The Career Studio: Blog
Ideas
Get back up and try again
It's February. How are those New Year's Resolutions coming?
If you're like most people, you've already given up on those resolutions. 23% of people give up after a week. And over 80% of people aren't able to stick to their goals longterm.
And I get it. Doing something new is hard.
Your behavior has to change. And this requires your brain to think it new ways. Which it really hates doing.
This means the whole process of creating a new habit can feel unpleasant and difficult.
And th…
One step at a time
I didn’t set about to become an entrepreneur.
I became one.
One step at a time.
I felt a call to leave advertising, so I did.
The next step wasn’t perfect.
I actually took a lot of steps here that weren’t great fits
But I had left advertising and I was learning about myself.
I discovered and got excited about coaching, so I went got certified.
I had no idea how it would weave into my career and life.
I took 3 years to figure out what kind of coach I wanted to be.
Training te…
How to trust yourself
It’s normal to tell yourself: I don’t know who I am or what I want. I feel so confused and lost.
Confusion, while uncomfortable, ends up being a comfortable place to live.
Our brain likes familiarity so it’s ok with confusion.
It means you stay where you are.
It means you don’t have to take action and try things you haven’t done before.
I like to shake this up for my clients by asking them:
If time and resources weren’t a concern and you knew you’d be successful, what would you …
Are you competing in the wrong events?
I found my MBA pretty difficult.
What took many of my classmates minutes to get would take me hours of reviewing to learn. I went to all the office hours to feel comfortable with the material.
It was hard being in an environment where everyone seemed to understand and apply the teachings faster than me.
I felt pretty down on myself most of the year.
I burned out and had to take the summer off instead of interning.
Towards the end of the program, I took a design-thinking class where…
Championing the crooked path
Last week I attended a talk with British Robinson, CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy and general all-around legend and visionary leader.
She described her career as a “crooked path.”
This caught my attention.
So often we worry about the narrative of our career.
We want a straight, linear path, all tied up in a beautiful bow.
We think we’ve done it wrong if our path has twists and turns.
We think there’s a right next step, a wrong next step, and we spend lots of t…
The new formula for success
The tried and tested formulas for ’success’ in life have competition.
You no longer have to climb the corporate ladder.
You no longer have to appeal to the masses.
You no longer have to live in a major global city.
Instead, today there are infinite ways to design your career and life.
You can create fulfillment using whatever definition of fulfillment you’d like.
And while this opportunity is exciting, infinite choice can feel overwhelming.
It can be hard to know where to star…
A 15 minute conversation about people pleasing
Kat Arapis, master life and business coach, sat down with me to discuss people-pleasing and how it gets in the way of building a career, business, and life you love. We discuss how to identify if you have this tendency and a few tips and tricks to manage it to keep on a path best aligned to your success and fulfillment.
It's short and fun and hopefully, useful.
Stop slamming the door in your own face
Negativity can be a comfortable place to live.
We tend to assume new things will be hard and come up with a load of reasons to validate this assumption. Even if the familiar is mediocre at best.
When it comes to our career it’s thoughts like:
It’s too much work.
I’m too old.
I don’t have the right experience.
It’s really hard to be successful.
You can’t make any money doing that.
So we don’t take action and we stick with our status quo.
Because while these thoughts aren’t comf…
Love yourself to a career you love
Warning! This post is super ‘woo’.
Everything in my career changed when I started loving myself.
Yikes, such a freaking platitude. I know.
Let me make it more tangible.
I used to wish I was more quantitative and strategic. I used to wish I thrived in high-pressure, fast-paced environments. These are not strengths of mine. But boy did I try to fit myself into that mold.
I did a competitive MBA and spent 6 months trying to be a management consultant. I burned out during this process.
I tried…
Lessons from getting fired
I got fired once. And while at the time I was super embarrassed about it, today I call it one of the best things that has happened to me.
Here’s why.
After my MBA I found my way into tech - it seemed like the ‘right' next step and I’d get some experience that looked good on my resume.
It turned out I don’t really care about tech and generally didn’t enjoy it, but regardless I continued to stay in the space and ultimately found myself running marketing for a seed stage hardware start-u…