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Essays

Build Your Inner Scorecard: A 10-Minute Exercise for Better Decisions

    What defines you? What does success look like? How can I make good decisions for myself in the long term?

    My belief is that it’s important to operate our lives by an Inner Scorecard. While an Outer Scorecard is based on how the external world sees you, judges you, and stacks you up in comparison to others, an Inner Scorecard is something based on what you truly want without thinking too much about what other people think of you*.

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    A Practical Guide: How To Find an Executive Coach (Part 3)

      When I give advice to executives looking for a coach, I typically break it down for them into these straightforward steps on how to structure their search. This is Part 3 of my series on executive coaching based on insights from 80+ interviews with executives and coaches, focused on how to find a coach. Check out Part 1 for a rundown of the results and data, and Part 2 for what I’ve learned as a coach so far.

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      An In-Depth Guide to Executive Coaching: Everything You Need To Know (Part 1)

        I’m excited to share what I’ve learned from 80+ conversations to map the executive coaching industry:

        • How are executives finding their executive coach?
        • What areas is coaching effective for and how are people leveraging it?
        • How much do executive coaches typically charge, and what’s the structure?
        • How do you maximize the value from your coaching relationship?

        I was curious about these questions, too, in the course of answering these I collected interviews across 13 coaches, 17 founders and executives (Director/VP/GM+) who have engaged coaches, and 50+ prospective coachees.

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        7 Things No One Tells You About Being a Startup Founder

          When I founded my first company Connected back in 2011, I was really surprised by the intensity of the emotional rollercoaster. By then I’d already worked everywhere from large corporate Microsoft to tiny new startup and felt prepared. I was dead wrong. I remember describing it to a friend as, “After I started a company, everything became 10x more intense. The highs and lows filled with terror, sometimes all in the same hour. Everything else I’d done in my professional career fades in comparison.”

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          Finding Meaningful Work with “Designing Your Life”

            With all of the talk of The Great Resignation, it doesn’t come as a surprise that many people are asking the question, what do I really want to do?

            Many people follow a guiding star throughout their early career. Their career transitions are based on what their parents or peers expected, what their peers did, where there was the highest status, or even taking what they were good at to its natural extreme. Later on, what they begin to question is whether that work is meaningful or significant to them.

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            The Leadership Chasm

              Why transitioning to management is hard: The Leadership Chasm

              When I coach founders and execs, I often encounter them in a point of transition. Reaching the point in your career where you transition from individual contributor to a people leader is often a story of struggle. Here’s why it’s so difficult to rise to the new challenge: The Leadership Chasm.

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