The People Who Say They Can Save Your Career

with the rest of your life. This came up because you and I, as we do, we're chatting about our own work anxieties, and the things that bother us about our jobs are just kind of nagg at us about

where you want to be in our lives down the road. Yeah, I was telling you about how I feel kind of stretched then, Like I do this show, which I like, and I'm a reporter, which I like, and I've done video stuff, and I've done just so many different things that I don't know that I've ever really concentrated on one thing to get really good at it. I think a lot of people have that feeling of doing a bunch of different things that aren't necessarily the one job

that they got hired for. And I have kind of a related but different issue, which is as astute listeners may have noticed the name at the end of our creditist change, the person who is ahead of podcasts here at Bloomberg is me. So it's cool that I got this great opportunity and am in a role where I've expanded my job, but it means that more of my job now is about managing and things like doing this

podcast asked, which I also really like. Um, it's a little bit at odds with it, Like I want to keep making things because that's how I got here, but it's harder because management is a job in itself. Yeah. I think that's not an uncommon thing that I've heard from people who shift into management that usually you are qualified for management because you got really good at the job you were doing, and then they're like, okay, we'll

put you in charge. And often that means you're no longer doing the job you want to do, and you're doing a completely different job than you were doing before. Yeah, totally different set of skills and one that I want to continue to grow and get better. At but as with you, it's just sort of like raises these big questions. What am I best at, what should I be doing,

how do I divide my time? Etcetera, etcetera. So I was talking about my anxieties with a friend and she suggested a career coach, which is something I've never taken seriously. But the coaching industry is this huge industry that exists. It's expo it. Over the last ten years, there's an International Coach Federation and membership has more than tripled in that time. And this is like a body that like

certifies people to do this job. Yeah, I know, I've heard of career coaches, and I can remember one person ever telling me that they saw a career coach um when they were trying to figure out the next step in their career. But yeah, it isn't It isn't something that I would have previously signed up for myself. Yeah, it does feel a little bit mushy. I've covered executive coaches, which are like career coaches but for bosses and founders and leaders, and they're kind of like therapists but for

your jobs. The one who comes to mind is this guy Jerry Kelowna. He's kind of famous in the startup world, and he was on the podcast Startup and he met with the founders of Gimlet, which is a podcast company, and they play a part of their session in the episode, and it sounds like therapy. They're talking about his parents and how he was raised and you know, resentments from childhood and it gets really emotional and somehow this is supposed to help the founder, you know, be better at

delegating tasks at work. So that's kind of my associations with coaching. But maybe you know, what they say about therapy is that like everybody could use a therapist, even if you're not actively having a lot of problems in your life, like there's probably something you could work through. So maybe career coaching is the same thing. Like even if your career is going pretty all right, maybe you

could use a career coach. Definitely. But the difference is that therapists are trained and certified, and a lot of coaching isn't regulated, Like there is that federation, but you don't have to have a certificate. I think some universities teach coaching now, but like the credibility is still fuzzy. You don't necessarily know what the bona fides are of the person that you're talking to. And even if they, like, you know, even if they are certified as a career coach, like,

what does that even mean. It's still such a nascent industry that there probably aren't really enough safeguards to know. It's like, you don't know exactly what somebody has learned that gotten that certification, and you're spending money on this. It can cost anywhere from like a hundred dollars a session to hundreds of dollars a session, so you could be throwing money away. How do you know when you're done? How many sessions do you have? Just all very mark.

On the other hand, I think there's a sense that there are certain issues that nobody else in your life is really able to help you cope with. Like you know, chatting to your friends inventing about your career is is nice for letting us steam, but they can't necessarily give you answers that are right for you. And you know your actual therapist is going to help you with the mom and dad's stuff, um, but they don't know what

your industry is about. So the idea of somebody who gets what you do, who knows generally about getting jobs and changing jobs and thinks about this stuff all the time. The idea of talking to somebody like that in a really focused way actually does kind of appeal to me. Yeah, I find the whole thing incredibly enticing despite all my skepticism, Like I really do you want this person in your life?

You want? We all want guidance, or at least I do. Um. So the only way for us to really figure out if this career coaching thing is worth it was to check it out for ourselves. So you and I did a little research and got a recommendation for a career coach. Her name is Vicky Solemmy. She charges a hundred fifty dollars a session, and a few weeks ago we each went to see her to hash out our career agst.

On a Wednesday morning a few weeks ago, I went up to the fourth floor of a giant midtown Manhattan office building and into an empty conference room to meet with my career coach. Hi, I'm Vicky so Emmy. I'm a career expert with Monster and a career coach and a former corporate recruiter. Nice meeting, Rebecca, We're going to just dig in because at the end of the session,

I want you to feel empowered. I want you to feel like you have action items, and that you feel like there's a shift in um your perception in terms of what you wanted to talk to me about. That pitch. It didn't make me any less skeptical than I already was. She was throwing around a lot of jargon where it's like empowerment and action items. She was sounding a lot

like a motivational medium post. Before we met, Vicky had me send her an email about what I'd hoped to get out of our session and why I wanted to see her. That was the first thing she asked me about. She wanted me to tell her again why I was there right now. Feel like I am a reporter and I write, and I do the show, and I like doing all those things, but it's actually really hard to do any of them very well. That was the problem I came in with, and she and I talked about

that for a while. Actually mostly I talked while she typed everything I said into her laptop. I gave her an entire history of my working life, from my first job to how I got to Bloomberg. I told her I went from being a blogger to a reporter to hosting a podcast, and then I talked about my frustrations from small things that happened last week, like being annoyed

a story went up later than I wanted. I just wrote a story that went up yesterday that was like kind of a big story for me, and I definitely could have gone up should have gone up last week for like the news cycle it'sbout Harvey went Stey and stuff. Part of me is like I should have been on this sooner, but it ended up being fun to bigger picture of things like how I want our show to be bigger and more successful. It's not as successful as

we wanted to be, as I wanted to be. Every once in a while she would chime in with a question, so what do you like most about it about doing the podcast? Writing and reporting? What would you enjoy? Do you thrive on the adrenaline now or no? Because you're still methodical? Are you like that in your personal life too? Ors on the work? Were you the type of person in college I could like study the night before final and that's when you worked best? Do you get bored

basically I was venting. It felt good, but venting isn't something I usually have to pay for. How is this helping? Then, after thirty minutes of talking, instead of asking me another question, she told me her way of seeing things. I think you're putting self in post pressure on yourself, but you don't need to, and it'll be really liberating for you just to like let it go. Um. But the question is like, how do we do that? And it's one session.

When she said that, and I know that I'm going to start sounding like a cheesy self help blog post, it was an aha moment. My problem isn't that I wear too many hats or I'm stretched thin, or whatever other cliche. My problem is much deeper than that. Coaching is kind of like therapy. By talking about one problem, you can discover a deeper problem and then hopefully make progress. But then it was like, okay, how do we solve this? In forty five minutes, Vicky had some ideas. I think more,

you can just liberate yourself from your own change. I don't want say change, but like your own expectations. Like it's great you have high expectations for yourself. That's incredible. But I think it'll be easier for you even as you progress in your career, to we'll look at your resume in a minute to go over your accomplishment and unlike a therapist, she did give me some as she'd

call them, action items to reach my goals. She told me to find a mentor, to write down my accomplishments in a Google duc and to reframe the way I think about productivity. Let's define productivity for you, because productivity for you is probably a published story, but productivity can also be that downtime to just take a breath and be like, I don't have any stories today, Like we need to just I think reposition what that dead time is to you, and maybe it's no longer called dead time.

After that, we went over my resume and that was it. I left feeling like we had to accomplish something. Vicky have given me at least four actual things I could do in my daily life, but a couple of them, like having a mantra, we're on the cheesy side, and I wasn't sure i'd actually do them. One session is probably enough for me. When it was my turn to meet with Vicky, I started out by giving her a rundown of my career background. Then I told her I

had recently been promoted. I said that with every step up the ladder I took, I was doing more meetings and emails and planning and less actual making things. She asked how I felt about being a manager. Do you like managing overall? Do you like managing a team? Lighting the budgets? And you can be honest, there's a lot of things about it I don't like, like like the

stuff you do. I mean the having to make decisions about things I don't really care about that much, things like contract details and planning out what to say in a meeting with an executive. And I talked about hating feeling like I'm constantly trying to solve a million little

problems and not succeeding. That stuff makes me feel really overwhelmed, like, you know, just like my inbox and the fact that people are waiting on me for answers to things and I don't have them or I have forgotten about them, Like that stuff really weighs on me. She gave me her concise diagnosis. The further you go up, the more

removed you're going to be from the creative aspects. Right, and that's the conundrum, right, because you love it and you could tell just you get excited when you're talking about it. She gave me some simple tips for managing my time, like putting time on the calendar just to work on the podcast and finding shortcuts for working on other things. All of it was meant to create time

to focus more on the creative side of things. At this point, she made a casual mention of going out on my own and starting some kind of venture somewhere down the line. But there are other opportunities, I think within the podcast world where you can eventually, Let's say we have this conversation a few years from now and you're like, hey, biggy, I am producing and hosting my own podcast, and I can do from home and write, and I'm working three days a week. And guess what.

Just crazy? Yeah, full time podcasting, three day work weeks. Yeah, that sounds amazing. But this was going off the rails. I wasn't going to quit my job to become a part time podcaster who works from home for all kinds of reasons. So we were just indulging a fantasy. Then we got back to talking some more about concrete waste to clear space on my calendar, how I could go to fewer meetings, delegate more responsibilities, and even develop an

f a Q sheet. If you're getting the same questions or smart questions it's like Francesco's faques and then just emailed to them, or if you have an Internet fight that you can put it there. Then we were about ready to get to the practical part. Vicky was looking at her laptop, preparing to discuss everything on my resume point by point, but she made the mistake of giving me one more chance to talk. So do you feel like you have a sense of an action plan? Well? Questions?

I wanted to ask you because you we only touched on it really briefly, but you you know, you mentioned this like going independent thing, which sounds like a total

fantasy to me. And I wonder if, like with your other clients or people you've talked to who have who who aren't just like you know, single and free to do, free to take whatever career risks they want, Like how do people Because for me, I feel like I would always be in a holding pattern because I'm like, well, I can't give up you know, health insurance for my family and my son I can't give up like, you know, a fairly you know, at least a comfortable salary, Like

I can't give up these things. But I might want to go independent, but that might mean taking a pay cut working the way back up, and I feel like I end up in a sort of feedback loop. And I wonder how people get out of that, Like what do people do to like take the plunge or make the decision like that I can do this responsibly. I want to stop here first can. She gave me a bunch of perfectly serviceable tips about how to build a side hustle, what types of freelance work was available, and

how to get it. But again we've gotten off track. This wasn't really what we should be talking about, or even really what I wanted. I wanted to stay in a secure job with health insurance, work in an office with other people, do more of the things I like and fewer of the things I didn't. But there was something so appealing about that fantasy of freelance life that I ended up talking to her about it for another

fifteen minutes. Finally, fifty minutes into an hour long session, we started talking about my resume and that last ten minutes turned out to be one of the most useful parts of the meeting, because she showed me how I was downplaying some big accomplishments like founding a section of Bloomberg's website and how to restate them even though I wasn't looking for a job. Updating my resume boosted my confidence. Ironically, it made me feel happier about where I am now.

I just wish we'd spent more time on that and less time on my freelance pipe dreams. So now we've had a little time to let our sessions sink in. Uh, and I'm wondering what we think about career coaching and how helpful it is now. Becca, you were saying, um when you talked about your session, that you did find some of her tips helpful, and you came away from it kind of with a more positive feeling. What's your take now? So there were two specific things that I

thought were very helpful. First of all, she at the end of the session went through my resume, and then after the session sent back some edits which I found really helpful. Like she told me to take out any word that was like help contribute to or like help edit. She was like, you can just say you edit, you contribute to you can explain that you're part of a team later. But on a resume, you don't have to

kind of cut off your knees. That's cut off your feet. Um, you don't have to cut off anybod don't cut off anybody parts for your resume. Um. And then she also said to quantify things. So if I sat on my resume, I write for Bloomberg, she was like, how often, how many stories a week? How much time does it take you to edit the show? Things like that to show how much work is actually going in to the work

you do. So I found that really helpful. Um. And the other thing that she said was that I need to be better at redefining productivity and my being better with downtime. Um. So one thing I have been doing is trying to at the end of yoga classes day for five extra breaths just to get more comfortable sitting, which is actually incredibly painful. Well, paint aside, it sounds like you actually took something away from it, But I guess the real test is would you recommend career coaching

to other people? I think yes? What about you? What did you take away from the session and would you recommend it? So I'm with you. I really appreciated the part where we kind of got down to it and talked about my resume we could tweak. And what was helpful to me about that wasn't so much that I'm trying to shop around my resume. In fact, like I had to update my resume at the very last moment right before our session because I hadn't looked at it

in so long. But I really liked what she said about just keeping a running list of your accomplishments, and the best place to keep them may as well be your resume, because not only are you going to forget some of these details later when you need to know them, but it helps you do your job better. I think, to be aware that you're you're in the place that

you belong. You're in the place that you are because you belong there and you've earned it, and to kind of just have a little confidence boost whenever you needed. She said something about reading it over on a bad day, and I think that could be really helpful. As for whether I would recommend it, you know, I also wasted a lot of time in our session because I was kind of like highly asking questions about things that I thought were interesting, like what the freelance life is like,

but that weren't necessarily going to change my career. So I think that for me, yes, i'd recommend it, But I think maybe it's not like therapy, like it is one of those things that if you're in a certain place, like you want to change jobs but you don't know exactly how to get a new job, or you want to change fields, or you think that you would be good at another career, but you have no idea what it is like. You have some big questions, some big

crossroads that you're at. I think a career coach can be good for that for somebody who's just needs a little tweaking and the way that they're looking at their current job. Um, I don't know, maybe it's maybe it is best left just chatting with friends. I don't know. I guess I just like talking to people, even if I have to pay them. And now it's time for half big Takes, Happy fake takes. If you have a half big take that you'd like to share with us,

please call into our hotline. It's two on two six month seven zero one six six Francesca, what's your half big take? I have yet another commuting half big take. So we've talked about commuting, We've done a whole episode abou commuting, We've talked about how bad it is, and we've talked about talking about commuting too. I feel like so people come in and they just start cavetching about

how bad their commute was. Um, And this is like annoying for some people, and it's necessary venting for others. But this is what I think. When you had a heck of a commute this morning and it was just really something, and when you get to work after a terrible commute, you feel like you have just been through a war. And then you get to work and everyone's acting like everything is normal, and you just want the

acknowledgement that you've just been through this nightmare. So I feel like every office should have some kind of confessional booth where if you need it, you can just walk into this place. Somebody's always there listening, and you can be like, first, I got kicked off of this one train because it went out of service, and then I had to walk five blocks in the rain to another station, and then that train was so crowded. I have to live three trains pass and blah blah blah blah blah.

And you don't have to bother your coworkers for it, but you can just get it out and start your day and move on so that that experience is honored. I like the confession booth because nobody wants to hear about your Nobody wants to hear about it, but you need to talk about it. Yeah, it's good. Maybe it's an app like it was about the voice memo app on your phone. Always send it to us. I'm all about turning half bake takes into businesses. Becca, what's your

half bag take? My hapic take is about wrinkles and um that basically I have a theory that if you wear a wrinkled shirt, the wrinkles will fall out over the day, and that's how I say it. But like, if you wear a wrinkled shirt by maybe noon, it will be nice and fresh. I hear if this is scientifically not true, but basically I don't want to iron I feel like this is something our parents told us because I definitely have a phrase like the wrinkles will

fall out. Yeah, what does that fall out? Where they go in my head too, and I do think it's a lie we tell ourselves to allow to justify wearing wrinkled shirts because my shirt is kind of wrinkly, even though what's hanging in my closet? Where did the wrinkles come from? Uh So, if it was hanging there in my closet and the wrinkles didn't fall out, I don't think it's going to happen by lunchtime, but we'll give

it a few more hours. Yeah, and I don't know my older age and nice really nice Crisps shirt really looks good, so I don't Yeah, this has been half big takes, half baked takes. Thanks for listening to game Plan. You can find me on Twitter. I'm at rs Greenfield and I'm at Francesca today. You can tweet your half baked takes at us or anything else you like. You can also call and leave a voicemail at two one to six one seven zero one six six. If you like the show, head on over to Apple Podcasts and

rate and review and subscribe. I've noticed so many new ones recently, so you're all this linktime message, so thank you so much. The show was produced by Liz Smith. And Magnus Hendrickson, head of Podcasts, is me. We'll see you next week. By then, we were about ready to get to them. Meat and potatoes. What do you love that. I don't say that in real life, so I can't say that.