Category Archives: Coaching

Career Crossroads

July 16th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. How do you walk away from something you’ve spent your entire life preparing for? A beloved coaching client is a professional musician. He’s played since he was 3 years old, studied music in college, worked in orchestras his entire adult life. He has $80,000 worth of instruments in his music room. Several years ...

Interviews Are Not Therapy Sessions

July 9th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. I was at a party, half listening to a guy talk about an upcoming interview. “I’m just going to be myself,” he said confidently. “I’m going to show them the good and the bad.” He’s a newly minted lawyer with no work experience. He’s never had an interview for a professional role. I ...

Sleep as a Career Strategy

July 2nd 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. “I am so burned out,” my coaching client told me, her head in her hands. “I am so unmotivated. I’m really struggling to juggle my work and my family.” “Tell me about your sleep,” I answered. I recently read “Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams,” by Matthew Walker, Ph.D., ...

The Dirty Dishes

June 25th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. Sometimes a simple question can change your life. Or at least your dirty dishes. As a coach, I’m interested in how questions can reframe a problem. When I teach my clients how to coach others in their life — to ask those good questions — I often tell an allegorical story about my ...

Decision Fatigue

June 18th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. “I need to work on work/life balance,” said a coaching client, stretched thin between a big job and family commitments. “I am so overwhelmed.” “How many decisions do you make every day?” I asked her. She looked at me blankly, unable to begin to quantify an answer. “What if we strategize about how ...

Prepping for Cocktail Parties

June 11th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. Having a good story changes everything. I’ve been working with a lovely coaching client for a couple of months. She’s a senior professional working on a job search and, ancillarily, on confidence and presence. She’s been through the wringer this year, both personally and professionally, and was a little shaky when she first ...

Money and Ambition

June 4th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. “How ambitious are you?” I asked. That’s one of my favorite coaching topics. Talking about a client’s ambition exposes a potential Catch-22 of social expectation and censure. On the one hand, it can seem somehow unseemly (for women, particularly) to be ambitious. At the same time, there is all kinds of pressure to ...

Double Black Diamond

May 28th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. I often tell my coaching clients to stop thinking. “Thinking is all bad,” I say. “You’ll just think about why it won’t work.” This comes up with clients working on a career transition. Clients who are dreaming about doing something new. Maybe something risky. I often tell these clients a ski story that ...

The Salary Negotiation Game

May 21st 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. In my coaching practice, I see experienced, seasoned professionals fall apart when they negotiate their salary. It’s like they’re afraid of losing a game of poker. I try to make the negotiations less about playing a cutthroat game, and more about developing a business case. “Ack! I have a phone screen,” a new ...

Managing the Micromanager

May 14th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. “My CEO is micromanaging me,” a beloved client told me. She’s a vice president at a local start up. “He’s constantly in my business. I’ll wake up in the morning with half a dozen emails from him.” “What are you doing about it?” I asked her. “I tell him that he has to ...

Spiderwoman

May 7th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. Sometimes I feel like Spiderwoman when I walk in the city. Leaving work one afternoon, I saw a woman catch a heel on a curb and sprawl down the sidewalk. Spiderwoman ran to her, helped her up, brushed her off, picked up her cracked phone. We shared a shaky laugh. Spiderwoman didn’t want ...

There’s Always a Way

April 23rd 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. Our general contractor took my breath away. And not just because he’s adorable. We were trying to figure out how to fit a window seat under the eaves without removing too much of my house’s framing and upsetting the structural engineer and city inspectors. “There’s always a way,” he said. “Wait, what did ...

Memory Palacing

April 16th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. “How’s the ‘First Dreadful’ coming along?” I asked a beloved career-coaching client. He squirmed uncomfortably. The First Dreadful is one of five networking questions I work on with clients who are trying to make a career transition. The Dreadfuls are the questions you are, well, dreading: the basic questions you know you’re going to stumble ...

Networking in Middle School

April 2nd 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. “Try not to get shot at school today,” I tell my kids every morning as they get on the school bus. “We’ll try, Mom,” they say. They don’t roll their eyes. We’re whistling past the graveyard. That’s how I regulate the terror I feel every single morning when my children leave for school. ...

This Year’s Word

March 26th 2018

Read all of my Seattle Times columns. “I choose a single word every year,” a beloved coaching client told me. “Like a guiding principle for the year.” I looked at her in surprise. “I do that, too,” I said. (Apparently, lots of people do this.) “What’s your word this year?” “Connect,” she said. “I want to focus this year on connecting with ...