Happy 2021, readers! I’m grateful to have the opportunity to engage with you via my blog and hope that you had a restful and restorative conclusion to 2020.

For my first post of the year, I wanted to write about intention-setting. The beginning of the year represents a good chance to take stock of where you’ve come and where you want to go over the next 6-12 months.

I’ll share my process around self-reflection as well as a few of my individual intentions and goals, in case they’re helpful in sparking ideas for you.

When I reflect

• I set aside time to reflect at a bird's eye level every 6 months or so. Doing this every 6 months provides me with enough opportunity to course correct without being immersed in an existential crisis every month. 
• This process takes me an hour or two. I like to set aside time when I have some flexibility - a day off or a weekend - rather than trying to sandwich this reflection in amidst an otherwise busy calendar.

How I reflect 

• I start by taking stock of where I’ve come. I go back to my intentions from 6 / 12 months ago and see what they look like now. Some may still be present, others may seem completely absurd, and others may have come to fruition. All of these outcomes are reasonable, and reflection on the past enables me to see how far I’ve come. 
• I take a few moments to be proud of what I’ve done and to recognize where I’m still growing.  
• Then, I look forward, asking myself - what do I want in the next 6 / 12 months? What intentions do I want to set? I write these down so that I can refer to them later

Selections from my 2020 + 2021 resolutions
I’ll share a few of my resolutions from 2020 and 2021 below, in case they're of help. 

• 2020 Resolution 1: It seems that I may be done living in San Francisco. Identify where I want to live next and move. Create and do things on an SF bucket list.
  Outcome: In 2020, I moved from San Francisco to Playa Del Carmen. Unfortunately, I didn't get to do most of my bucket list items when the city closed due to lockdown. 
• 2020 Resolution 2: Spend quality time with Pinch (my dog)
  Outcome: Done and done!
• 2020 Resolution 3: Start my coaching business, and if it feels right, leave Google to pursue it.
  Outcome: Done and done!
• 2020 Resolution 4: Build a new habit each month using some sort of 30-day challenge.
  Outcome: I don't think I did this even once.

 

• 2021 Resolution 1: Create space for what nourishes me: bread, chocolate, time with Pinch, time spent in nature, board games, music, dancing, exercise. 
• 2021 Resolution 2: Continue to build my business to see just how much it can grow.
• 2020 Resolution 3: Be thoughtful about the amount of time I spend with people who drain vs. energize me, prioritizing the latter. 
• 2021 Resolution 4: Travel, if possible...

What’s next for you
Hopefully these help provide templates for you if you enjoy reflecting and setting resolutions or intentions. If I can be of help in clarifying anything for you, don’t hesitate to reach out. My calendar is always open for a free 30-minute chat to hear what’s going on in your world and where I can be of help: https://calendly.com/tory-coaching
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Looking forward to where 2021 takes us...

Do you have an unwieldy, never-ending to-do list?
​My clients are often frustrated when things on their to-do lists aren’t getting done. They feel that they must be lacking in motivation or self-discipline.

While it is possible that motivation or self-discipline can impact your productivity, more often than not, to-do lists become unwieldy because they contain large end outcomes (e.g., “write a book”) without clear, small immediate next steps (“draft a table of contents”).

Honing your skills in a technique called T-Shirt-Sizing can help you to make your to-do lists less Herculean.

How will T-Shirt-Sizing help me? 
​T-Shirt-Sizing will ensure that the tasks on your to-do list are small enough that they are possible to accomplish. 

This technique will break a behemoth, Large T-shirt project down into a set of Small T-shirt tasks that will make it easier for you to take action. Once you start taking action, you'll create a sense of momentum so that you feel proud of your progress instead of buried beneath a behemoth. 

Ideally, your Small tasks will be easily doable in 1 day and will have a clearly measurable result. Here are a few examples:

• Write 1 page of your book (with no requirements on quality)
• Draft a set of slides for your presentation or lecture
• List the collaborators needed for your upcoming project
• List 5 things that you want in your next job
• Schedule a career check-in with your skip-level manager
  
  

T-Shirt-Sizing is a skill, so don’t expect yourself to get it right at first. You may identify what seems like a Small task that then takes a longer time than you’d estimated. You may come up with Small tasks and still not want to approach them because of dread - at this point, you can start to become curious about your motivation. I’ll review ideas around motivating yourself in another post. 

By practicing making Small tasks and checking how many you’re able to get done, you can revisit and revise your to-do lists until T-Shirt-Sizing serves you.

Know someone who could benefit from coaching around time management? Schedule a time for a free chemistry call with me. 

What's the deal with burnout? 
Burnout is pervasive among working professionals and COVID-19 is making it worse. Ongoing surveys indicate that rates of burnout have increased from 61% of professionals in February 2020 to 73% in May. 

Job burnout is defined as: “a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. The three key dimensions of this response are overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.” 

Sound familiar? Too often, when it comes to burnout, we only realize that our time, energy, and health have dwindled away when it’s too late. What can we do to avert burnout before we reach that point?

What does the research say? 
The academic literature on burnout has demonstrated that both characteristics of the workplace environment and individual personality can contribute to burnout - sometimes additively. Here are a few interesting learnings that I've gleaned from reading research in this area. 

Aspects of the workplace that contribute to burnout include: 

• Inequity
• Incivility
• Role conflict and role ambiguity
  
  

Individual characteristics that predispose one to burnout include: 

• An “avoidant” coping style (coping with stressors in a passive, defensive way) 
• High work-home interference (when job stress interferes with home life)
• A mis-match between employee and employer values

What can I do to address burnout?
​Many of my clients, when we first start working together, are overwhelmed, overworked, and exhausted. I’ve found 3 areas that have helped them, drawing from the academic literature that I cited above as well as my own experiences with burnout.

1. Define your values. What’s important to you about your job? What aspects of it energize you? What aspects of it drain you? 
2. Set intentions and regain control. What do you want your day to look like tomorrow? How can you make that a reality? 
3. Establish and enforce clear priorities. What is your highest priority area of focus? What can wait until tomorrow or next week?    
   
   

Let me know how these solutions work out for you in the comments (or feel free to let me know if they don't!)

My Request from You
I’m honestly truly fulfilled when I see overburdened clients make a few small changes and take back control of their time and energy.  

Know anyone at risk of burning out? Willing to introduce us?

I’m offering a free 30-minute coaching session for you in exchange for 1-3 email introductions to your friends, relatives, or colleagues who could benefit from coaching focused on averting burnout.

“You’re not qualified to do anything other than {insert what you currently do here}.” 

Heard this before? Thought it yourself? It’s easy to question whether we’re capable of doing anything other than what we’ve done in the past. One of my doctoral advisors, when he heard I was looking to leave academia, told me that I wasn’t qualified to do anything other than be a professor. Even though he was one of my fiercest advocates (and still is to this day), it was truly foreign for him to think that I could do anything other than use my PhD to become a faculty member. 

I’m here to tell you that it is absolutely possible to move: between roles, companies, or industries. In fact, it may even be desirable to move into a different area given that COVID-19 is likely to shape the job market for years to come. 

You may be skeptical that you can move into something new. You may think that you need to take an additional course, obtain more training, or somehow prove yourself to move into something new. But what I’d like to convince you is that you already have skills and intellect. Where you may need practice is in the toolkit that you’ll need to use to conduct your job search. 

The EXAPT model
From what I’ve learned, having made the jump from academia to the Tech industry to running my own business, there are four core steps to any career transition. I’ll share them with you, just as I’ve shared them with more than 45 people whom I’ve coached in identifying the next steps in their career. 
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These four steps form the basis for a model that I’ve called EXAPT:

1. The first thing to do in your job search? EXhale. Accept that it’s OK to look for a job, even though you may not have chosen to do so. Reflect on what it is you want to do now and use that reflection to guide your career path. 
2. Second, Ask for information. Determine what types of jobs are available now, what sounds appealing to you, and what can leverage your strengths. Identify what skills you already have and how they can be translated. 
3. Third, Prepare for job applications. Find jobs in your industry and role of interest and apply. Fine tune your resume and brush up on your interviewing skills. 
4. Fourth, Transition into your new role, knowing you’ll still be learning along the way. You are qualified, but there is still a lot of room to continue to grow when you’re making a substantive transition.
   

Other than it being a strange acronym, why have I called this an EXAPT model? Let’s take a quick detour to the world of evolutionary biology before returning to pragmatics of the career search. 

Why EXAPT?
In evolutionary biology, one of the concepts proposed in the past 50 years was the notion of an exaptation - a trait that is currently being used for a function other than what it evolved for. For example, say bird feathers initially evolved as an adaptation to keep birds warm. Birds that grew feathers made it through the winter and so survived more readily than those who didn’t have feathers - this trait would therefore be adaptive. Now let's say that once birds had those feathers for warmth, the feathers also became useful for another function - flight. Those feathers were exapted for flight, or stretched beyond their initial adaptive use.

My goal is to give you tools to EXAPT —  to take the skills you’ve already acquired and stretch them to a different function, beyond their initial use. Many of the folks whom I’ve coached believe that they need to learn new skills to make a career transition - following the metaphor, they believe that they need to adapt. But instead, you can EXAPT — take the skills that you already have and use them elsewhere. If you do so successfully, you won’t need to learn any new formal skills beyond those related to the job search process itself.

Get Started With a Free Webinar
Returning now from evolutionary biology to pragmatics of how to search for a job: I’m currently formulating more detailed online courses around each of the four stages of this model. To get started, I’m offering

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A free webinar at 5 PM EDT on June 11th 2020
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In this interactive webinar, I’ll share an overview of the EXAPT model that will tee you up for a career transition. Again, this webinar is completely free, with the expectation that you fill out a survey after the webinar to give me your feedback.
 
To sign up for the webinar, RSVP here or on the "services" tab.

I’m excited to share these tools to help you make a successful career change. Join us on June 11th to learn more. Until then - happy searching!