If you’ve been curious about executive coaching but have hesitated because you’re not sure what it entails or whether it would help you, here's what former client SJ Crawford shared on LinkedIn about working with me 1:1. 

When someone tells you the next step in your career is “networking,” something in you tightens. It feels foreign. Transactional. A little inauthentic.

That discomfort is a sign you’ve been handed the wrong definition of networking, and it’s conflicting against your integrity. 

Here are five steps I suggest to my well-meaning introverted clients who want to grow their careers without being schmooze-y.

Feeling like a "fraud" is super normal, even for me. The more I coach subject matter experts and executive women, the more I see that imposter syndrome is never an indicator of actual competency but a hypnotic spell induced by a society steeped in bias against women and minorities. We can break the spell of this terribly boring hypnosis by co-opting its language. So there, I'm a "fraud." 

My client received an incomplete email about a time-sensitive project from one of her direct reports. Her response requesting the missing information was met with a terse and defensive reply. 

Moments like these have her feeling tension behind her eyes and wondering: 

• Why is my team so mediocre? 

• Is it me? Am I doing something wrong? 

• Can I keep growing my career if I struggle with people like this?

Now that things are slowing down and she has bandwidth… it feels very uncomfortable.

Like people don’t have confidence in her (otherwise, why would they withhold more work from her?).

Here’s how I coached my client.