier as a result of this experience at the end of it? After having a year of a monastic style diet, were you healthier?
00:16:36
Speaker
it's hard It's hard to say, actually. I mean it wasn't purely... There's still a lot of like tea and biscuits. I mean, it was in English.
00:16:48
Speaker
Biscuits are my big vice. Yeah, there were a lot participants. But yeah i mean, because I wasn't there like full time. So i would say i'd say for the programs that when I went on silent retreat, if I was in a residential program for a week or two, then yes, definitely. I feel i mean, there's a lot of research out there to say that the mindset that you have when you eat a meal actually changes the way that your body processes the food. So for example, if you're extremely stressed and anxious and you're on your phone distracted while you're eating, you're likely to absorb less of the nutrients or like have like take less of the, um,
00:17:21
Speaker
benefits of the food than if you were mindfully eating. I'm not sure how strong that research is, but there's definitely some stuff around there. If you were intentional and settled and you're you enjoying the food as like a nourishing experience, you know, in community and you're kind of appreciating it, that's a different quality of eating, even if it if the food itself doesn't change. Yes, there is a lot of research that I've seen about how if you are watching the TV, reading a book, doing something as well as the eating, you you don't register how much you are eating. So you will you will eat more or you'll eat more of the wrong sorts of things in that sort of process. But you've you've had the the program presented to you. You've investigated it. You've decided that it's something that you want to do.
Monastic Principles and Identity
00:18:08
Speaker
You've cleared it with your employer.
00:18:10
Speaker
What was the first day like? It's hard to remember actually what the first day was. I think the first day was kind of an orientation, you know getting to know one of the central ideas that you abide by in the monastic communities. And this is something that had been um an influence of um older communities like Benedictine and Franciscan monasticism is this set of values, which is like binds the community together. So this is sometimes called a rule of life. And it's basically like a set of, I think, 10 or so principles that you say that you sign up to as part of your community values. So these would be things like um we're going to prioritize study or we're going to prioritize discipline or we're going to commit to poverty, which is basically not buying things that you don't need, things like that. The first couple of introductory days would be going through those kinds of principles that would really shape the... Adopting those types of principles whilst you're working in the City of London in a law firm, and must have been there must have been challenges. And I'm thinking there might actually be more challenges working in that environment than if you'd been...
00:19:19
Speaker
in a less high pressured environment, in a less, well, an environment that has less of the status type issues that are associated with the corporate world, which from what you're saying are totally different to the monastic type experience.
00:19:39
Speaker
In a monastic type experience, I can't imagine that the corner office or or or anything like that is of any importance whatsoever. But in a corporate world, where somebody's office is, the type of office, the size of it the company car, all sorts of various different things have an importance because it it signifies status and career progression.
00:20:04
Speaker
What you're saying in a in a monastic experience is that, I think, is that you have to wash all those types of things away and focus on the the values of the monastic experience.
00:20:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think um possibly because of the um the type of firm that I was in, i wasn't hugely exposed to um the sort of corporate lifestyle that you think about yeah when you think about like investment banking or something. Yeah.
00:20:40
Speaker
like my sort of experience in law was that people were just working it extremely hard, like extremely long hours. It was mostly like, um, you would just see books and things rather than company cars and that kind of thing.
00:20:51
Speaker
Um, but yeah, definitely. i mean, for me, the biggest piece was identity. So, um, throughout the year I really worked on this huge shift of identity away from being a lawyer because I had studied law at university. I had always thought that I would be a lawyer from quite a young age and, I had really been dedicated to this profession. I'd like written books about it. I'd really like carved out an identity within the profession for myself. And I had to do this sort big disentanglement of my sense of self from that particular
00:21:23
Speaker
path of work. and That was really difficult to do actually, but it did enable me to essentially leave the career and still have this sense of self intact. So it was really important work, I think, shifting your identity and values away from your career or who you are at work. Because we do become, i think, regardless of what profession you have, we do become our jobs. Because that's, meet somebody new, what is it? The first question is like, what do you do? And that becomes our definition of our role in society and so many judgments are made as a result of that.
00:21:59
Speaker
If I understand you correctly, then going through this type of process enables you to connect much more with you as the individual than you as the job title.
00:22:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. yeah think it's kind of like a ah finding of your own values and it really forces you to confront yourself as to what you actually care about.
00:22:21
Speaker
Right. That's was a really straightforward and simple sentence to say, but it's a really powerful one, isn't it? To actually find out what it is that is important to you, what your values are, is something that people can struggle with for many years. And ah get what you're saying about you have to strip away the, the things that aren't you, but are your role, the external things in order to be able to focus on identifying the internal things, which really define who you are.
00:22:58
Speaker
Yeah. what's What impact did having that monastic experience have on your post-experience career choices?
Career Transformation
00:23:11
Speaker
Were the career choices already made or did the monastic experience help you to make the decisions about what the future would be? I think it did it definitely did help me shape my future decisions. It's interesting, like I often think that the monastic experience really didn't take its full shape in my life until a few years after I actually finished the program because it was quite an intense, um intense experience. And it just took such a long time for it to really sink in as to what the impact of it was. And so I was seeing the effects of those kind of um shifts of priorities and realignment of your your values and things. It wasn't immediate. it wasn't like during the program, I suddenly decided, right, everything needs to change and everything's going to be different. It was more, it was more like um finding a different sense of self. And then from that perspective, then looking back at everything, like the other choices that I've made in my life and choosing differently in different ways. um So it was a few years afterwards that I decided to leave law and I actually, just went into self-employment. So now I do a number of different things. And again, that kind of diversity or variety of things, I think was hugely influenced by the work that I had done on figuring out what do I actually care about, what's important to me and how can I sort of design a career that really reflects the variety of things I care about. Yes.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah. It's, It's a very personal thing. I spoke to a lot of people have not been... Now, you see, you're making me think Eloise, and it's like, um it's the sort of thing that I'm thinking, like, I'd quite like to have experienced it in some way or another.
00:24:53
Speaker
But, you know? Yeah, you could. You could, for sure. I mean, there's all sorts of different programs, commitments that you can make or, you know, programs that you don't necessarily have to... give up any any practical things but you can sort of just add them in yeah how quickly did people notice a change in you or you said like the the monastic experience happened and then it was a couple of years before you really started to make the changes that that put you to where you are now did people see a change in you that as a result of the monastic experience that you had
00:25:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. um Yeah, I mean, i would have to ask people whether they noticed like a particular change around that time. i think um I think people were more shocked that I had done it, to be honest, than the changes that came out of it. Like, I think people were really surprised that i had made that made a choice like that to do the program in the first place. And then I would say it probably didn't change my Probably, yeah, probably the act of taking undertaking the program was the most shocking thing for people. And then after that, it kind of didn't really change my um my perception with other people. Although, yeah, I mean, i would have to ask people. Hopefully I became a bit more intentional and values orientated. But um it's it's sometimes hard to convey...
00:26:16
Speaker
that really deep work in, for example, like a friendship or a colleague, like a colleague relationship or, you know, something that you're just talking about other other topics and other things, because I think a lot of people don't really discuss like, you know, values, identity, you know, with with um sort of more lighthearted friendships. It's true, but I suspect it's also that not many people have actually gone through the process of working out what their own values are.
00:26:45
Speaker
we We absorb the values of the people around us. as And that becomes the norm, the status quo. Whether those fit comfortably with the way in which we want to live our lives as individuals is different to actually making a conscious decision to explore what our personal values are and how those might actually be used to frame a life, a career, um and fulfilling a fulfilling life, I suppose. Mm-hmm.
00:27:18
Speaker
It certainly is very interesting that somebody who was ah on the route to being a corporate lawyer in the City of London and everything was was planned towards achieving that to then change track and the route the route that you're now taking and the the way in which you've applied your values into that decision-making process is really interesting.
Engaging with Monastic Programs
00:27:43
Speaker
I've learnt a lot and I'm intrigued. So where could I find out more information about this programme? Yeah, this ah this particular programme you can find by searching the community of St Anselm, which is what the um community was called. and But you could also find many more programmes that's doing similar things or similar initiatives by searching new monastic programmes in whatever region you're in, in the UK. And you can find out more about monasticism by um searching up different types of um more established monastic communities like Franciscan or Benedictine or Ignatian.
00:28:17
Speaker
There's an awful lot of information. i must admit, when you first told me about it, I was thinking, well, this is really unusual. But when you then do the search of the number of opportunities that there are to do this sort of thing, you're not as special as I thought you were. Yeah, which I think is good. i mean, that's the most exciting thing about it. It's like it really is just something that people can, it should be something everyone does. Like at some point, it's just have a year where you think, you know, where you reflect on the things that really matter to you. It's really interesting. i do appreciate your time today, Eloise. It's been really interesting. and I hope people can look into these things in more details. But thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me.
00:28:54
Speaker
pleasure. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abucida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Eloise Skinner, who is an existential therapist. You can find out more about both of us at abucida.co.uk, and there's more information about the program that Eloise experienced in the description.
00:29:16
Speaker
If you're listening to the independent minds on your smartphone, you may like to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data. So listening on 3.0 means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
00:29:27
Speaker
There's a link in the description that will take you to more information about business and personal telecom solutions from 3.0 and the special offers available when you quote my referral code. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
00:29:44
Speaker
Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.