The Lawyer Who Left the Brief Behind

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with how many hours you have worked. It is the exhaustion of being very good at something that doesn't quite fit. Larissa Hawkins knows this feeling intimately. She lived inside it for years, wearing it like a well-tailored suit that was half a size wrong.

The CV is, by any measure, extraordinary. She completed the equivalent of a three-year law degree in under a year. She became the first in her family to qualify as a lawyer. By 29, she was Employment Counsel at a global telecoms company, operating well beyond the seniority most lawyers her age could have hoped for. She had, in the conventional sense, made it.

And then she left.

'I realised I didn't just want one career label for the rest of my life,' as she puts it, with a candour that is entirely characteristic. What followed was a period of deliberate reinvention: travelling the world, qualifying as a coach, and sitting with a question that most high-achievers avoid entirely. Not *what am I good at?* But *what do I actually want?*

The answer became GlassFrog.

'It's not about us. It's never been about us. We are changing cultures, helping people change their lives, being real with each other. That's huge. It's a privilege to be a part of someone's story like that.'

GlassFrog operates across two genuinely distinct territories, and Larissa's particular background is what makes the combination coherent rather than opportunistic. For individuals, she offers one-to-one career coaching for people navigating career change, burnout, the pull towards self-employment, or the kind of low-grade misalignment that is hard to name but impossible to ignore. She also works with clients managing ADHD, whether diagnosed or not, bringing an informed, grounded approach to what is often an invisible layer beneath someone's professional frustrations.

For organisations, GlassFrog offers workplace culture consultancy that goes significantly further than a staff survey and a values poster in the kitchen. Larissa works with businesses on the real mechanics of retention and belonging: what makes people stay, what makes them leave, and what kind of culture a company is actually building versus the one it thinks it is building. She supports organisations through transitions too, including mergers, acquisitions and the cultural collisions those events tend to produce.

Her legal background is not window dressing here. As an employment lawyer, she spent years working with large organisations on secondment, watching the recruitment process from the inside, seeing how hiring decisions get made, and being called in when cultures had already fractured. She has been the person brought in to fix things after they have gone wrong. Now she would rather help you not get there.

There is also the Career-Change Considerate Employer Badge, a scheme Larissa created for forward-thinking organisations that genuinely want to attract candidates with broader, more varied life experience, and want a way to say so clearly. It is a small idea with an elegant logic: if you are open to career-changers, signal it.

What clients describe, again and again, is a coaching style that is warm without being woolly, rigorous without being cold. 'Warm, empathetic, but action-oriented,' one client wrote. 'Puts you at ease from the word go.' Another described simply feeling 'more empowered in my own skills and strengths.' These are not small things. They are, arguably, the whole point.

Larissa has spoken about her own experience of burnout, about the moment she appeared on MasterChef UK, about the fact that she is not the kind of coach who has lived a frictionless life and is now dispensing wisdom from a distance. The winding road is the credential. The stumbles are the syllabus.

The name GlassFrog, incidentally, is worth a moment. A glass frog is a creature that lets you see straight through it. No opacity. No performance. Just transparency. For a business built entirely on honest conversations about who you are and what you want from your working life, it is the right name.

Coaching packages and culture consultancy details are all at weareglassfrog.com, with individual coaching at weareglassfrog.com/career-coaching-for-individuals and organisational services at weareglassfrog.com/culture-consultancy. Find GlassFrog on LinkedIn and Instagram at @weareglassfrog.