Coaching Session #7

March 14th

Last night was my last session until April. We didn’t really have a plan, actually I had something I wanted to discuss. The first thing Stacy and I talked about was our respective blogs. Stacy is working with a social media consultant, which I find very interesting. We’re talking about me doing a guest blog post on her page. And she posted this on her page, which is tres cool.

I had a flash of the idea of a thought about a week ago. One of those thoughts that is so clear and you understand it,  but you cannot put it into words or make someone else understand. You know what I mean?

The gist of my concern boiled down to how I will demonstrate or show actual abilities I have or tasks I’m capable of, without experience. Not like before when the answer is to explore arenas of work for a good fit.  My concern is how I can take my existing resume and tweak it’s wording to reflect real world actual concrete skills that maybe were part of my former jobs, but weren’t so obvious that they’ve made their way into my resume.

For example (just thought of this) my 4-5 years of teambuilding and youth recreation. Basically my resume says teambuilding and youth recreation. It doesn’t, however, highlight the massive amounts of public speaking involved, or the creativity required to lead mentally challenging games or challenges and creating fun new activities for the purpose of team-building.  One of my favorite days at that job was the meeting of staff where we each made up a game and played them as a group to test them. Best. Day.

Stacy understood, thankfully, what I was trying to say. I have a difficult time verbally communicating my value to others. Even as a doctor I prefer to let the other doctors speak about clinical issues with medical colleagues because they come across as doctors and I feel like a 13 year old tongue tied kid. Then again, I give great clinical presentations in the department on single specific subjects after tons of research, powerpoint and preparation.  I can’t imagine how I’m going to sit in an interview with a CEO somewhere and communicate my value in such non-specific areas as I’m currently working on in coaching, when I can’t even do it in my current field.  When I strongly dislike having to defend or account for myself to others past preliminary statements.

One gift I have is the ability to put others on the defensive. Stacy says it comes across like I’m a sports car stuck on a slow highway, trying to force the highway to work at my speed, and that I need to work on finding roads that are in line with my abilities.  Pretty accurate analogy. 🙂

In order to deal with my frustration at not being able to effect change at work, and to increase my concrete knowledge of different fields, my coach suggested that I find people or businesses I know in which I could volunteer to contribute my time helping them fix issues I can handle.  Who do I know I can help, she asked.

I have no idea. And where would I find the time?

I know what I’m capable of, and how I can or cannot help in most situations.  My fear is being in a situation where I know what needs to be done and someone says “okay Andrea, fix it” but refuses to allow me the tools to do the work.  Then again that could just be post traumatic reaction to working somewhere where the impossible is demanded of us, but help is refused.

Stacy’s last suggestions for my creative nature were visualcv.com and vimeo.com.  Unfortunately as much as I’d love to explore those and play with them and create with them and….blah!!!! AaaUGH..! At this point the call just devolved into me bitching for 15 minutes about how frustrated I am, about not having any energy or time or desire to work on things like this when I’m tired from work. Which just made me feel like shit, like it always does when I vent too much, knowing my listener is liking me less and less the more I bitch.  Blah, Gah, Aaugh!

Yep… the wheels fell off at the end there and poor Stacy ended up having to point out how negative I still am (which I’ll address in the homework followup I wrote for the 17th) and how I expend a lot of energy fighting and beating my head against a wall trying to change the world, when I should just let my world be the screwed up clusterfuck of negativity it is without allowing it to harm and frustrate me so much that I stay negative as well.

As she pointed out: I am not my job. And I have a tendency to equate myself with my job, my emotions to the harm done by my job.  Stacy, wisely, reeled me back in by reminding me that I must define myself by myself, not by my screwed up atmosphere and job.

Stacy’s advice on my rant, as well as my earlier concern about showing concrete skills in my areas of interest, was to keep working on my master goal sheet. It’s the key to everything.

My main learning point this session was the idea that I’m a fast car on a slow road and beating myself senseless trying to make the other drivers speed up is pointless.