Larissa Hawkins

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with long hours. It is the exhaustion of performing a version of yourself that no longer fits. Larissa Hawkins knows it intimately. She lived it for years inside a high-flying legal career, surrounded by every marker of professional success and increasingly certain that success, as currently defined, was not the point.

Walking away from employment law was not a moment. It was a slow, private reckoning. The kind that happens in car parks after difficult calls, or at 6am when you are already dreading a day that has not yet started. 'The career looked right from the outside,' she says. 'But I had stopped recognising myself in it.'

What she built instead is GlassFrog: a career coaching and culture consultancy that takes the question most people are too frightened to say out loud, is this really it?, and treats it with the rigour and honesty it deserves.

'I had stopped recognising myself in it. That is not a small thing to admit when you have built an identity around being good at what you do.'

The business runs on two parallel tracks. The first is deeply personal: one-to-one coaching for individuals who feel stuck, burned out, or pulled towards something they cannot yet name. That might be a pivot into self-employment, a career change that feels reckless to everyone else, or simply the gnawing sense that what they are doing and who they are have drifted dangerously apart. Hawkins also works specifically with clients navigating ADHD, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, bringing a particular attentiveness to the way conventional career structures can grind against the grain of certain brilliant minds.

The second track faces outward, towards organisations. This is where Hawkins' legal background becomes quietly powerful. She understands how workplaces actually function, not the version in the employee handbook, but the unwritten rules, the cultures that calcify around poor leadership, the retention crises that could have been read years earlier if anyone had been paying attention. Her consultancy works with businesses on building cultures where people genuinely choose to stay. She also supports organisations through the pressure points that can shatter team cohesion: mergers, acquisitions, restructures, conflict.

Then there is the Career-Change Considerate Employer Badge, arguably GlassFrog's most distinctive idea. It is a scheme for forward-thinking businesses willing to publicly signal that they value people with non-linear histories. In a hiring culture still quietly suspicious of anyone who has changed direction, it is a provocation dressed as a credential.

Hawkins is doing something that sounds simple and turns out to be radical: she is arguing, with evidence and from experience, that the standard British relationship with work is broken. Not occasionally, not at the margins, but structurally. That too many people are spending too many years in roles that cost them more than they pay back. And that the organisations enabling this are paying for it, in turnover, in disengagement, in the quiet leaving that happens long before anyone hands in notice.

The irony is that she is saying all of this from the other side of a leap that terrified her. The former lawyer who spent years advising others on workplace matters eventually had to take her own case to heart.

GlassFrog works with individuals wherever they are in the country, and with organisations of every size navigating the complicated, human business of keeping good people. If you have ever sat in a meeting wondering how you got here, or if you lead a team and suspect the culture is telling people something you would rather it did not, Hawkins has likely already thought about your problem. Probably for longer than you have.