Career Reinvention

Reinvention is one of those words that brings to mind people of great strength and force. The fact is, though, that many women who are masters in reinvention experience healthy fear and trepidation as they reach toward a new work or life stage. With an email moniker that includes “on the go”, and an impressive…

Women I coach often come to me with visions of leaving Corporate America for a job with more meaning. They’re tired of helping companies sell cosmetics, cars or bonds and they want to find a way to “do well by doing good”. This is an admirable quest, but you have to do a lot of…

Harvard Business Review blogger Whitney Johnson caught my attention when she tweeted her concept of “dating your dreams”. This makes sense to me because reinvention is so often making a dream happen—if you have the clarity and the stamina to bring all the fuzzy edges into focus. Dating your dreams—trying them out a little and living with…

It’s true that some people have a hard time getting off a certain career track. If you’ve been in marketing for 20 years and you want to reinvent yourself toward public health, it can be hard to get employers to connect the dots. But it can be done. Transferring your skills to an entirely new…

There are plenty of articles in the media forecasting that many Americans will never have the money to retire. In that scenario work is a ball and chain, a means to an end, just a way to pay the bills. Other people have played the retirement savings game well, can afford to retire, and never…

Here you will find compelling excerpts from a wonderful article by Dr. Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, Vice President and Managing Director of Apollo Research Institute, an organization focused on education, work and careers in Palo Alto, California. Dr. Tracey’s article gives great credence to the non-linear career path, which I’m happy to see is trending upward. In my coaching and recruiting years I’ve always advised women to…

When Lyn Kimberly of Weston, Connecticut talks about her childhood, there are many tales of a Vermont camp on Lake Champlain. She spent 10 years as a camper and a counselor and later married a man who shares her love of the outdoors. For many years they wedged camping and canoeing trips into their professional…

When most women think about returning to work after a long hiatus, they’re hoping for a short commute and perhaps a part-time job that ends in time to meet the school bus.  Sandra Bornstein attempted the typical return to work route in her field of teaching, and then had a more unusual opportunity to teach…

Though I think most men zoom through their work days with tunnel vision, most women are interrupted by phone calls from school, doctor appointment scheduling and mundane problems that arise at the family home. When you’re waffling about a return to work, it can seem impossible that you would ever be able to take care…

When one half of a couple is contemplating retirement, reinvention can be the result for both husband and wife. That was the case with Gay and Roger Squire, now owners of Squire House, an upscale B&B in Dorset, Vermont. Gay raised two sons and had a brief stint as a social worker. Roger had a senior post at…