When I was working in the corporate arena years ago, I had the great misfortune of reporting to and working with a number of extremely toxic colleagues and managers whose behavior hurt me and was also a complete mystery to me. I couldn’t understand their raging, their defensiveness, they inability to be challenged or questioned, or their penchant for drumming people out who were not obsequious and total “yes&rdq...

As many of my readers know, I had an 18-year corporate marketing career that was very “successful” on the outside, but entirely unsuccessful on the inside. I faced a myriad of crises and challenges including gender discrimination, sexual harassment, zero work-life control or balance, chronic illness, narcissistic bosses and colleagues, and more. But worse than all that was the painfully nagging question “I...

Recently I was asked to contribute to a piece for The M Dash, the online magazine for clothing brand M.M.LaFleur, about what it’s like to feel lost at work at various stages in life. While my deepest area of expertise is coaching and training mid-career women who recognize they want and deserve a better, happier professional life, I’ve worked with hundreds of women and men across a fuller span of their lives, in...

This week, I received an email from one of my LinkedIn followers in response to a recent episode I published of my Finding Brave podcast. While I don’t know this individual, she shared openly and emotionally about her situation about how she’d been terribly mistreated and, in fact, bullied in her latest job by her manager who was a director and also, later, by the head of HR, after she quit and gave a short noti...

In my work as a career and executive coach, I work with women of all ages, sizes and styles, and one theme has become very apparent: women are incredibly tough on themselves, full of self-rejection, shame, humiliation and doubt, particularly about their looks, their weight, intelligence and their worthiness. I can count on one hand the number of women I’ve spoken with recently who feel “just great” abou...

Thousands of professionals are stuck in unhappy careers because they have a misguided belief that if they start exploring a new career, they’ll lose everything that matters to them. They worry that they’ll risk losing hard-earned money, status, title, flexibility, their place in their field because of years of experience, and more. It’s fear of loss and of giving up the “security” of their curr...

This month, I was honored to be interviewed for an Oprah Magazine piece by Celia Fernandez on It’s Time To Stop Saying I’m Sorry and how it hurts your confidence to say you’re sorry when you’re not. It got me thinking in greater depth about the crushing habit I see in myself and in so many other women I’ve worked with of saying they are sorry when they are actually feeling something very diffe...

Last month, I had the great honor of speaking at the Pennsylvania Conference for Women, an inspiring conference that attracts over 10,000 attendees from around the world. I gave two presentations, one on Finding Brave To Reach Your Highest Potential, for a breakfast event sponsored by Accenture for 150 senior women in pharma, biotech and medical technology. And the other was a panel discussion exploring the topic of Get Uns...

In the past 13 years of coaching and training professional women around the globe, I’ve seen firsthand that thousands of women have spent years building careers they thought would make them happy, only to wake up and realize they are very far from where they want to be, without a clue as to what’s in the way. Thousands are expending great amounts of energy hiding the fact that they’re scared, sad and de...

I spent 18 years in corporate life, and experienced some great successes that I’m proud of. But I also faced some dismal failures. The failures weren’t around outcomes I generated, or projects I launched – those tended to go well. The failures centered around my emotional and physical well-being, how I was treated, and the lack of integrity, meaning and purpose I felt doing work that wasn’t aligned w...