I was talking with my career coaching client, Damon, the other day and he brought up a great point. He shared with me that in his previous job he was always motivated by the fear of not making sales, opposed to the passion for making them. As he was trying to find career fulfillment, he decided this was not something he wanted to continue. Until we looked at it, he had never realized that his motivation came from that fear...

If you are an unemployed job seeker, your job search might be more difficult because you don’t already have a pre-existing schedule to help you establish a structure for your search. There are pros and cons to being an unemployed job seeker. You have more time than those who are employed, but you also have to create your own structure and schedule from scratch to ensure you’re effective in your job search. I recently spoke...

I was on a group coaching call a few weeks ago and my client Farah shared a great success story. Farah has decided that she wants to become a medical illustrator. As part of her research into this field and to learn more about it and whether it would be a fit for her, I suggested she try to find illustrators she could talk to for a few minutes to learn more. She didn’t have anyone in her network so she found an association...

Do you ever ask yourself, “Why is it so hard to figure out what career is best for me?” Sometimes it feels like you’re running on a hamster wheel, or moving through a dense cloud of fog with no clear destination in sight. You are not alone! I frequently work with highly educated, wonderfully successful clients who wrestle daily in the career decision-making fog. Interestingly, no matter how smart you are, and even how well...

I recently gave a speech at the GA Tech Alumni group. They are a wonderful group of people who are really committed to finding greater fulfillment in their careers. We talked about the analogy of painted versus stained wood that I normally use in my speeches. It’s about not letting your authenticity be painted over so to speak by a coat of paint, like paint over wood. Instead, imagine that you use stain instead to bring out...

I was talking to a friend the other day, and she told me about her brother who went on an interview at a daycare center in Kansas and they told him during the interview they don’t typically hire men. Oops! That’s not something that’s smart for an interviewer to say (and why were they interviewing him anyway?) It’s an awkward situation for the candidate. How would you handle this? A good solution could be to simply ask them...

A lot of potential career coaching clients will ask me, “Why do I need a career coach, can’t I figure this out on my own?” The truth is, usually they haven’t figured it out on their own, which is why they’re talking to me. What I tell them is this, “Yes many people can, and have figured out their career direction without the help of a career coach, which is great!” I’ll admit that I’m a little jealous of those people, becau...

I was talking to my career coaching client, Damon, this week and he asked a great question. I hear this often, so I wanted to share it with you. How do you know if your job is not a good fit for you, versus you just need to improve yourself and work on your skills? There’s no one size fits all answer. Although, it would it be very nice if there was! Here’s how you can start to understand the difference:Remember that there a...

I was working with my career coaching client, Sara, last week and we were talking about developing her career purpose and mission statement. Have you written one yet? If not, you need to! Doing this exercise will get you straight to the heart of what would be most fulfilling to you in a career. In our career workbook we have several exercises to help you get to this, and it takes some time and thought for our clients to fig...

I was working with my client Seth this week. He came to our career coaching call very excited with the progress he had made. I wanted to share this quick tip with you: Seth is a high performing individual. He sets high goals for himself and is constantly thinking of new ideas for his work at a custom software outsourcing firm in North Carolina. He would blast into his office in the morning excited to go to work, and at the...