Do you have your coach certification? 

It depends which one you’re asking about!

I received my Coach Rating from the United States Parachute Association, America’s governing body in charge of sport parachuting. Earning a USPA Coach Rating is a challenging and stressful process that prepares individuals to teach and train others to become better skydivers. The program is specifically focused on adult pedagogy — the theory of adult learning — to equip skydive coaches with the teaching techniques to effectively impart critical information to adult learners.

I am also a Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®) from Scrum Alliance®, a training program that equips individuals with the tools to effectively coach project teams toward greater productivity, velocity, and delivery. Coaching, facilitation, and teaching are in fact three of the most essential skills required to be a powerful ScrumMaster capable of removing impediments and unleashing her team’s full potential.

On the other hand, I do not have a certificate from a life coaching program such as ICF or CTI, nor do I do plan on attaining one at this time. While I read the literature on leadership and coaching (such as Co-Active Coaching and Harvard Business Review) and keep myself current on modern techniques and methodologies, I am a consultant, not a coach. Through my industry experience, I have cultivated a portfolio of skills that combines communications, capacity building, workforce development, and talent retention.

As an expert in this field, I make my knowledge and expertise available to others as a consultant, in much the same way that an expert in investing or accounting or public relations may choose to consult in his or her area of expertise, without needing a certificate in teaching investing, accounting, or public relations.  

This sounds like a lot of money per phone call. What else do I get?

First things first:

You do not pay me for the hours I spend teaching you. You pay me for the years I spent learning how to teach you what I know in a few hours.

And I do not charge per phone call, because what we do on the phone is only 30% of the picture.

It’s hard to overstate how involved I get with my clients’ process.

At a bare minimum, I spend:

• One hour preparing before each call

• One hour on each call

• And then one hour after each call to write up the notes, next steps, homework assignments, and other assessments and documents as needed — which varies from client to client.

In addition to that, we’re emailing or messaging throughout the week, you can message me with questions or send me job descriptions for my feedback, and I’m helping you write a fabulously polished resume and cover letter (already worth the price of admission).

You’re never alone. That’s why I call this a partnership. I get deeply invested in your progress and tailor my service to your individual needs.

What sets you apart from other career experts I’m evaluating?

Make sure to spend some time reading and researching my consulting method.

In a nutshell, I use a combination of:

1. Storytelling to develop your professional narrative, and

2. Marketing rooted in political campaigning to develop your message.

I look at the job search just like a politician views a political campaign.

As the job seeker (or politician), YOU should be in control of your message. YOU should decide what the employer (or electorate) thinks about you.

If you’re communicating information that dilutes your key message, I’ll teach you to eject it from your narrative. If a question asked at the interview does not support your cause, I’ll teach you to reject the premise and answer a different question — without your interviewer ever noticing.

How do I know how to do this? Because I worked in politics and media. So I have an unfair advantage to offer you.

How do I know I’ll be more successful working with you instead of another career expert?

Powerful career coaches, the ones who are genuinely dedicated to their clients and show up 110% for their success, will all help you get there. But there is no one formula for success, just as there is no one way to be a career coach. You will experience extraordinary results working with any good career coach, as long as you put in the work.

So how do you decide? By determining which career expert works on your frequency. Whom do you jive with? Can you envision yourself following the plan we put in place together? Do I speak your language? Do we mesh? You’ll have the greatest success not with a specific methodology, but with the right rapport.

Bottom line: a good career expert will leave you feeling invincible and inspire you to do your best work.

But that kind of breakthrough trust is a two-way street.

So should you partner with me? Explore this website, read my writing, and give yourself time to form an opinion on whether you and I see the world in a similar way. If, after you’ve done your research, my words resonate and fill you with optimism and possibility, then we have a spark. That means we should quit lollygagging and get started. 

Why should I invest in becoming joy adjacent?

Let me answer your question with a question. Have you ever found yourself procrastinating on a project that doesn’t even seem that hard, and definitely shouldn’t take long, but for some reason seems impossible to complete?

That’s because you’re doing work that’s not aligned with your purpose…work that is not adjacent to the things that give you joy.

Because if you were doing work you cared about, you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from doing it. You’d be all fired up to get it done, and heaven help the person who suggests you get some sleep or eat a sandwich once in a while. Nope! You have better things to do!

I can come across as a workaholic, but I am not. I’m only a workaholic when I’m working on projects that are beautifully aligned with my purpose…with the things that bring me joy. When you working in your purpose, you’ll find it’s harder to differentiate between who you are and what you do. And the work you do becomes easier to perform because it is already so reflective of who you are, that by merely being, you are doing.

In short, if you enjoy your job, you’re going to be better at it!

That’s why it is so important to get joy adjacent in your work. Joy adjacency efficiently allocates your energy and talents towards the things you’re best at anyway. Joy adjacency is also the most likely to leave you feeling happy and fulfilled in your life.

You were given this incredible gift of existence and put on this Earth to do anything you want with it. There’s some pretty rad stuff you get to do on this planet! But let’s be honest: you spend most of your life at work.

You should do everything in your power to ensure that the majority of your time on Earth is spent on things you actually enjoy doing.

This is worth everything. Otherwise, what a waste of a life. 😢

You don’t get another one.  

What’s the difference between coaching and consulting?

The difference is mostly semantic, but the implications matter.

Here is a typical conversation:

• Them: “So what do you do?”

• Me: “I work with private clients on career and job search strategy.”

• Them: “Oh, so you’re a life coach?”

• Me: “No, I’m a career and job search expert. I consult. I consult on this one thing and one thing alone. I am not qualified to counsel you on your childhood trauma and I can’t fix your eating habits. I just know what it takes to get hired, and that’s why people hire me.” 

Since starting out in this industry in 2013, I never once referred to myself as a life coach. I find the concept of life coaching uncomfortable and too close to therapy. Since I have zero expertise on your life, I certainly don’t have the secret to coach you into living a better one.

I do know a lot about this one thing, however. As a communications and workforce development expert, clients hire me to advise them on a very specific, time-boxed, and goal-defined problem: get them out of the work they’re in, and into something they actually want to do.

The difference is not at all subtle: I do not coach people through open-ended problems such as personal relationships, unhappiness in life, and unresolved traumas.

I get hired with a surgical aim: to assess your career situation, inventory your strengths and talents, identify what you love and hate at work, build a professional narrative to market you to employers, and equip you with polished application materials.

Since I get hired to share my subject matter expertise in recruiting, hiring, firing, building teams, and running companies, I am a consultant, not a coach.

Why did you start this company?

Almost as a revolt against bad application practices. I have read thousands of applications over the course of my career. I want to do my part to fix what’s broken.

Joy Adjacent started very organically for me. My friends and contacts knew I was good at preparing resumes, cover letters, and interview answers. So they started coming to me, hiring me, and referring me to their networks. I haven’t done any advertising up to this point. This has been entirely word-of-mouth, built upon social proof and great client results.

And finally, passion. This is my passion. My clients’ success is the reason I get up in the morning. I lose sleep thinking about some intractable challenge my client is experiencing and spend weekends emailing back and forth if there’s an important job application deadline. I couldn’t help starting this company. I tried not to, but I got hired anyway. That’s what happens when you get joy adjacent and start doing the work you love. It does itself!

Free career advice: Whenever there’s something you care about this much, it makes a lot of sense to get paid for it so you can spend more time doing it. 

How is your experience founding and operating a talent marketplace in East Africa relevant to job seekers in the U.S. or other parts of the world?

On its face, it might seem that job seekers in East Africa are really different and face different problems than you or me.

Not so.

Sure, you might have better grammar (since English is your first language) and be more computer- and internet-literate (since you grew up with technology), but the operative problem is the same: neither of you nor my client in East Africa is comfortable with self-marketing. We are all terrible at selling ourselves! Most of the heavy lifting my company and my trainers did for our clients in East Africa had to do with developing a coherent professional narrative and communicating a persuasive case to employers.

You are a different customer, but the secret to success is the same:

It is all about selling your professional story.

Want to learn more about my unique methods? Head on over to read about my approach.

What are some of the coolest experiences you’ve had in your career?

Tons, but I’ll share a few.

In 2006, the Cato Institute, a policy think tank in Washington, DC, recruited me to launch a podcast for them. This was long before Gimlet and NPR figured out how to monetize podcasting. It was still the Wild West for all 17 of us podcast pioneers and we were just trying to figure out what the audience wanted and how they preferred to consume it. The reason Cato reached out to me was because I had a popular political blog at the time that was getting lots of traffic, and they wanted someone with storytelling experience in the digital space. We were few and far between back then!

At the age of 22, on the strength of my writing and political analysis, I was offered a high-profile job, a national platform for my voice, and the freedom to turn my ideas into action. I was booking daily interviews with politicians, journalists, and policy analysts for my very own talk show at one of the nation’s most prominent think tanks. It was absolutely the coolest gig I could have imagined, and the one that launched my subsequent career in communications and digital media.

One interview in particular stands out. After a policy forum about President George W. Bush’s 2007 Iraq War troop surge, I was in the green room with Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, who had served as Director of the National Security Agency in 1985-1988. Odom was a world-class expert on the Soviet Union, and oversaw America’s most powerful intelligence agency during the height of the Cold War, playing a critical (if still classified) role in its eventual denouement, beginning with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall just a year after his tenure.

Born in Moscow in the 1980s, I was now facing a man who had all the answers to every question I had about the most pivotal events of the 20th century. I was giddy with wonder and curiosity. I wanted so badly to ask him one thousand things. But of course I remained professional and focused on the subjects of our conversation: the war, the surge, and warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens.

Lt. Gen. William E. Odom passed away at his home of an apparent heart attack on May 30, 2008, just over a year after my conversation with him. What an incredible honor and privilege it was to speak with him. Here is that conversation if you are interested:

My reporting for the Cato Daily Podcast drove it up to #1 on iTunes Politics. Today it remains Cato’s most popular media product, thirteen years after I founded it.

My podcast interviews attracted the attention of NBC’s Washington, DC bureau, which I later joined as Political Producer. I stayed at NBC for over five years, eventually moving to New York City, where I shared the sixth floor bathrooms with the cast and crew of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. One time, I fixed Lauryn Hill’s dress for her because she ran into the bathroom just as I was coming out, and she asked very nicely. I had to oblige.

NBC was incredible as a crash course in business management that would help me to this day and in every subsequent job and endeavor. It’s where I learned how to build complex models in Excel, manage technical projects, and organize stunning events, such as a Cabaret-themed party at The Standard Hotel with one of my favorite bands, or having Rufus Wainwright out on the beach in Montauk playing a grand piano at sunset.

My last project there was the digital program management of the 2012 London Olympics. I vividly remember wrapping up on August 12, giving a report out on August 13, and getting on a plane to Kigali, Rwanda on August 14, where I was to remain for the next six years.

It was a whirlwind. One minute I’m in a boardroom at 30 Rock; the next I’m upcountry in a maternity ward of a rural hospital in Rwanda, documenting the systemic inequities that resulted in a majority of the post-natal women in the district lying with their newborn babies on the floor shortly after giving birth.

I was in Rwanda as a fellow of the Global Health Corps, a program led by former CEO and Co-Founder Barbara Pierce Bush that arose from a brainstorming session at the AIDS2031 conference hosted by Google.org. If you’d like to learn how to apply and become a fellow, feel free to reach out to me or read about the program on their website.

You’re a skydiver. Does that mean you’re a raging adrenaline junkie who takes unnecessary risks?

Contrary to popular opinion, skydivers are a very risk-averse lot. Most of the skydivers I know are highly intelligent people in very challenging and rewarding careers, ranging from doctors and bankers to engineers and programmers. The sport favors strategists, systems thinkers, and gear nerds. And none of us are here for the adrenaline.

Skydiving is about preparing for success.

Skydivers put a lot of effort into calculating, managing, and mitigating risk. We train and develop the necessary skills over many years, we meticulously prepare for every jump, and we stay on the ground when the weather promises an unsafe landing. Skydivers who put others in danger and take a cavalier attitude toward the sport get a very stern talking-to from the on-site safety and training staff.

Skydiving is about increasing our focus and removing distractions.

Focus is devastatingly powerful. It is a state of flow, productivity, and possibility. For most skydivers, the jump is a sixty-second, sharply focused journey into the present.

Much like a rewarding day at work, if you remain calm, at peace, and focused, the jump feels like a success. If you are distracted, tense, or nervous, your performance suffers, just like at work. We don’t do it for the adrenaline rush, but for the clarity, connection, and accomplishment that follows.

Here’s a really good article from a fellow jumper on reasons to skydive that have zero to do with adrenaline:

Meditation is all about tuning in, and becoming aware of your body and engaged in what you're doing. It can be an invaluable tool for learning how to work with your mind, whether that's improving your focus or finding clarity about your emotions and reactive states. Practically, it might look like focusing on a word, a color, or even nothing at all.

It’s helpful to think of each skydive as 45 seconds to one minute of pure focus. That focus includes flying with your friends and performing a checklist of everything you need to do to make that happen safely. Because things happen so quickly during a jump, there is little margin for error. We can travel in excess of 160 miles per hour, so there are very real consequences for careless mistakes. Skydiving requires you to exist in the moment, for 45 seconds of your life.

Your mind doesn’t drift, because that would be dangerous. It doesn’t wander to peruse the day’s current events. It isn’t consumed with obtrusive thoughts. You don’t think about that awkward thing you did at a party four years ago.

There is little to no time to think about the worries of the world or the very real stressors in your life: your mind is focused on the “dive plan,” as well as performing a sequence of actions (in the right order) in order to safely deliver you back to earth.

Being this present in your own life feels incredible and the positive effects can carry over to the non-skydiving parts of life too—you might find that you have a renewed sense of contentment, enhanced focus, and clarity.

Skydiving is about overcoming our limitations and conquering our fears.

This idea features prominently in the work I do with my clients. When we are afraid, we allow ourselves to be governed by our false beliefs about what we consider to be our limitations. So we don’t act, we don’t apply for that job, we don’t make that speech, and we don’t take that chance.

All accomplishment is about overcoming fear. Accomplishment is the direct result of doing daily battle against what is easier, safer, and more convenient. Effort is how we better ourselves. Fun fact about the etymology of the word “effort”: ef·fort comes from the Latin “ex-”, meaning “out”, and “fortis”, meaning “strong”. Out of strength, comes improvement. If effort were easy, it wouldn’t be called effort. Discomfort is where we grow, and we should seek it out whenever possible if we are committed to improving our outcomes.

Skydiving is about personal growth.

For me, skydiving grows me as a person, reminds me of what I am capable of every time I jump, trains me to make calculated decisions quickly, and expands my awareness. I take this courage and awareness out of skydiving and apply to other parts of my life every day. And I want to teach you to do this as well.

Skydiving is about community.

Finally, skydiving is about connecting deeply with people from all walks of life and creating real community in an increasingly fragmented world.

Here’s something I wrote about the concept of human connection in the context of a jump: