services

In our first meeting together, we need to get to know each other so that I can best support you.

The Foundation meeting grounds us both, by:

1. Allowing us to share how we prefer to work and tools to help us stay organized and communicate
2. Uncovering challenges that hold you back and strengths that help you make progress toward your goals
3. Establishing realistic goals that target education, work, personal, financial, lifestyle and geographic preferences
4. Gathering information about you that supports your resilience and/or transition. This might include:
   • Stories that feature your strengths, values, personality, interests and goals
   • Relevant past and present experiences
   • Formal assessments if desired (additional fee for cost recovery) including Strong Interest Inventory, Myers Briggs Type Inventory, MSCEIT and EQi, VIA Character Strengths
   • Grades and test scores

Sometimes clients know exactly where they want to target their application efforts be it for education or work transitions. In which case, we can skip this step and go right to engagement.

On the other end of the spectrum are clients who are at the beginning of their transition journey or uncertain of their next steps. They therefore need time and support to research their options.

The main goal of Exploration is to build a long list of education or work options, clarifying for each option:

1. Degree of competitiveness
2. Eligibility to apply given existing grades, scores, courses, related experience
3. Application timing, process and requirements
4. Networking considerations

Engagement is all about applied skill building in relation to building resilience, presenting in writing, and presenting in person.

Building Resilience

The journey to your education or work goals is more like a marathon than a sprint – a marathon that can continue over many weeks until you reach the desired endpoint.

If you’ve been forever putting off your education and work goals, you can benefit from a pre-course to build self discipline and self confidence. To build optimism,  manage the many tasks along the way and maintain your focus despite setbacks, we engage in three categories of resilience building:

1. Mindset training. Mindset training is about identifying the mental blocks that keep you stuck. Learn techniques to build a positive mindset and mental toughness.

2. Strengths work. Exploring and owning your strengths – from your signature  character strengths to natural personality traits, interests and values – builds self awareness, self esteem and self efficacy. Your confidence in these self attributes moves you to focused action and allows you to engage more authentically with others.

3. Relationship, mission & meaning. The exploration of relationship, mission and meaning early in life sets the stage for realizing our full potential throughout our lifetime. Most of life’s challenges have a relationship component. Having a purpose in life gets us over the humps. Doing work that has personal meaning to us energizes us.

Presenting in Writing

As a general rule, applications for education or work require some form of written submission. To achieve a quality submission, we engage in three important skill-building tasks: 

1. Review/critique your draft documents related to your specific transition.
2. Work together to strengthen your writing, focusing on audience, purpose, structure and relevant details.
3. Enhance format and layout; correct for grammar.

Depending on whether clients are making an education or work transition, examples of documents include:

Presenting in Person

Some applications for education and most applications for work require an in-person interview and/or presentation component. Advanced preparation and rehearsal help you focus your “pitch”, cultivate relationships with your audience and manage inevitable performance anxiety.

The process of preparation and rehearsal with me typically includes:

1. Clarifying your audience of your upcoming in-person event – i.e.,  1-1 or group interview, presentation, networking event
2. Clarifying the anticipated style of inquiry/interaction of your event – i.e., formal or informal, single meeting or full day, backgrounds of people you’ll interact with
3. Review resources to prepare and rehearse
4. Engage in practice interview(s), presentation(s) or networking scenario(s) to identify strengths and weaknesses
5. Conduct focused self assessment
6. Receive focused evaluation, insight on mannerisms, and corrective strategies