21. On Career Transitions & Building a Sustainable Work-Life with Cathryn Caruthers

Overview

I was excited to speak with Cathryn Caruthers, an executive coach who specializes in working with senior and emerging leaders in navigating major career transitions.

In this conversation, Cathryn offers great tips for managing a sustainable career, dealing with impostor syndrome (or she’d call it impostor phenomenon), which most of us experience even high performers, and paying attention to what might lead to burnout.

This is an episode for people at all stages of one’s career, as Cathryn offers tips that apply from the time you’re in college to what we should all prioritize to sustain us throughout our careers and support our ambition, the foundational elements of staying healthy physically and mentally and taking care of our relationships.

I also found Cathryn to be an inspiration for us all to really think about sustainability when we manage our careers and make choices that consider both what we want personally and professionally. What impresses me about Cathryn’s own journey is how she has been so attuned to herself and paid attention to how her career needed to support the kind of life she wants to live.

I loved this conversation, Cathryn! Thank you for sharing your own experiences with us and your smart guidance for us to navigate our career transitions with more confidence and ease, while building more sustainable careers.

More about Our Guest

Cathryn Caruthers is an executive coach known as The Success Strategist who is on a mission to maximize the potential of high performers. Cathryn’s clients are senior and emerging leaders at some of the world’s most successful organizations – including Fortune 50 companies – and she helps them navigate major career transitions. Cathryn is committed to getting results and even greater success for her clients. She’s been identified by Insider as one of the “World’s most innovative career coaches.” And prior to becoming an executive coach, Cathryn worked in finance and started and led a consulting practice.

Topics Covered

  • Cathryn shares her own career journey and transitions with us over the course of the conversation. What impressed me about Cathryn’s journey was how she was so attuned to herself and paid attention to how her career needed to support the kind of life she wanted to live. She remains ambitious and invested in her career, but she's shaped her career to fit her life vs. the other way around.

  • Early in your career, Cathryn advocates getting internships while you’re in college to get relevant work experience and once within an organization to network and make connections to get others to advocate for you and keep an eye out for opportunities.

  • We talk about burnout and how it often comes along with health issues materializing.

  • When thinking about career arcs, a key myth that Cathryn wants to bust is that careers are linear (so many on the podcast share this point!). From her perspective, when thinking about your next career move, don't plan too far out; start closer in.

  • Another important thing to avoid is comparison. As she notes, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” or “Compare and despair.”

  • Cathryn is another guest who advocates paying attention to get a sense of what might be next for your career and importantly to listen to your body and your intuition. What are they telling you? Pay attention to the signals that might be saying you're ready for something new. She shares how it's when we resist our intuition that we get into trouble.

  • Cathryn speaks to the point we make on Sustainable Ambition that your satisfaction and ambition ebb and flow over your career, from decade to decade. When thinking about building a sustainable career, she advocates getting input from those in your life—your partner, your kids, whoever is impacted by the work you do—to help inform decisions you’ll make.

  • When considering your next step, first get to know yourself and what you want and avoid jumping into searching for jobs on the career websites. If you invest in getting to know yourself first and identifying what you want, the rest will be easy. For example, get clear on your must haves, nice to haves, and deal breakers. Cathryn shares a great resource, the book “Pivot: The only move that matters is your next one,” by Jenny Blake (links below!).

  • Cathryn’s primary piece of advice to manage your career across the decades: stay healthy physically and mentally and take care of your relationships, because if these foundational elements aren't sound they'll impact your ability to execute in your career and even deliver against your ambitions.

  • We talk about the often-discussed topic, impostor syndrome (or she’d call it impostor phenomenon), and how it is present for most people, even high performers and men and women. So, we need to accept this and learn to live with the discomfort when we go into stretch or growth assignments. Cathryn offers some tips on how to work with impostor phenomenon and get past it.

  • We round it out with answers to some rapid fire questions. Cathryn’s best time saving or productivity tip: follow the rule of three. Just have three things that you're going to do everyday, three professional things and three personal things, and do those first.

  • And Cathryn’s final piece of advice: remember that it's all gonna work out. Have faith in yourself, especially when you feel your confidence is shaken. Believe in yourself. Believe in your track record. And the right people and the right opportunities will pop up for you when you're ready to receive them.

Resources Mentioned

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21. On Career Transitions & Building a Sustainable Work-Life with Cathryn Caruthers

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2021Kathy OnetoRight Aspiration, Right Effort, Right Success