Blog - Rose Gold Careers: Recent Episodes
None
Last night, I made the kids their own sticker charts. When they do great things like practice their Chinese or be kind to each other, they get a sticker. Eventually they can trade in their stickers for Legos. How cute, I thought, as I was laminating their charts. Yes, I have a laminator at home.
“Wow, I could use one of these,” I said to myself. But then, a critical voice kicked in.
Shadow: Why would you need that? Be practical. You’re an adult now. Do you need a baby sticker system?
Self: Well, what if I do? What if this could actually help me? I have all these goals I want to accomplish, and I’m not doing that well on any of them. So why not?
Shadow: Besides, what would I even trade in my stickers for?
Self: I’m not sure yet. Anything I want. Maybe we’ll get a new pair of sneakers. That’s not the point.
Shadow: Fine. I like sneakers.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, my skin just a bit saggier, my hair thinner, my brain - perhaps a little less obsessively wired. But I can’t power through things the way I used to. I cannot just have a thought pop into my head, and then execute seamlessly. I need systems. I need help. So yes, I made myself a sticker chart, too. When I set it up in Canva, I sat through all the negative self talk and did it anyway. I swallowed all the complicated feelings and said to myself, “I’m not above this.”
Here’s how I set it up: It’s a simple table with 14 columns - each representing a day. Should I start with 30 days? Too scary. 7 days? Not enough. 14 felt good to me. Next I started free form writing down categories, which ended up being:
- Go to the gym
- Writing
- Meal prep
- Track Weight Watchers
- Read, relax, self-care
- Bed by 10 pm
Why these categories, I wonder. These are basically things that I find hard to accomplish, and am always fighting myself to do. I always have so many excuses not to do these things, and yet I find these are the foundational pillars that I need to keep my life on track. There are some things that are pretty high stakes: If I miss a good night’s sleep, for example, I’m a terror. My eyeballs hurt, I have a headache. Like that monster girl with the dripping sewage hair in The Ring. Then there are things that aren’t immediately noticeable, but over time they cumulate and also make me grump (read: missing that gym workout).
I realize that all of these things are protecting myself, from myself. For example:
- Go to the gym: this goal protects against an essentially lazy Mandy who thinks she is being more productive by doing work instead of exercising. This is in fact, never true. I have never in my life worked out and then in hindsight wished that I didn’t work out. I always feel better afterwards.
- Writing: this goal protects against an isolated Mandy who feels and experiences things but doesn’t want to share them for fear of being vulnerable and rejected. When the ride gets rough and I feel like I’m holding on for life, it feels easier to put my head down and hide.
- Read, relax, self-care: this is a defense against stubborn Mandy who thinks she doesn’t need any rest or time to herself to recharge, which is a lie. I need to read trashy romance novels, take a bath with fuzzy bath bombs, and I need to text my friends back. These things heal me.
Curiously, I noticed that I didn’t list any of the things that I usually obsess about, like growing my business or making more money. Why? I think because I’m naturally wired to think about these things, I love these kinds of challenges. I realized that all of the items above were things that usually get in my own way. If I’m not focused on my business it’s because I feel disconnected, exhausted, or are eating crap and just laying down clutching my stomach in a bloat.
This is about progress. This is about creating momentum for yourself. Architecting the ideal conditions where you can be most productive and happy. I don’t care that I have to trick myself into doing it, or use the same sticker motivation system as a child, lol. Whatever gets the job done. I am not above Weight Watchers, even though I look down on it and think its stupid and yet it is the only thing that’s ever really worked for me to lose weight. This is about being vulnerable and admitting that you don’t have all the answers, but that you are trying anyway.
What would be on your list? What would be the things that you need to move out of the way, to make room for your best self?
Three years ago, I was still working at a startup full time while at the peak of the pandemic. I was frustrated by the work and felt like anything could happen. The kids school could close, again, at any moment. They were already home with us, while we were on calls all day. They were so young. We were so unavailable. I just wanted to take some of my power back.
I started looking for a new job. I started a list of target companies. I updated my resume. I asked a friend in Denver if she could connect me to people at Zoom, which I knew had an office about 20 minutes away. I did a networking call with an old colleague from American Express, who was now at Microsoft. I replied to a LinkedIn post with a person who had consulted for a company I worked with before, who was now leading a team at Salesforce.
“I’m gonna hustle,” I proclaimed to my husband. “I’ll make six figures at a corporate job, do it for a year or two, pay off my student loans.”
Total disaster unfolded, like a symphony of yuck.
I applied to the job at Zoom, and included the names of the two referrals. I even had a referral link. I never heard back from HR. I texted them (“thanks again - submitted the application!”), and the referrals were helpful and friendly (“awesome!”), but then NOTHING. Weeks later, months later, still nothing. Microsoft had a hiring freeze. I had an informational interview with the lead at Salesforce, but he ghosted me. I sent two follow-up emails, like a loser.
Weeks later, I then had an interview for a different group at Salesforce, for an Account Executive position (the same title I had like ten years ago). They told me it would be a starting salary $50K less than what I was currently making. But you’ll make it up in commissions, they offered. Da fuck? Then, they told me the hiring manager needed people to be local to San Francisco, and wasn’t going to consider remote (this was before the whole company went remote). While the recruiter was actually really nice, this entire interaction was draining the life out of me. Like I was begging for something I didn’t even want.
The whole process exhausted me. I felt like I had tapped all the connections, used up all of my favors. This didn’t feel fair. I squeezed myself into silk tops and fitted blazers for these virtual interviews. I spent 20 minutes doing my hair. I prepared. I came up with a fake ass speech about “ohana” for Salesforce and how it resonated with me (reader, it didn’t, it felt like cultural appropriation, sorry).
All my worst fears - 1) that by working in startups, corporations had no idea what to do with me, and 2) that I was both overqualified and wildly under qualified and therefore completely unhireable. That as a result of my poor decision making (job hopping when things got boring, leaving corporate and starting small businesses that quietly failed), which at the time I thought was great decision making, I had driven the train off the rails, onto the grass, off the cliff.
I was embarassed not about how badly I had driven the train off, but about the fact that I had no idea I was doing it at the time. I saw my face, joyful and carefree, full of conviction that I was doing the right thing (“I’m being bold, I’m following my dream”). In reality, no one wanted me. I was last pick. What if instead of being bold, I was stupid? What if I had surrounded myself with the wrong people, with the wrong advisors?
What if the fact that I was an immigrant, and that my grandfather who has since passed had been an overnight security guard that slept in a small booth at an apartment complex in Hong Kong, was my fate, too? That I had gone as far as I could go, that my limitations of heritage and poorness and lack of class were activating at this precise moment, pulling me down to a pre-destined swamp of mediocrity? Cute try, little girl.
What if right now, in this very moment, I was making a similarly big mistake, and that my judgment and instincts are just off? Like I’m the sad tiger who doesn’t have the killer instinct? Am I the sad tiger? I don’t want to be. I could cry just thinking about it.
I basically did everything I would have told my clients to do, and it did not work. I couldn’t see in front of me. I just gave up. I didn’t know what to do in the face of failure. All of the external signals were giving me a “no,” and then I internalized those no’s and froze and didn’t know how to process it. I didn’t have the tools to stand up, and use it as a re-direction moment. I was looking for support in the wrong places. I was entitled. I was deflated. I kept emailing all these people for help, who were not in any emotional position to actually help me. I didn’t have the mental stamina to keep going.
I was lost, so I sat down, and I just didn’t get back up.
I ended up staying at the startup and then eventually just quit. Hahaha! How anti-climatic. The official story was that I was leaving to focus on my coaching business, which yes. I was honestly excited to try to go at it on my own. But the underbelly is that no one really wanted me so I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Trust me, I had tried.
How can I do the work that I do, knowing that I myself failed at it? I don’t know. I like it, I guess. I like being in a space with people where there is no clear answer. If there was an answer, you would have figured it out by now. Also, I know the pain. I know how it feels. I know that sense of not knowing what to do next and losing all hope in yourself.
Maybe the failure part is always going to happen. There will always be pain in the job search. I mean it’s a pretty treacherous and terrible and slippery path. Maybe I got it all wrong. Would “winning” have been to get a job at Salesforce? Is that success? That can’t be the universal answer for everyone. I think winning is the process of getting to know yourself. Now I say, tell me who you are and I’ll tell you what you should do.
In my case, I couldn’t create my image in corporate America’s mold because I wasn’t allowed to. I knocked on all the doors outside, realized they were all locked, and then sat down with myself and my own inner doors. I opened those, instead. I completed my 3-year shamanic practitioner program, which was all about understanding your inner landscape and becoming an expert navigator of those lands. I sat with, and am sitting with, my leftover parts. I hold them close and coax them to sleep, petting their matted fur.
So I’m not good at the whole getting a job in corporate thing. But I am good at seeing people for who they really are and tapping into their potential. That’s a gift. I can’t take away the pain, I can’t take away the failure. But I can listen and laugh and hold your ugly parts close, too.
When my son Wolf was younger, like really little toddler young, he would wobble about and hit his head on this and that. The bookshelf, a bonk, and then - all at once - a high pitched wail. My first instinct was to run to him and hold him. Rock him tight and kiss his little head. “Give mommy the pain,” I would say as I cursed the air, yelling at the stupid bookshelf. Let me swallow it and make it all better, for you.
I was a mother bear, a metabolizer. Taking it, eating it, returning it whole and clean. This is fine to do as a mother to a very young child, but as he grew older I let him sit in the pain and helped him to cope with it. I paused before rescuing him - or anyone.
I’ve been listening to this podcast on Carl Jung’s wounded healer theory, and these Jungian analysts talk about the interplay between practitioner and client. That we attract a certain kind of client, that somehow psychically is on the same wavelength as us. And that in fact, our familiarity with the pain, however alive it is, is activated when we connect with our clients. And that this very activation is the thing that helps to transmute and metabolize it.
I was skeptical of this idea because well, energy hygiene and vampirism. It would simply not be sustainable to be around cousins of your own pain and little traumas all day. How would I be expected to hold all of that, be ahead of all of that, and answer to that when I’m still wrestling with the very same questions myself? Questions like, what is the point, what is the purpose, why do I feel trapped, how do I be the person I’m meant to be? Especially if I’m the coach with a capital C, and I’m supposed to have all the answers.
Where did this thought begin, that there should a hierarchy between practitioner and client? Between writer and reader? Between creator and consumer? Naturally I look at my personal history and I see 2,500 years of Confucius principles, steeped in filial piety and country before family, family before self. It’s my parents telling me they know the answers. It’s my high school IB teachers circling my mistakes in red. It’s the world asking what you do for a living and going into debt on a Celine bag because it points to your status.
I can’t have all the answers, just like your math teacher shouldn’t just tell you how to solve the problem. So what if I was, simply, a coach with a lowercase c. A coach companion. I’m someone who can walk with you in your own dark night of the soul - knowing that I’ve walked the similar path. That I can shine the light a few feet or even several hundred feet ahead because watch out, I’ve tripped on that same branch or fallen down that same hole. I’ve felt the whooshing and the loneliness and I still have dirt in my hair, too.
Personally I would rather have a coach that has some skin in the game, some unfinished business. Some deeply personal reason for wanting to help me untangle my shit; because maybe by being in the (to them, agnostic) trench, they get to help me punch my own demons and their arms get stronger. I don’t want a coach who knows it all. I want someone who is on the healing path, and is a little ahead of me, or is walking in parallel and can walkie-talkie with me on the weather conditions.
It sure is stormy out here, I might say.
Sure is, they reply. A nod, some silence, and then we walk on.
A few years ago, I signed up to run a 5K. This shouldn’t have been a big deal, except that it was a trail run. On a mountain. And - it was in Castle Rock, Colorado which sat perched above Denver at 6,000 feet.
I’m not a runner. I had that little stick-out belly that would protrude over my skinny jogging pants. Rude. My sports bras were tight, I always had to buy an XL or larger. I barely had the right shoes. But through a combination of fear (I didn’t want to die on the mountain) and wanting to come right up to the tipping edge of my fear, I started training.
My first practice run was at 5 pm as the sun was going down. I wasn’t prepared. By the end of the 2 mile loop, my legs felt jiggly and my eyes were going sideways. I was so hungry I got into my car and tore into an old granola bar. I’m pretty sure I stopped at McDonald’s on the way home. You know when you’re so crushed from a workout that your body is literally shaking? Yeah, that was me.
The next time, I made a mental note that running at 5 pm isn’t a good idea. So I started earlier on the mountain. This time, my legs were less wobbly. I was still a sweaty mess, but I made it home without going to McDonald’s! This, I smiled to myself, was progress. There was one part of the hill that was my favorite (a little zigzag downhill in the shade), and I spent the first half panting and wishing I was at the hill, and the entire post-hill run in a bitter mood.
It wasn’t pretty. But I got it done. How? Well, I started building systems: I had a A4 sized piece of paper with my runs on it, and it felt so good to pencil in a run after I actually did it. I started going to the gym and running on the flat treadmill for endurance. I started at 2 miles, and then 2.2, then 2.5, then 3. By the end, I was going for 4 miles at a time indoors. I had my special headphones, and I wore those fancy socks that have an “L” and “R” on them because they’re specially formulated to cradle your big toe.
You have to put in the work. The silent work that requires you to show up at the gym for no one but yourself. The foot pounding. The stretching. The conversations with your partner on who’s going out when, and who’s going to watch the kids (“you go…no, you go - I just ate.”)
This race was a beast. First of there were like five hundred people there. Then, it threw me off because it went in the opposite direction of the mountain than I usually trained (talk about a mind fuck). And, even though I had been training and training, I was so slow and basically one of the last people in the pack. I saw literal children run past me.
Here’s the thing: it’s not about the race. It’s not about that specific day, or about how no matter how hard you train, you come home and can hardly walk. The mountain is no joke. It’s about the lead up to the race. The alone time, when it’s just you, pursuing a goal, just for you. It’s the showing up even when you don’t want to. Because you want to better yourself, and you want to be the kind of person who shows up.
The job search is like this. You’re the one, after all, who signed up to do it. OK well, maybe you were pushed into it because you received bad feedback from your boss, or you’re pretty sure the company is going down the drain - slowly, and then all at once. But in any case this is YOUR decision to start searching for a new place to land.
You have to set up your systems. Your checklists. Your places that you want to work. You have to set up networking calls and informational interviews, and lead those meetings even when every cell in your body is mortified and you can’t think of anything worse. You have to apply and apply and apply into the void, just like you would show up on the treadmill and run and run and run.
We run because we want to get better at running. We also run because we hate it, and we want to get better, however incrementally, at doing things that we hate. And changing our relationship with the hate. Learning to co-exist with something that tastes awful, and somehow getting back to neutral.
So yes, there are times when the job search will also get ugly. Your little fat belly, or metaphorical belly, will be hanging out - and you’ll wonder why you signed up to do this in the first place. You’ll get rejected, you’ll get ghosted, you’ll get ignored.
It will hurt and burn and sting, and then eventually you’ll realize you don’t care as much - that you’re willing to keep going, sweat dripping down your face. Because it’s not about the winning. It’s about embracing the process of something terrible and terrifying, and finding the beauty in it - for yourself.
Your relationship with your job is a living, breathing thing. Are you getting back what you put into it? Do you see a future there? Is this what you want your relationship to be?
I think the first thing is to understand the trade that you’re making. I put in time and effort and in return I expect stability and respect. I answer emails at 11 pm and in return I expect to be recognized and eventually promoted for my efforts. What is the trade that you’re signing up for? Is it a fair trade?
What is the cost of the effort that you’re putting in? You might say to me, Mandy, it’s worth it. I’m putting in the best hours of the day, but in return I’m getting global opportunities to lead projects that I actually care about, I’m making more money than I ever thought was possible, and I can see a future here. Fantastic! Or you might say, well, I’m putting in face time, working on projects that bore me to death, doing work that I’m probably over qualified for, and in return I have a job during the recession and only feel acute anxiety 30% of the time. It could be better. Let’s get you better.
Listen, we all go through phases where we are in a purely transactional relationship with your job. That’s OK. But I want you to be awfully clear about the agreement that you’re in. In column A: what are you giving (life, blood, sweat, tears?). In column B: what are you getting (some semblance of job security, money to pay off student loans?). You must be vigilant so that when it stops making sense (which it often does, all at once and without warning) and when the fairness equation starts tipping against your favor, you are already emotionally primed to make a change.
Work by nature is hard, I don’t expect any kind of perfect utopia. But by large here are some signs that it may be time to move on:
- You are experiencing a situation where your talents and contributions are not acknowledged. You’re not seen and not being used in smart or creative ways or efficient ways. You feel that the “future” of your career slowly slipping away.
- You’ve made your dissatisfaction known. You’ve spoken up, drawn better boundaries, and made an effort to make your truth known. If you were to quit tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a surprise. You bring yourself with you, so it’s better to work on speaking your voice now and not having unhealthy patterns carry over. If you’ve tried at least twice to voice your concerns and nothing’s changed, well, you tried.
- You’ve been at the company for 10+ years and you’ve learned all you have to learn. On one hand, you’re such a valued and dedicated contributor and leader. And at the same time, all my clients who were self described “lifers” at jobs and then finally left - not a single one regretted it. Not a one. All of them relayed to me how timely their departure was, and how happy they were to have finally made a change.
So, what is your personal equation? What is the unwritten handshake agreement that you’re making with your work? And, if it’s not up to par, what do you want it to be?
When you feel lost, it’s natural to try to find yourself out there in the world. We don’t know what we want to do with our lives, so we open up LinkedIn or Indeed and type in random keywords to see what comes up. We scroll and our analytical mind takes over, seeing how we might contort ourselves to fit into this job, telling ourselves we are overqualified for this job or that. It feels cruel, like a muffin without a top. Searching for yourself this way feels like the logical solution - I’ll just keep looking until I see something that feels like “me,” or what I hope the future me can be. But the process is so opaque, so unfriendly, and our actions are met with such silence (not even a rejection email), that it becomes exhausting at best and deadening at worst.
There is another way, and it involves doing the inner work. Sitting with yourself. See, you have been through a lot. Some of it was easy, but a lot of it was hard. And sometimes during the hard stuff (e.g. the micro aggressions at work, the disagreements with your business colleagues or boss, the everyday wear and tear of not feeling valued and seen) we lose a part of ourselves. It just detaches. Goes away. Knows that it is painful and so it hides. And over time, we lose more and more of ourselves. We’re barely even present. We say things like, I don’t know where the time has gone. I don’t know how I got here.
So the first thing you must do, my dear friend, is go ahead and revisit those hard times. Sit with the pain. Think about who you were, and what it did to you, and then tell those little lost pieces that it’s safe to come back now. Call your energy back. Reclaim your power, your essence, yourself. You have to find all those lost little bits and sweep them into a pile, and then sit in that pile until you can reabsorb yourself and feel yourself again. Speak aloud the things that happened to you. Forgive yourself. Write it down, dance it out, burn the whole house down. We move on. We evolve. We must believe that change is capable, so let it be so.
Next, you will welcome all your past selves - the naive person from ten years ago, the ambitious one from five years ago, the cynical, slightly hilarious one from last week. And you will merge. All of those sides of yourself, all of the blood and guts and fear and madness, finally together again. You will ask yourself: what is it that I really want? What do I have to offer the world? Where do I want to stake my claim? Who am I? What is my medicine and what is my power?
You might not know the answers to all of that at once. But keep asking. This is where you begin. Then and only then, perhaps you can open up the dreaded Indeed and have an open heart and open mind, and let the postings be possibilities instead of a rotting fish. You can do it. I love you. The whole universe does. We are all, in fact, on your side.
For the past two weeks, we’ve been teaching the Interview Prep workshop. There are logistical things like how an interview works, but the crux of the session is to learn how to answer the “tell me about yourself” question.
The last time I resigned, I practiced my “speech” in the shower for 45 minutes. I was doing this nervous coughing/almost gagging thing where I felt like I couldn’t breath.
When I was 34 years old and pregnant with my second kid, I decided to leave the full-time world and go freelance. I knew that I wanted to have a different kind of pregnancy, one that was more relaxed…
As of 2021, Canva has over 1,400 pre-made (and free!) resume templates. Here’s why I think Canva can be a great option to create a designed resume, along with top 4 template picks for you.
The job search can feel never-ending sometimes. Take our quiz to find out what animal’s power you can rely on in this journey.
You’ve dedicated months and years to your job. Is it finally time to hand in your two-week notice? Or hang on just a little longer. Take our quiz to find out.
I closed my eyes and nothing happened. Try meditating, they said. So here I am, sitting in lotus position. I’m thinking about the weather, about how my nose itches.
I have a spreadsheet. It’s like my home base, the place I go a few times a week. It’s grown organically, and sideways. Bursting with information on stock performance.
This morning I went for a run. I arrived at the hill, the one near the fancy charter school. From the top, you can see all the houses in my development, rows and rows of perfectly spaced miniatures.
Quitting your job can be a super stressful, nerve-racking, and painful decision. You might be thinking: should I stay or should I go? Where am I going to go next?
I was 24 years old, and was interviewing for a product marketing manager position at Google. They had flown me out to Mountain View, put me up in a hotel for two nights. I had 8 back to back interviews, from 10 am - 4 pm.
Every day, I hear stories of rejection. I am a career coach, but I secretly believe that it is my job to help people rise up and heal their career wounds.