Career insights and advice

Career Management, Leadership Development

Maximize Your Career in Your Current Organization

From a University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education webinar: Prospective clients sometimes ask me how I have the credibility to coach senior executives in industries I know nothing about. Challenging question, right? So I have a choice here: I can answer in a way that risks sounding defensive, talking about my experience and my degrees. I like to do something really unexpected instead. I like to talk about knots.

Career Management, Career Transition

How to Network When You’re Not Networking

From a University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education webinar: It can be useful to think of networking in terms of the classic journalistic Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, although I’m going to mix up the order and start with Why. Why do you need to even bother with this networking thing? We’re going to talk about something I call the “career lifecycle” – which sounds awful, doesn’t it? I think you’ll find it reassuring, actually.

Leadership Development

Stop being a pushover!

“I need to stop being such a pushover,” my coaching client said. I looked at the soft-spoken, whip-smart young woman in my office and sighed to myself. I think she’s crazy impressive, and I want her to see that in herself. “Tell me about a time you were a pushover,” I said. She described not […]

Career Management

Apples to oranges

Deciding between two job offers, each with lots of pros and cons, can be like comparing apples to oranges. Try plotting the different factors on a grid to help simplify the decision. Here’s an example that illustrates how to do this. A coaching client had a tough choice: two very, very different job offers and […]

Career Management

Write like a girl

“Write like a girl,” I told my career coaching client. My client, a scientist with several years of postdoctoral research experience, was applying for a faculty position at a prestigious university. We were working through drafts of her cover letter. The first draft of her letter was good: well written, well organized, coherent and clear. […]

Leadership Development, Miscellaneous

What’s your 202[x] word?

As 20[xx] comes to a close, have you decided on your Word of the Year for 20[xx]? Instead of a New Year’s resolution (which is generally a setup for failure), I like to ask my career coaching clients to think about a single word that will guide the upcoming year. My 2019 word was “relax.” […]

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