Frustrated at age 42 by a “glass ceiling” at an international bank in Paris, Véronique, an attractive Afro-French metis, came to me to strategize her “retirement” to a backwater, rural banking job in order to be closer to her two soon-to-be teen children. Within two coaching sessions, Véronique realized that she didn’t actually want that solution at all; that her dream ambition was to assert herself as an international banker, thanks to her language and technical skills.

Over the following sessions, Véronique learned a conflict management and negotiation technique called Non Violent Communication. We role-played interviews and used NLP visualization to build her confidence. By the time she successfully negotiated a favorable financial departure from her current job, she was enjoying her new-found empowerment. [Read more…]

Coping with a forthcoming expatriation to London was Karine’s first priority. Her husband’s company had offered him a good promotion to develop a subsidiary in the UK. They both recognized it as an excellent opportunity for them and their two small children; it would enlarge the family’s economic and cultural horizons. The drawback was that Karine would have to at least temporarily give up her career as the coordinator of and principal recruiter for a large educational program. She would also have to speak a language which didn’t quite master. [Read more…]

Sabrina came from a macho national culture that had inflicted her with adolescent diffidence and was educated principally in Anglo-Saxon countries where she honed a steely sense of superiority. She was having a very rough time adjusting professionally to working with the French. [Read more…]

Déborah was my first client. She was the middle-aged owner of a local restaurant. The minute she heard I was a career coach, she signed up. I was startled to see the difference between her public and her private personae. Déborah felt totally lost: she was tired of the restaurant, no longer happy sharing her life with her companion, the restaurant chef, and terrified to do anything about it. [Read more…]

When I met Aude – a brilliant engineer with an MBA from a top European business school – for a preliminary meeting, it was not clear to me why she sought coaching. She was profitably employed in a job of prestige, bright, charming, attractive, already on several boards of directors, and happy in her personal life. Nevertheless, there was something she found dissatisfying in her life that she wanted to explore, believing it to be the present impasse she had reached in her current job. [Read more…]

Oscar, a young accountant in a small rural community, came to me ostensibly because he wanted to “just try” coaching in order to be able to write about it cogently for his professional CPA (expertise comptable) thesis.

In the beginning, Oscar refused to allow himself to become “involved”; he expected only intellectual input from me and was lost when all I did was ask probing questions that visibly took him aback, perhaps for socio-cultural reasons, but most certainly because he had never consciously thought long-term about his life. His meme was that his life would be just like his parents’ and (shockingly, since he knew my mature age) that he would be “in a wheelchair” by age fifty. [Read more…]