At an early age, Sarah* was trained to follow instructions and win.

She became a stand-out student, athlete, and musician. She attended great schools, landed competitive internships, and was on track to surpass her own career expectations, but in the last few year's relationship with work started slipping.

Her deep-seated drive to avoid missteps, impress her stakeholders, and expedite decisions consumed all her time and energy, and she was finding it impossible to…

Since 2023, I have invested a lot more time and energy into understanding the science of behavior change and the art of subconscious programming (aka mindset work), all to transform my clients’ career performance.

I have dug deeper than smart decision-making frameworks and collaborative leadership models and I’ve examined the invisible levers that drive performance: your perceptions and beliefs.

For ambitious, mid-career professionals, career transitions are complex, and over time, they can become quite disorienting and destabilizing. While we may do our best to make the optimal choice, our minds are often littered with questions and unknowns. We vacillate justifications around money, time, family, well-being, security, autonomy, etc. This messy mental state is related to what psychologists ‘cognitive dissonance’ - when your mind tries to reconcile two or more thoughts (or behaviors) that are inconsistent with your beliefs or values. So why does your smart brain launch into these mental gymnastics? And how can you outsmart it to minimize exhaustion?

I spent decades collecting some pretty strong beliefs about work, money, and professionalism.

My beliefs carried me (and a lot of people I know) pretty far, but at a certain point they stopped being helpful and they started complicating my career transitions.

In 2019, I finally figured out what it actually takes to make a successful career transition: getting really clear on your own definition of success.

Have you heard the old adage, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”? It sounds cheesy, but it’s actually a valuable reminder that in a battle between established norms and new ways of working, the norms usually have the upper hand. Similarly, in a battle between relationships and rules, relationships usually have the upper hand!