The Quarter-Life Breakthrough: Invent Your Own Path, Find Meaningful Work, and Build a Life That Matters by Poswolsky Adam Smiley

Author:Poswolsky, Adam Smiley [Poswolsky, Adam Smiley]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

LEARNING WHAT’S NOT THE RIGHT FIT IS JUST AS VALUABLE AS LEARNING WHAT IS

It’s hard to know whether you’re best suited to be an entrepreneur, or work for a larger organization, until you try one or the other and see what works best for you. Interestingly enough, Dorothy Zhuomei’s path to a full-time coaching job came by way of a side hustle she was pursuing while working a full-time job she disliked. While getting her MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, she took a leadership coaching class, where she experienced the power of self-awareness and self-discovery work, and realized how much she enjoyed coaching her peers. However, Dorothy was getting her MBA with the intention to build up her résumé and gain credibility in the business community. Going into coaching post-MBA was almost unheard-of. So Dorothy did what many of her peers were doing: she decided to get a couple of years of management consulting experience.

Six months into her gig at a prestigious management consulting firm, Dorothy knew she didn’t want to be a management consultant. “I was not feeling the impact of my work, and through my self-discovery at Kellogg, I knew that I needed to see impact on the individual level,” Dorothy recalls. “I am not sure if I bought into the culture of management consulting, where you need to be very type A and do exactly what the firm needs you to do, even when the work is not aligned with your interests. I also didn’t buy into the brutal consulting lifestyle. I wanted more control of my life. I knew I wanted something better, something that was more aligned with my values and mission in life.”

Dorothy continued consulting for another six months, to save money and gain more experience. She started to pursue her love for coaching on the side, convincing the UCLA Anderson School of Management to build a peer coaching program, and participating in intensive weekend coaching workshops at Stanford. Eventually, Dorothy left her consulting job (which paid $150,000 a year) to pursue coaching full-time. Rather than go off on her own to build her own coaching practice, she got a full-time job as career coach at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. I asked her why.

Dorothy replied, “I talked to a lot of people, mostly coaches, people in HR, other consultants in the people business, and found out that (1) coaching is a little bit of a ‘white hair’ industry where years of experience [matter]; (2) it takes time to build a coaching practice, and doing it slowly and on the side could reduce the anxiety and stress; (3) many coaches are affiliated with a firm, a group practice, or an institution, even when they are experienced.

“Combined with my own risk-tolerance level, and the cost of living in San Francisco, I knew that I wanted a full-time job that was somewhat aligned with what I want to do, and to explore my own coaching practice on the side. In

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