A little about me & a little about you
Let me ask you something, how are you spending your Sunday nights?
It’s Sunday night and you find yourself collapsed on the couch again, desperate for time to slow down, trying to avoid thinking about Monday. But you feel it — the stress, the dread — creeping in. How is it that you find yourself wondering how to overcome a mid career crisis? What exactly are midlife career symptoms?
You numb it with Netflix, Instagram, maybe a few Amazon purchases. Anything to avoid facing the fact that You no longer feel excited and energized by your work. In fact, you feel fatigued, even exhausted when you think about it. You probably feel some shame, thinking you shouldn’t have these feelings at this stage of your career.
Because, from the outside at least, you’ve made it. You’re successful by most outward measures. Also true: You can’t imagine living like this for another year.
You’ve come so far, achieved SO much — how can you leave? You tell yourself it’s too late to start over, but you’re also definitely not ready for retirement, even if that was a feasible solution.
The awful truth is that you, the one who always has a plan, have no idea what to do.
Hi, my name is Jeanette, and I help well-established professionals like you to get unstuck and back on track in a fulfilling career so you can actually enjoy your Sundays AND Mondays again.
If you’re here, you’re a Grade-A problem-solver, which means you’ve already tried to dig yourself out of this hole.
You’ve probably wondered if your problem is with this particular job in this particular organization and wish you could get some guidance from your boss or even HR. But that would mean admitting your disengagement which isn’t likely to end well…
You think about quietly updating your resume and looking for another job, but when it comes to describing your skills and accomplishments you have never felt more uncertain. You used to be confident and it never felt this hard.
You have wondered about burnout and researched the signs and solutions.
You may have reached out to a therapist to address anxiety and low-grade depression.
You’ve looked into early retirement, but either financially or mentally, you’re not ready for that yet.
Getting unstuck isn’t just about developing a new plan for your career and executing it.
It also involves understanding why you are stuck and how your brain is keeping you stuck.
When you feel stuck, stress increases and confidence erodes.
You feel tired.
Overwhelmed.
And you stop being able to see your situation, or yourself, or your potential clearly.
You’re in a fog and it’s nearly impossible to find your way out without help — because you’re just too close.
We'll focus on,
Cultivating a fresh look at who you are, what you want, and what you’re capable of. Having an outside perspective really helps with this.
Identifying realistic options and opportunities to make changes within your current job, or outside of it.
Actionable, tangible help with developing your career strategy and exploring your next steps with your LinkedIn profile, resume, networking skills, informational interviews, and support to make time to explore what’s out there.
Clearing the fog is simpler than you think
You just need a safe place and a guide to walk with you through the process. What is at the root of the problem for you? What factors have changed to transform your joy into dread? What is your bespoke recipe to flourish once again?
Let this next stage of your career be a cry of victory instead of a whimper of defeat.
It is entirely possible.
If you’re thinking “Well, I don’t feel ‘stuck’ exactly…” — that’s where I was too.
I never would have described myself as “STUCK” in my career, but I knew I was exhibiting symptoms of burnout and didn’t know a way out. I noticed I felt anxious any time I even thought about work. I also felt like I was working all of the time because I was so busy trying to get everything just right, to make everyone happy, even though that wasn’t ever going to be possible.
I didn’t hate my job, but I did hate feeling constant anxiety and dread.
So, I started to dig into what was really going on for me and I realized that I was missing a very important component to my work that had brought me great satisfaction in the past but that had slowly and soundlessly disappeared due to shifting organizational priorities.
That was a huge ah ha for me, but it wasn’t the whole story. I also needed to get back in the driver’s seat of my career. Gradually, given my propensity to want to make everyone happy, I had fallen into a pattern of looking to the validation of those around me rather than listening to my voice. It had happened so quietly, this fog seeping into the nooks and crannies of my outlook. And that’s what made it hard to fix because it had seeped and soaked up my normally optimistic outlook. But I was determined to clean-up the mess and get back to sitting in the drivers seat (with the top down, the wind in my hair, and the sun shining of course) and I did just that.
Today, I still face challenges in my career, but I don’t have that constant feeling of anxiety and dread when I think about my work. Yes, I am doing hard things that test my confidence, but I feel free. While I can get stuck on a particularly tough work problem, the difference is that I am not stuck in my career. I feel hopeful and excited, not only about my career, but what we can do together.
Fun Facts
In addition to successfully unsticking (is that a word?) my own career, I have achieved an International Coaching Federation (ICF) credential and have over 15 years of coaching experience.
I have a Masters in Organization Development and Change, and created and ran the Owning Your Career@Stanford program while working at Stanford University.
My initials are in exact alphabetical order (JKL) and sometimes people mistake my last name for my first name and call me Lindsay. Even more confusing, when I was born, my maternal grandfather declared that he really liked my middle name so he got the whole family to start calling me Kim. So, I guess you can call me Jeanette or Kimberly or Lindsay. But, I am trying to work on my people-pleasing tendencies, so really I would prefer that you use Jeanette.
Weird thing I love: Transportation systems, like the monorail shuttles in airports. I don’t really know why, but I think it might have to do with how clear their purpose is in getting us from point A to B with an interesting journey in between.