28. What You Don't Know When You Start Your Big Career - with Niki Khoshzamir
Career Stewardship with Michael Melcher
Release Date: 05/12/2021
Career Stewardship with Michael Melcher
There are coaches all around the world. In this episode, we examine executive coaching and career development from the point of view of someone who practices in a different hemisphere. Michael speaks with Ana Pliopas, Ph.D, a coach in Brazil who trained at the Hudson Institute, where Michael also did his coach training. They discuss how the pandemic affected the way people see their careers, the differences and similarities in how pandemic stress showed up in Brazil vs. the United States, and how coaching might show up differently in the two countries. She also shares...
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Career progress isn't just about how competent or hard-working you are. It can require the ability to attain and exert power within organizations. This is a scary thing because power tends to have a bad rap. You might think you can't attain it, or you might not want to attain it. As our guest explains, power is simply the ability to get your way in the face of opposition, and it's something that you can understand, unlock and use for your own benefit. Wenderoth is the author of the new book, , which is a practical, intelligent guide to mastering power at...
info_outlineCareer Stewardship with Michael Melcher
In this episode, we speak Lara Sullivan, the CEO of Pyxis Oncology, and a friend of Michael's of many years. Lara has served as CEO since 2019 after roles at Pfizer, McKinsey & Co. and in private equity. No slacker, she also has both MD and MBA degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, we discuss the role of curiosity in career success, how mentoring works differently from the way people assume, and the role of relationships in "de-risking" career moves. We also learn how studying Comp Lit in college can be a highly useful preparation for the world...
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And we're baaaaaaaaack. Michael took a break to write a manuscript and manage some other life and career things, but here we are. We're kicking off this new season with an exciting Coaching Realness episode. Jennie Nash, America's favorite book coach and writing entrepreneur, last seen in Episode 31, returns to the pod, only this time as a client. Jennie's business is doing great but she's facing a big issue: namely, that to take things up to the next level she's going to have to let go of things, which is easier said than done. Michael and Jennie get into...
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What is really goes on inside a mentoring relationship? How do these unique relationships start, evolve, manage bumps along the road, and be useful to both parties? In this episode, Michael is joined by the founder of Parachute Coaching who is -- spoiler alert -- Michael's mentee. They review the random way that they met, what initially kicked off their connection, when it turned into a mentoring relationship, and what they've learned along the way. This episode has some mentoring realness a-ha's that you are unlikely to find elsewhere, such as: mentors aren't...
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In 2018, Lauren Baer ran for Congress from Florida's 18th District. She won the Democratic primary handily and came close to unseating her rival in a deep-red district. While she had a stellar professional background, including stints working directly for two Secretaries of State and for the Ambassador to the United Nations, she was a first-time candidate and her district had never had an out, lesbian mom candidate running for the seat. She now runs , an organization that prepares new candidates for office and trains staff to be effective. But years before all this,...
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It's time for another real coaching session. Michael's client-for-the-day is Meghan Daum, host of podcast and author of many bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including . Meghan is a writer who hit all the marks of literary success early in her career. She published her first collection of essays at 30, and since then has written several additional books of essays plus a comic novel. But in recent years she's made a big pivot and this has presented big challenges, as she shared in a fascinating episode she called . So Michael invited her on the show to...
info_outlineCareer Stewardship with Michael Melcher
We often plan our lives assuming best-case scenarios: the fastest commute, the home that will always rise in value, the jump to a new exciting job. But sometimes we have to deal with things that are not on our wish lists. One of these is disability. Disabilities can be temporary or permanent, hidden or visible, predictable or a total surprise. At least 15 percent of the workforce deals with disability. What can you do to manage this? And what should your company be doing? In this episode, we are joined by Michael's business school classmate, ,...
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What if you end up achieving a big dream, but discover that it's someone else's dream, not your own? What do you do then? This week, we are joined by Executive Coach . Jenn and Michael talk about how putting your head down and working hard isn't always the best strategy for career happiness, and how true insight is difficult but can come over time. We talk about imposter syndrome, pivotal feedback moments that shake up our thinking, the pluses and minuses of the immigrant experience as it relates to careers, why "presence" is a loaded word, and what to do when we...
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This week we go DEEP and ask: If you were really present in your life, as opposed to being stuck in your head most of the time, what might you experience? Michael is joined by executive coach , who walks us through the subtleties of this thing called awareness: what is it, why it is important, and how we can develop it. We learn how cultivating awareness fits into leadership – and how our busy, task-oriented work lives seemed almost designed to prevent any actual awareness. Duncan shares three specific techniques for beginning to cultivating this mysterious but...
info_outlineJust because you've spent years of effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars on your education doesn't mean you are prepared for your big career. Crazy, but true. The world of work is different in many ways from school; just because you've been successful in one doesn't mean you'll hit the ground running in the other. So, what can you do? Today we're joined by Niki Khoshzamir, the CEO of PracticePro, a social enterprise that helps new grads set themselves up for success in their new careers. We talk about the unwritten rules of career success, why your most important relationship is your relationship with yourself, the challenges and rewards of being first generation, how to talk up potential mentors, and why looking for sponsors might be a distraction. Born and raised in Iran, educated in Vienna and the U.S., and a successful lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, Niki is fascinating person in her own right and has some great tips for cultivating resilience. Check it out!