Dive into the archives.
- DayTrading & Managing Our Own Minds
Increasingly, clients have described their turn to trading in volatile and uncertain markets, as their corporate incomes have vanished and their assessments of possible return to their former workforce positions have darkened. Day trading. Paradoxically, they have embraced uncertainty as their former sense of loyalty to firm and task has been disappointed. Their “security”, they [...]
- Career Anxieties
This is how she remembered what her husband had said: ” Your preoccupation with work is destroying this family. We can’t take how wretched you’ve become.” And as she told it, she’d successfully kept her underlying depression at bay for years. But 18 months of unemployment— which were the busiest months of her life as [...]
- A New Transition: Rethinking Career
“It is exhausting?” (Yes it is) “Is it necessary?” (Yes it is) “I’ve never worked harder in my life” (Probably true) “Is there a “There” there?” (Barring unforeseen circumstances, of course…) Questions and answers between clients and psychologist: reporting back on the work necessary to create the successful transition between “what was” before unemployment, underemployment, [...]
- Becoming a (Professional) Executive Life Coach
Perception is everything. And sometimes, it takes a bit of questioning for our own perceptions to align with others’. Recently, a client informed me that I was an Executive Life Coach. She of course, was the executive. And it was her life that I was coaching. She recognized too, that while she might otherwise call [...]
- Case Study: Uncertainty and the Questionable Productivity of Certainty
Certainty is a momentary phenomenon of rootedness in the passing of time. The certain is the unchangeable, the fact of the present as it recedes into history. Beyond the unchangeable, looking forward, is the highly probable. Given what we know in the present, what do we see coming next? With slightly more uncertainty, we enter [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Entrepreneurship is Making Use of Reciprocity
A question from a client who’d worked in the non-profit sector throughout her professional life got me to thinking. She was adamant that entrepreneurship meant exploitation. And committed to community building, she was concerned that personal gain meant diminution of the common good. On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: The Stories We Tell Ourselves as Others Hear Them
Here is a simple exercise: take a room of mature, urban professionals– highly educated & highly skilled. Ask each to reflect on a personal vignette, mirroring their sense of accomplishment and pride. Then contrast what capabilities they think are reflected in their own stories with the capabilities that others actually hear in their stories: the [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Security and Temporary Organization
I woke up in the middle of the night with a singular dream image in my thoughts: it was an egg carton. Thinking about it, I started to chuckle. I recalled it exactly. It had been about 40 years ago— and the first time I’d travelled outside the United States. I had been investigating the [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: The Midlife “NO!”
The first hurdle facing consideration of independent employment for the midlife professional is internal. Its that assertive inner voice that says, “Hey—I’m 45, 50, 55, 60 years old. If I were a risk-taking entrepreneur, I would have been doing it years ago. I wouldn’t have worked the way I’ve worked, throughout my work life.” The [...]
- Millennial Mash-Up and William James
All the honor to you! To you, millennials, beginning or continuing college this year, toiling in late middle school, rebelling in high School under the harsh rod of Algebra 3…… All the Honor to you! I’ve just shown an antique to one of you: a prized, early album of Dave Von Ronk, alluded to on [...]
