The Career Narratives Blog

If you’re reading this, then I’m assuming that you don’t have a lot of time. So I’ll try to be relatively brief, which isn’t always easy for me. You've probably been reading my blog posts, after all.

Like you. Like everyone. I often find that it’s difficult to keep my long-term projects on track an...

If you’ve ever been involved in recruiting for your company, you’ve probably run into this problem. You get to the end of a long day or week of interviews, and all of the people you’ve met start to blend together. Then a colleague mentions the name of someone you both interviewed and all you can com...

I’ve explained how my Zoom setup has evolved, from reasonably good to what I — and many of the people I Zoom with — consider to be pretty great. 

The motivation for my current (or let’s call it my ultimate) Zoom setup was to find a better way to approximate eye contact with the person on the other ...

Do you ever feel like you aren’t connecting with someone on Zoom? And do you feel completely worn out after just a few Zoom meetings? Or even one?

As a coach whose practice has transformed from primarily in-person sessions to almost entirely virtual, I’m on Zoom for hours at a time. And while the t...

When you think about having a personal mission, is it focused primarily on your own achievement and success? Is it focused on your ability to be a supportive and contributing member of your family? Or is the focus more on the specific contributions you make at work and their impact on other people a...

I've written about what not to do when it comes to executive recruiters, including reaching out to them directly.

And I've stressed the importance of getting to know individual people and not just firms when you want to tap into the influence of executive search to help build your career. 

So that...

I need to start reaching out to executive search firms.

As an executive and career coach who once worked at a top 20 executive search firm, I hear some version of this statement almost every week. I used to think the same thing ​​when I was building a career in Fortune 500 companies. I thought I ne...

You might think you need to find the perfect job right now to have a successful career. 

That’s an awful lot of pressure. And you don’t.

Still, it’s the kind of pressure many of the people I coach impose upon themselves. Most are achievement-oriented MBAs and professionals, so anything less than a...

One of the toughest challenges I face with the people I coach is convincing them to focus their positioning in the market, even just a little. When I talk about positioning, I’m referring to a phrase or sentence you might use to describe what you do, who you do it for, and what the benefit of that w...

When you think about being mission-driven, you may imagine ‘making the world a better place’ or ‘helping people’ by working for a non-profit. That’s an idea that many of the people I coach have when I first meet them.

The truth is, you don’t have to work at a non-profit to be mission-driven. You ca...