Getting past the mangled moments: why my coaching focuses on the particular exhaustion of senior women in tech (with handy aquatic analogy).
Healthy fish are glorious explosions of color, shape, and movement. Mangled fish are dull, tattered, gray-ish blobs that look like floating sadness.
Senior tech people have spent time developing their abilities. Senior women in tech have done this while swimming against the current. When we are functioning well, we’re pretty spectacular.
But many of us have a mangled moment, often at the point in our careers where it seems and looks like we probably have it all together. We look like strong leaders who must have amazing resumes. Many of us have helped dozens of other people develop their skills, confidence, and careers. We should be at our most powerful. But we feel dulled, bored, disengaged, trapped, not entirely sure we want to keep doing what we’ve been doing, and (worse) not sure we can.
In mangled moments, we forget how we feel when we’re functioning at full capacity. We blame ourselves instead of understanding that we ended up in an environment where we can’t thrive, like a freshwater fish in a saltwater tank. We fizzle. We look around at all the shiny young smaller fish and everything work-related looks impossible and exhausting.
Limp and overwhelmed, we try to think about career progression or enter the job search process, which has to be one of the suckiest processes in the world.
Luckily there’s more help out there than you think.
I recommend everyone:
read Phyl Terry’s book Never Search Alone
come to one of their free bi-weekly, free Linkedin Live sessions
and sign up to join a Job Search Council.
You buy the book and the rest is free. Really truly. It’s life-changing professionally, whether you’re searching for a new job as fast as possible or taking your time to chart a longer-term course. Never Search Alone revitalizes a LOT of fish. And I send everyone there first.
The vast majority will never need a coach, and that’s great.
If you do want some one-on-one help, get in touch. I coach sick-fish senior-level people who are trying to:
recover from you last job(s), organizations, bosses, and/or teams
somehow remember that you are actually good at a lot of stuff
get out from under all the anxiety, franticness, and mountains of ‘finding a new job tasks’ you’ve created for yourself
figure out what you want to do—which seems like something that’s easy for everyone else but almost impossible for you
figure out how you’re supposed to do that thing where you ‘make a plan for your career and set that plan in motion’—especially when you feel like a sick fish
get to a point where reading job descriptions doesn’t take all the wind out of your sails (or water out of your fins)
decide once and for all whether you actually need more training or school or whatever…even though the thought of doing that makes you want to barf (pro tip: you probably don’t.)
I love seeing crumpled fins unfurl and recover their spectacular colors. That’s my coaching goal. If you are feeling mangled, let me know. Maybe I can help.
