Live Coaching Kathleen 1 (of 6): Navigating Career Options Post Layoff

<p>Welcome to this special series where you get to bear witness and experience live coaching with a real client. Through the generosity of my client, who we're calling Kathleen to protect her privacy, you get to sit in on six full coaching sessions, recorded live. It’s the first time I’ve ever done this, and I’m thrilled for you to discover your own unlock in the process.</p><p>In this first session, I skip most of the usual relationship building, because Kathleen comes in ripe with what's happening in her life and I like to honor whatever is needed in the moment. You will soon discover that she was recently laid off, building a business she never planned to build, and feeling in her words ‘jumbled’. Her words for it: ‘it's a fork in the road, but the fork has a thousand tiny forks in between’. She's applying for jobs while quietly hoping none of them work out. She describes the choice as suffocation on one side, with failure and poverty on the other. Her life is on hold, her things are in storage, and decisions as big as having children are waiting on this to resolve.</p><p>We work through the emotions; the pull between should and want, and I offer her an experiment to find the truth of what she wants. The exercise is to notice, without judgment, whether each thing you do today is something you want to do or something you think you should do. The goal is not to change the decision, just to see what’s driving it.</p><p>I also offer her a reframe (and metaphor) about her jumbled life. Her puzzle got shaken up, and all the pieces are still in the air. She's trying to force them back into the old picture. But putting together a picture that already exists can be harder than letting the pieces land somewhere new. Tune in to hear what happens when you stop trying to figure out the whole picture, and start to trust the truth of your micro decisions.</p><p><strong>Episode Highlights:</strong></p><ul><li>Why we skipped the standard first session structure and went straight into what was present.</li><li>The jumbledness: applying for jobs while energetically blocking them.</li><li>Should versus want, and the awareness exercise offered.</li><li>Why the forcing is the overwhelm.</li><li>The exhaustion that shows up after deep work.</li></ul><p><strong>Quotables:</strong></p><p><em>"It feels like to try to picture squeezing myself back through a keyhole into something I don't really want to do, versus just take all the wheels off of the bus and try to drive it anyway.