Career Coaching Backstory #1: How It All Began

“Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.” – William Throsby Bridges

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Dear Friends,

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Welcome to the new November blog series: Career Coaching Backstory.

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Over the years people have asked me, “How did you get into this?” And when they say “this” it could mean all kinds of things: Career Coaching, Entrepreneurship, Teaching or Writing. Sometimes, based on the person asking, the question is layered heavily with me reading between its lines, “How the hell did you leave Corporate America?”

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Each story has its initial seed. That tiny nugget that, falling into the right soil, begins to take root. And the longer it stays there, the more stable the foundation it creates.

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My background is purely Corporate America. As a Senior in High School, I was part of the DECA program, which allowed us seniors to leave campus early to go to our jobs. In exchange we took classes in business and competed with other local seniors. Some of us managed to make it to State and then National competition.

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Business has always been part of my DNA and during graduation year, I was already working 30 hours a week at Old Orchard Shopping Center, aka the Center of the Universe. When I attended college in DePaul, I took on a full class load AND a full workload, hopping on 6am trains to make it to downtown and back. Throughout my college career, instead of Spring Breaks in Florida, fraternity parties and trips to Europe, my life consisted of earning my B+ GPA and earning an income to live on.

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Work is what I knew. It’s what I did.

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Six years after graduating DePaul, and two Chicago company stints later, in late August 2001, when I started graduate school, at the University of Rochester Simon Business School, I had big dreams, big hopes and giant aspirations. I wanted to change the world.

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Then two weeks into the program, the unthinkable happened: 9/11. From just a few hours away the impact at Ground Zero hurricaned its way all over the world.

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On September 12, as the rest of the campus shut down, giving the opportunity for its students to grieve, bond and somehow makes sense of what occurred, we, the MBA students, we had to be in our seats that morning, assignments completed, quiz-ready. Why? Because, we were told, “Markets never rest.”

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Shortly after, the market crashed. Along with all those dreams, hopes and aspirations. The attack blew the lids off corrupted firms such as Enron and Worldcom. The tech bubble imploded. And all that extra cash pumped into circulation in 1999 in fear of Y2K lost its prestige. And value.

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And so here we were, several hundred hopeful MBAs, half international, trying to renavigate in a world at chaos. We did have each other and on each other we leaned, learning social phrases in different languages, sampling ethnic foods and dancing to diverse music. It was survival. Global style.

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In 2002, I took on several roles in the school, including Team Coach, helping the incoming class adjust to their new pressures, as a Management Communication T.A., working with students on their written and oral correspondence styles and, additionally, as a Writing Center Tutor, where I met with individuals and worked with them on their Resumes, Cover Letters and Mock Interviews, providing insight and feedback on how to make them strong and stand out in what still was a shitty job economy.

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Additionally, I took on the role of Head Writer and Photographer with WATS, The World According to Simon, the magazine of the school. There I wrote on everything from songs about money to the reality of women’s equality in the business arena, especially springing from a class that had only 22% of us. I loved writing for the magazine and then also contributing endless photographs to our class yearbook.

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And so, that is where it all began. Where the seed first planted itself in the Career Coaching platform. Fourteen years ago, in Rochester, NY, post-9/11.

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Major General Sir William Throsby Bridges was right.  Sometimes it is the external that drives our life’s deltas. Our job? To listen, to not resist and to be open to where it leads. And then leads, again.