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CAREER COACH
Developing Your Plan
One of the most important things a career coach can offer is clarity. I help my clients sift through all of their career options, manage the related stress and anxiety and hack out the path that best serves their immediate and long-term goals. And when I say “hack out a path” I’m referring to motivating my clients to wield that machete and put in the work. The most rewarding path forward in work and life is rarely the comfortable one and can involve immense challenge and uncertainty – slippery slopes, uneven terrain, massive obstacles and the occasional setback. I coach my clients to expect the discomfort that can accompany those first baby steps toward real change, and eventually embrace it. One of the many ways I minimize the discomfort involved in searching for work is by developing personalized career plans tailored to my client’s goals, skill sets and circumstances – including customized exercises and tools to instill positivity, build confidence, fight fear and manage stress throughout the job search, interviewing and salary negotiation processes.
I also instill accountability, providing concrete steps and tasks that over time expand the comfort level of my clients to include what they previously deemed anything but comfortable… like introducing yourself at that meet-up or event, delivering your elevator spiel on a moment’s notice, asking for a business card or proffering one, getting in touch with an old friend or colleague. Working closely with my clients, I build a trusting partnership, providing sage advice and objectivity that help guide and support them through the inevitable vulnerability and sense of exposure that accompany any major life transition.
Managing Your Stress & Anxiety
Looking for work is massively stressful – whether you’re currently employed or not. It can be even more anxiety provoking when you’re returning to work after a prolonged absence. Armed with the right information and some responsive coping mechanisms, my clients are poised to take on every phase in the career transition process, from upgrading their resumes and online presence, to the job search, social media presence, networking outreach, skill upgrades, interviewing techniques and negotiation strategies.
The career search can bring up so many tangled and conflicting feelings regarding self-worth, unmet potential and opportunities missed that we get sucked into a dark and powerful cyclone of rumination and regret, failing to see the calm and beauty beyond the storm and the path forward. We fail to acknowledge that the most dangerous and enduring part of that storm was the part raging in our head, darkening our outlook, and haunting our psyche and sense-of-self. I coach my clients out of the past that cannot be changed and into the light of right now – inciting action and a proactive mindset that will lead to a new, deeply desired outcome.
Resume Genius Difference
Most career coaches offer resume and cover letter suggestions. As a world-class copywriter and one of the premiere resume writers in the country, I create peerless resumes, LinkedIn profiles and cover letters from scratch. I work with my clients to navigate difficult situations including employment gaps, career changes, and issues related to part-time, volunteer or family-related employment. I know when to put your education on top and when to put it on bottom. I help you decide whether one or two pages best serves your immediate interests – and when you’re allowed more than two pages (very rarely btw). Leveraging my peerless copywriting skills, I get rid of boilerplate resume-speak and cut-and-paste looking bullets as I build the narrative that will not only open the door to your next interview, but literally make the difference between you getting paid near the lower or higher end of a company’s salary range for any given position. Most importantly, I put “you” back into your resume, ensuring all the unique character attributes, skill sets and qualifications that make you who you are resonate in your resume and LinkedIn profile.
Mastering Your Toughest Challenge
Perhaps your situation seems bleak: you’ve dreamt of leaving your workplace for far too long and you’re feeling stuck in a dead-end job, undervalued and underpaid. Maybe your situation is less bleak: you really like the company you work for and the people are great but the pay not so much. How do I ask for that raise? It could be that your salary is spot-on but the work you do has either lost its appeal or is boring the hell out of you. Maybe you’d like to find a more interesting and fulfilling career but aren’t sure you can afford the steep salary hit. Where can I go next? What if you’ve always wanted to do something else but never given yourself that opportunity, staying in a comfort zone that’s kept you locked in a career that has become many things – none of them you’d consider comfortable? How can I finally pursue my dream job? Maybe you love your job and the salary’s okay, but your boss or one of your coworkers is starting to make your life miserable. Is there anything I can do? Perhaps you work for a family business and you want to break free; perhaps you work for someone else’s family business and you feel you’ll never be adequately compensated or appreciated. What’s my next step?
Career decisions are incredibly challenging because unless we’re speaking of the ones we make when just entering the job market for the first time, they often affect a loved one and possibly a growing family. How do we balance our own job satisfaction and sense of fulfillment with our responsibilities as a co-provider or sole provider? An entrepreneurial venture can bring financial risk and even ruin – but it can also bring unbridled success and fulfillment, a change of career can result in a salary hit, a switch to a more commission-based job may result in dramatic swings and uncertainty. What if you pursue that graduate degree and all of a sudden decide you don’t want to do whatever it is you thought you did halfway through.
There are a number of legitimate fears that can make you feel tied to your current job or too cautious and insecure to even think about starting your side business or approaching your boss for that raise you know you deserve. And beyond those legitimate fears are dozens more irrational thoughts, doomsday prophecies, and general paranoia whipped up by economic forecasts or coworkers and well-meaning friends and relatives you may have confided in (and then regretted doing so).
I can also help you with the subtler situations like navigating office politics, prioritizing your workday, becoming more efficient, learning how to delegate your authority more effectively, determining the best way to handle inappropriate behavior or bullying, finding out how to get the most out of your team, deciding what to do if a coworker consistently undermines you, figuring out a way to balance your work and professional life, coping effectively with work-related stress so that you don’t bring so much home with you and establishing proper boundaries so your home life is not consumed by your job.
Real-Time Motivation & Accountability
Not only will I help you answer all the difficult, life-altering questions above while coaching you into that more rewarding, higher paying dream job, but I will help you develop the strategies and skills necessary to navigate and alleviate the tensions in your current job (the one you may be dying to get out of) – and by doing so, make you more qualified (and more resilient) for your next position. Jobs are another form of relationship and if we fail to tend to our shortcomings in our current one, we can’t help but bring that same luggage into our next opportunity. There will always be new things to learn, more skills to master and better methods to employ, and our many attributes and deficits will inevitably travel with us; I help my clients sharpen and market their attributes and winnow down their deficits into a handsome set of Tumi carry-ons they’d be proud to take anywhere.
Transformational Change
By developing custom-tailored career plans and combining them with responsive coping tools to combat stress, fear and anxiety, I motivate my clients to power through the deceptive “comfort” of remaining in their dead-end, underpaying or dissatisfying job and begin to move onto and eventually master the uncharted path toward discomfiting, transformational change. I keep in touch with my clients via text messaging throughout the coaching process, providing real-time motivation and accountability. By adopting the concrete steps, action plans and behavioral modification tools I provide, you will begin to experience incremental, measurable results that will gradually morph into the massive change necessary for you to successfully navigate your career transition.
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The 90-Minute Radical Action
The 90-Minute Radical Action is the perfect way to light a coaching fire under your ass and hit the ground running. It works equally effective in addressing a problem area or ramping up courage to take on a new challenge or opportunity. I usually reserve The Radical Action coaching plan for returning clients intent on a little brush-up to get the embers sparking and flames sizzling again, but it can serve a number of purposes.
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The Half-Day Deep Discovery
The Half-Day Deep Discovery is a three-hour intensive coaching session (and 1-hour follow-up call) designed to drill deep into one particular area or problem in need of critical attention. We will dig deep into the obstacles holding you back from a more fulfilling professional or personal life, and introduce tools specifically tailored to modify the way you think about your challenges and the way you speak to yourself. We will introduce little sticky habits that will lead to the more important life changing habits that produce real change over time. You will leave with a radically altered view of your capabilities, a set of tools that will disable the blocks that keep materializing and an effective method of dragging negative brain-speak into mental garbage bin on your cerebral desktop where it belongs.
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The 6-Month Total Transformation
From wherever you are, to wherever you want to be.
The 6-Month Total Transformation starts off with a 90-minute discovery and visualization session where we map out the areas in your professional and personal life in need of immediate and massive impact. That envisioning session will include the creation of immediate tools and techniques that will change your entire approach to how you view yourself, your challenges and your potential. The initial session will be followed by 10 biweekly hour-long coaching sessions where we hack our way through your most persistent obstacles, establish healthier habits and create new rituals and systems designed to promote real change, of the permanent variety. I will provide follow-up email support on a weekly basis to keep you on your path.
How will we achieve this “total transformation” of the permanent variety? To start with we’ll lean heavily on the latest developments in neuroplasticity, habit science and behavioral modification to be sure, but I will customize my approach to crush your most deeply rooted blocks and misperceptions, rewriting and recoding your habitual internal response to setbacks and challenges until the healthier, more resilient and determined you is back at the wheel, rather than being taken for a ride down that old familiar (and hideously comfortable) path. We will work together to create an effective plan of action, including specific goals and full accountability (I can be quite the taskmaster if necessary), enabling you to master whatever challenges you may have now and in the future.
My coaching objective is not like that endless therapy loop you may have experienced. The goal is for you to become so damn good at tackling your challenges and maximizing your quality of life that you just don’t need me anymore, but of course your referrals are always welcome. No offense to you of course, but I want you out of my office, off of my Zoom and out there kicking ass and taking names (and yeah, okay, handing out my business cards). All BS aside, your profound transformation isn’t just the juice that makes my job so damn rewarding, it’s also good for business. I’m in the transformation business and if you’re out there transformed you’re bringing me roughly three times the business you will while you remain my client. I’ve run the numbers. This is all to underline a hidden truism in my business model, the more I do for you, the faster I can get you out there kicking ass, the more you will eventually do for me. It’s one hell of a motivator, to be sure, but if I were all about raking in money I would have chosen another profession. I want you out there kicking ass for you, primarily, because honestly, despite the “hard data” that says you’ll bring me more business, helping you get over is what gives my life more meaning. It’s that simple.
Once addressing their most pressing issues, many clients choose to extend their coaching to either incorporate additional areas of their lives or help them gain traction on a new journey, but the focus will always be providing the most tangible, life-defining and lasting results in as little time as possible. I refuse to bullshit you with “change is so easy” blather, but there are ways of gamifying the most arduous elements of transformation, methods that appeal to your competitive nature. I use everything at my disposal and create a great deal of customized solutions that are specifically designed to propel you and you alone. Life is short; who wants to spend it stuck in the same old shit? “Bring me new shit to conquer…” I believe that’s from Macbeth, but don’t quote me on that, it could have been that Off-Off-Off Broadway production of MacShit I once took in, hard to be sure.
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