CAREER TRANSITIONS & WHAT'S NEXT

I used to be pretty good at ignoring red flags. Many years ago, when I was first building my client base in executive search, I said yes to almost every assignment I could get. I was excited to win the business, eager to prove myself and, frankly, needed the clients. So even when a potential client had unrealistic expectations, wasn't quite ready to hire or kept changing the brief, I found ways to explain it away. We'll figure it out. They'll come around. This could lead to s

Okay, I think it’s finally time for me to tackle the topic of Focus. Focus of your positioning to be specific. I haven’t written much about it before, probably because it feels so fundamental. Of course focus matters. And yet, so many of my coaching conversations seem to end up there. A senior leader is leaving corporate life and trying to build a consulting or fractional practice. Another is deep into a job search and wondering whether they should broaden it. Someone else is

A client of mine lost her job recently. But that's not where this story actually begins. She had reached out to me a few weeks BEFORE it happened. Before there was anything concrete to point to. Before she had a single piece of evidence she could put on a table and say, this, this is what I'm worried about. She reached out because she had a feeling. The kind that lives in your body before your brain has caught up to it. The kind that wakes you up at 3am and doesn't give you

A few months ago, I sat across from a client of mine who had spent seventeen years building an impressive career at a global firm. She was smart. Accomplished. The kind of person whose LinkedIn profile makes you feel slightly behind on your own life. She had recently left her role — by choice — to explore consulting. AND she was stuck. Not on the logistics. Not on the pricing or the outreach or the contracts. She was stuck on a question she hadn't expected to find so hard: Wh

I almost didn’t go. It had been one of those days – back-to-back calls, brain slightly fried. Low energy. The couch was calling. It had just started raining outside. And the event felt optional…at best. I stood in front of my closet longer than necessary. Changed once. Changed again. Checked the time. Considered texting an excuse. You can skip it, I told myself. You’ve already been productive today. No one will notice. And deep inside of me, a familiar debate was playing out:

You’re asked a simple question. “What do you do?” “What have you been working on?” “What are you proud of lately?” And suddenly… your brain short-circuits. You know you have words. You use them all the time. But in this moment? Gone. You start talking, then stop. You hear yourself saying “um” more than usual. You’re halfway through a sentence and already wondering how to soften the ending. Your mind is racing: Don’t sound braggy. Don’t make it weird. Don’t take up too much

A client recently said to me, “I don’t hate my job… I just don’t recognize myself in it anymore.” She paused after saying it, as if waiting to see whether that was a reasonable thing to feel. From the outside, her career looked solid. A respected role. A steady income. A trajectory that made sense to everyone around her. The kind of job people point to and say, “You’re doing well.” And that’s part of what made it so confusing. Internally, she felt disconnected — like she was

There’s a particular kind of restlessness that shows up for most of us, at one point in life. Not the dramatic, storm-the-castle kind of urge for reinvention— but a quieter, nagging pressure under the ribs. I know this feeling intimately. Many years ago, when I was still an executive recruiter—seemingly at the height of my career—I started to sense a subtle shift inside me. To the observer on the outside, I had a dream career. But on the inside, something started feeling, we

We’re often told that confidence is the key to career success. “Believe in yourself,” they say. “Fake it ’til you make it.” Confidence is celebrated in interviews, in performance reviews, in leadership programs. We admire people who speak effortlessly, present confidently, take up space, and appear self-assured. But here’s the inconvenient truth: Confidence alone rarely changes careers. Confidence is a feeling—fleeting, inconsistent, and heavily influenced by circumstances. I

Part 7 of my "Behind the Glamour" Series - Confessions of a Fashion Headhunter In the last article in my Behind the Glamour series, we looked squarely at the quiet crisis happening in fashion and business in general: Ageism. A pattern of marginalizing—sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally—the very people who helped build the brands we now celebrate. But there’s another story happening in parallel. One I see unfolding in almost every coaching conversation I have with experienc

Part 6 in my "Behind the Glamour" Series - Confessions of a Fashion Headhunter Let’s talk about something the fashion, luxury and lifestyle industries refuse to confront head-on: Ageism. Behind the curated campaigns and DEI pledges, there’s a silent but devastating trend playing out in boardrooms and hiring pipelines—where brilliant leaders over 50 (especially women) are being quietly pushed out or passed over. It’s not subtle. It’s not rare. It’s a pattern. And it’s getti