Thinking time

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Management

I looked at the hour blocked on my calendar with relief. “Thinking time,” the calendar event said. I left my phone and laptop in my office, and headed across Pioneer Square to my favorite coffee shop for a quiet, uninterrupted hour of, well, time to think. “When do you take the time to slow down and just think?” I asked an executive coaching client. She’s brilliant, scattered, running a million miles an hour. She looked at me like I was …

The squeaky wheel

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Management

“My daughter needs to ask her soccer coach for more playing time,” my friend said as we watched our girls at soccer practice. “She’ll never do it, though — it’s too scary.” I wish she would do it anyway. It’s good practice for her future career. For example: A coaching client was talking about the corporate equivalent of “playing time”: She didn’t get a promotion she felt she had earned. “I need to talk to my manager and understand what …

Corporate kryptonite

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Transition

Seemingly innocuous questions can be like kryptonite to a professional looking to transition into a new role or career. These are the landmine questions, the gotchas, the facile questions that cause you to stumble and lose confidence at events, happy hours, skip levels and networking coffees. I call them Dreadful Questions. Over the years as a career coach, I’ve collected six Dreadful Questions. I’ve written here about the First Dreadful; this column is about the Second Dreadful: “So, what kind of …

Greek soccer

Kathryn Crawford Saxer Career Transition

Sometimes my coaching clients tell me they are scared to reach out to their network as they navigate a career transition. I tell them I don’t care. I mean, I care that they’re afraid, and that fear doesn’t get to slow them down. And I tell them the story of my 12-year-old daughter’s Greek soccer game. I took my family to a small Greek island for a couple of weeks this summer. I was chatting with our lovely innkeeper (another word for networking, …