Success Story: Coaching Turns Career Impasse into Fruitful Job Search

The impact comes from positive psychology, the science behind living a more fulfilling life. It’s the key ingredient in our 6-step coaching process that helped Maureen move forward in her career. Positive psychology focuses on harnessing the power of one's strengths, and challenging negative self-limiting thinking, to keep you moving forward toward a goal.

Maureen was a smart, motivated, and mature 24 year old who landed a dream job, right out of college, as an event coordinator at a well known nonprofit. Two years later, feeling stuck and needing to move on, she lacked direction and confidence. Maureen had difficulty considering her career options because of a negative belief she had developed that she wasn’t good at certain aspects of her job. We wondered if this was really true, or had something caused her to believe this. We learned that a year into her job, Maureen lost her mentor. She continued to organize and coordinate large scale volunteer events, but without supervision or real guidance. Because she did such a good job, she was given more and more responsibility. Although she was outwardly successful, she felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the job, and lost confidence. We helped Maureen to see that she may actually be very competent at this job, but was currently in a situation where her responsibilities outweighed her training. Maureen became hopeful that she could have a successful career in nonprofit event management if she could change her situation.

Through our process, we helped Maureen shift her thinking about her abilities so she could see her strengths and the very real marketable skills she had developed. Maureen realized that she wanted to continue in the nonprofit sector because it was meaningful to her, that she had a very high skill set for someone of her age and experience level, but she clearly needed a mentor to keep learning and growing in a professional capacity. Finding a strong, supportive mentor became a top priority in Maureen’s job search, above and beyond the organization or job description. With the sharpening of her focus, she found exactly the right job in a very short period of time. And, two years later, she is still working successfully and growing in that job.

The way we think about our experience, abilities and potential matters more than most people believe. Negative thinking is the number one thing that holds us back and is often times reflected in the jobs we seek, on our resumes and even during interviews. We help individuals like Maureen shift their self-limiting thinking and identify and highlight their strongest abilities and skills so that they can begin to move forward in meaningful ways.