How to Stress Less and Sleep More

Have you ever experienced this vicious cycle? It goes like this:

You're stressed out, so you have trouble sleeping, but then because you're not getting enough sleep, you feel more stressed. When you get up, after hitting the snooze button a few times and only being resuscitated by a caffeinated beverage, you still feel like a shell of yourself.

You know that 3pm coffee isn't going to help your head when it hits the pillow, but it seems like the only way you're going to make it through that afternoon meeting. So the cycle continues...

Learn how to break that cycle and restore your energy.

My signature wellness workshop “Stress Less, Sleep More” focuses on stress and sleep, and the impact both have on our health and job performance. I teach participants how to take make lasting changes no matter what life looks like or how busy they are. With these simple but effective tools, they can get back to feeling like their best selves.

If you’d like this offered where you work, reach out for a complimentary consultation to learn more about how to support your own efforts to get your energy, and life, back. 

In the meantime, here is a 15-minute guided meditation to get yourself back to a calmer state - you can even use this if you have trouble falling back to sleep. Sweet dreams!

Courageous Career Choices: Episode 2

The second episode of the "Courageous Career Choices" monthly series is here! I'm interviewing people from all industries, both entrepreneurs and employees, who have made intentional decisions (not just major career changes) to do work that's aligned with their values. The goal is to to inspire you if you're curious about:

• the impact that our work can have on our health 

• what makes people move from thinking about leaving their jobs to actually taking action

• how to manage stress and prioritize wellness when in a big transition (or simply in your everyday life!)

This episode is with Alfredo Axtmayer, cancer survivor and career changer, now a Nurse Practitioner in Oncology at Yale New Haven Hospital. He's the epitome of someone who has shown courage in both his personal and professional life, and shares some inspirational messages we can all learn from. 

Please fast forward to 2:30 as Facebook and Zoom didn't sync and those first 2 minutes are garbage! If you have questions or comments, or want to tune in to next month's episode, head on over to the Facebook page.

Are You Making Career Choices With Courage?

The first of a new monthly series called "Courageous Career Choices" is done! I'm interviewing people from all industries, both entrepreneurs and employees, who have made intentional decisions (not just major career changes) to do work that's aligned with their values. 

The goal is to to inspire you if you're curious about:

• the impact that our work can have on our health

• what makes people move from thinking about leaving their jobs to actually taking action

• how to manage stress and prioritize wellness when in a big transition (or simply in your everyday life!)

The first interview was with Jen of Wander Free Wellness. You can watch here (just skip to the 1 minute 30 second mark to ignore the tech trouble!) or head to the Facebook  page if you want to leave a comment or question. The next three months are scheduled and in the events section there so you can RSVP to receive a reminder when we're going live! I truly hope you enjoy this series.

How to Create an Effective Job Search Strategy

There are many common missteps that happen when trying to land a job. Submitting applications and never hearing back or refreshing your inbox every few minutes to find out whether or not you have been selected can certainly make you feel helpless.

Learn how to use a simple, two-pronged, proactive approach to feel energized and empowered instead. The more you operate from this position of strength when searching, the more motivated you'll be to take time to do the work AND you'll have more energy to do other things you love.

When creating a job search strategy, it's important to keep two things in mind. You want to have both proactive and reactive goals as part of your approach. In this video, I'm going to define what those are and how to create a really effective strategy to manage your job search with confidence and to feel empowered in the process. 

Let's talk about reactive goals first because this is where I find most people spend the majority of their time. When I talk about reactive goals as being part of your job search strategy, what I mean is just reacting to things that are coming your way. The most common area where I see this is people just applying to positions they see posted online or they're getting job alerts for. While this can be a helpful part of the process, it is not where you should spend the majority of your energy. But that is how most people end up navigating their jobs or when they're approaching it on their own. 

The reason I don't recommend spending all of your time here is that sometimes positions get posted, and they've actually been filled already, or there is another candidate in mind. So when we see them posted we think, “Great, I'm starting at the front of the line,” but realistically, there might be other people who are already being considered ahead of you. If you're spending all of your time and energy justifying to those, it means you're missing a lot of opportunities. You want to be the person that is at the front of the line, and in consideration before something even gets posted. 

This brings me to the proactive approach to goal setting when you're navigating a job search. Being proactive or setting proactive goals, is referring to networking. I know this is not everyone's favorite activity, and there's a lot of stigma and generalizations made around networking. So to kind of counteract, I want to talk about what I mean by that. While your longer-term goal is to land a job, the networking I'm talking about is focusing on your shorter-term goal.

It's important to learn about the roles that exist in the field you're targeting. One should learn what skills are really valued and would make you stand out from your competition. Then ask questions from people in positions that you're targeting like how they landed them, what was the hiring process, what were the interviews like, etc? Focus on building connections and relationships more authentically. It’s so much more than just approaching networking, like many people think, which is “Hi, are there any openings? And can you make sure my resume gets to the top of the pile?” When you shift your perspective to think about networking in this mindset of really learning and building connections, it will help you incorporate more of these strategies into your search. 

A quick fact I’d like to share with you is over 80% of people land positions through networking. So if you're spending your time 80% on the reactive side, and 20% networking; I'd invite you to flip flop that. I'd rather see you spend way more energy building relationships and learning how to make yourself stand out than just blindly submitting applications online. 

One other note on the reactive side is I'm making the assumption you're really tailoring your application materials with each position. Many employers are using artificial intelligence to scan your materials before they even make it to a human being to vet your qualifications. If you're not taking those extra minutes to make sure you're connecting the dots for the employers, then you're spending even more time and energy on things that are not most productive to the process.

Hopefully, this helps you create more of a clear-cut approach to navigating your job search. Each week, I invite you to spend time on both the proactive and reactive goals so you can feel like you're not just waiting to see openings come up. We're also not just waiting to hear back from people for informational interviews. This approach is a more holistic way to ensure that you feel empowered in the process, and you always have some actions to be taking instead of refreshing your inbox every five minutes and waiting for other people. 

I hope you find some value in the lessons I shared today. If you have any questions on your job search, feel free to leave a note in the comments or reach out for a free 30-minute consultation. I'd be happy to be a sounding board and hear what you've been doing in your strategy and see if there's room for any improvement. 

Thanks for watching, and best of luck in your job search.

How Long Should A Cover Letter Be?

One of my goals for 2018 is to create more video content, knowing that people have different learning styles and also feel more connected when they can see the person they're learning from. 

...truthfully, this was a goal for 2017 but I procrastinated because while I love presenting, shooting and editing videos of myself is a totally different experience! I know I'll get more comfortable and my true personality will come out more with time, so I'm honoring this growth period and not letting perfection be the enemy of good. 

So without further adieu. here is my first video (outside of my online coaching program)! It's called "How Long Should A Cover Letter Be?" and you can view it through clicking below.

When helping people with their job search, one of the most common questions I get asked is, “How long should my cover letter be?” If you want more information on the pros and cons of writing a cover letter, I'm happy to share with you my free cover letter writing guide. 

For today, we're going to focus on the length of a cover letter. When you're writing the letter, you want to keep in mind you only have a really short amount of time to deliver a lot of valuable content to the employer because they read your application materials so quickly. With that in mind, knowing you have only a short period of time to deliver valuable information to an employer about why you're the best fit for the role, your cover letter should never be longer than one page. Also, it shouldn't come close to the bottom of the page either. Let’s discuss a little bit more about the structure of the letter so you can get a better sense of what really goes into it. 

In your first paragraph, and I say that loosely because it's only a sentence or two long, should cover what position you're applying for and how you found out about it. This section is where you would name drop if there was someone referring you, or someone you did an informational interview to include a quick summary sentence talking about what you're going to discuss in the rest of your letter. 

For example, you could say “I'm writing to apply for X, Y, Z role, and I found out about it after Bob Smith referred me to this opportunity. The combination of my x y, and z skills coupled with my A, B, and C, makes me a great fit for this position.”

Then you get into the next, the second and third paragraph, which is what I call the meat of your cover letter. So this is where you're really thinking strategically about what is most important about you and your background to emphasize to an employer. It should not be a regurgitation of what's on your resume. It's more of a narrative approach to maybe fleshing out an example or a story that showcases multiple qualifications you have for the role. 

The most important part of a letter that most people leave out is why you want to work for that organization. It doesn't have to be again a verbose thing. It can be a short and sweet sentence or two, explaining what about this organization and what they do is unique and why that makes you want to deliver and use your skills for them in this role in particular. 

So hopefully this helps you get a little bit more clarity on the length, as well as the structure of your cover letter writing. If you have any questions feel free to shoot me a note or download my cover letter writing guide posted in the comments below.

If you learn better through reading, you can see this information in my previous cover letter blog posts or my free comprehensive guide. If you have questions, leave a note in the video comments! 

How To Figure Out Your Career Path

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”

— Aristotle

When evaluating career paths, it can be tempting to look everywhere but inside of yourself for the answers. Common questions that come up when exploring ideas are: What’s valued by society? What does my family think? Hey, Google- what pays the most and where’s the growth? Which companies are rated the best to work for?

While some of the information than can be gleaned from these questions can be useful, it’s wildly ineffective to start there.

Why?

If you’re asking “What career path should I pursue?” and want the world to curate an answer that’s specifically relevant to you, you’re going to be disappointed. Searching in this broad, unfocused, and generic manner will make you extremely overwhelmed, as occupational options are endless. “One estimate suggests that 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that aren’t on our radar yet.” (source)

Use self-understanding to find a job that's the right fit. Get your guide here.

Additionally, you know yourself better than anyone else.

Slowing down, turning inward, and getting more clarity on your values, interests, personality, and skills (VIPS), and how those align with potential career paths, is an incredibly valuable place to start.

Many people get to this point, but then get overwhelmed by how to do this self-reflection. What questions do you ask? How do you think through your interests and different career options?

Knowing this, and that many people like to work through some of this on their own instead of or before working with a coach, I I created a comprehensive 20-page self-assessment guide. It's a combination of open-ended questions tapping into your values and interests, along with more formal assessments like the SkillScan. It wraps up with resources and an action plan for you to have concrete steps to move forward with your exploration.

In my 10 years of coaching people, I've found that the more clear people are on their VIPS, the more certain they are about their career paths, and the happier they are in their work. Start with finding your why, and then the rest of the answers will come.

I hope this helps you in your journey towards finding work you love! 

Flow + All About Aspire

I'm working on something REALLY exciting that I'm planning to launch this fall, and because of that I'll be doing a few blog posts per month instead of a weekly edition.

When I started to put pen to paper on this new idea for Aspire with Aileen, I found I was completely enthralled and in a total state of flow (and I'm not talking about a "yoga flow" in this case!).

If you've never heard of this concept, here are two great articles to get you up to speed:

• Your Ideal Career is the Intersection Between Flow and Meaning

• Find Your Flow and Success Will Follow

Do you experience this in your career? In your personal life? How can you make changes, personally or professionally, if not?

Photo from article linked above

Finally, I recently realized I never shared an interview I did with Just Us Gals Boston. If you're new to this page or want to better understand why I focus on helping clients with both personal and professional goals, click here to read the full article. And if you already know you're going to be working on a career goal, here are 4 ways to work towards it without sacrificing your physical or mental health. 

Want to stay informed about this upcoming announcement? Members of my monthly newsletter will be the first to know and you can sign up here! 

Should You Quit Your Dream Job?

Dream Job. What’s yours?

I was looking back over old emails when I saw what I wrote to a reference of mine a few years ago. “eeeee this is my dream job!!” …yes, I wrote “eee” and no I don’t recommend you do that in your emails to your references, unless you’re very close to them like I was in this case!

Considering I'd left that job to start career coaching on my own full-time, it got me wondering if I’d labeled any other former jobs the same way. Sure enough, after some digging, I found older emails about other jobs I’d held where I described them in just the same way.

Now, maybe my 20-something-year-old self just had a tendency to overuse the phrase, but it got me thinking about our development and how it shapes our perspective of what our “dream” is…

In my opinion, one of the keys to both our personal and professional success is the ability to continuously reevaluate the things that matter to us.

But it can’t stop there and happen in a vacuum.

We then have to look at how our life is, or isn’t, providing space for us to experience those things.

So often, we don’t take the time to slow down long enough to do this reevaluation (in either a formal or informal way).

When I led a work life balance workshop recently, I invited participants to do a pen-and-paper version of this exercise. Once they completed it, and looked truthfully at their lives, they were shocked to see how little overlap there was between their values and their daily actions.

When we name what these disconnects are, it helps us to understand where possible sources of anxiety and frustration may come from.

For example, let’s say one of your values is spending time with friends and family, but work is so busy that that’s been more of an afterthought. If there’s no indication you’re going to be less busy any time soon, you may understand why you’ve been getting cranky on Sunday nights before the workweek begins.  

So, what changed for me 10 years after initially using this "dream job" phrasing?

My passion for career coaching remained strong, but my interests and skills expanded to include corporate wellness. The combination of some changes in my office, coupled with an unanticipated spike in clients, led me to feel pulled in too many directions. I had a check-in with myself (and my husband!) to assess it all and realized that I valued the success of my business, and the ability to tap into these newer skillsets, more than the work environment of higher education I'd previously adored. It took some time to process the notion of leaving this previous dream behind for a newer one, but I haven't looked back since.   

How can we be proactive about making sure we’re living in alignment with our values, before too much time passes and stress builds to scary levels?

Here are some ideas:

• Prioritize bringing more awareness into your life, in general. Continuous awareness of how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking will make it less likely that you’ll wake up one day wondering how you ended up wherever you are. Meditation (especially apps like Headspace!) can be a great way to increase awareness while decreasing stress.

• Schedule check-ins with yourself. Just like many employers have performance reviews, you could set up an annual or semi-annual values review.

• If you need extra accountability, schedule a check-in with a friend, colleague, or career coach. It doesn’t have to be anything formal but some people need this kind of structure for it to actually happen. It can also be helpful simply to get out of your own head.

These are just a few ideas. In what other ways can you bring more self-reflection into your life?

Make a commitment to put these practices into place now, so that if life moves along and you notice your dream job is no longer fulfilling you in the same way it used to, you’ll be empowered and informed enough to take action.

P.S.

I'll be talking more about self-reflection and mindfulness as it relates to the way we eat our food in a blog post soon. If you're interested in the topic, I'm hosting a free "Mindful Eating" talk in Boston in just 2 weeks too!  

Aspire with Aileen Manifesto

In case you're new to my website, my manifesto is one of the best ways I know how to introduce myself. It encapsulates the three areas of my business (career counseling, health coaching, and yoga) and hopefully helps you get a sense of what perspective I bring to my work with my clients. 

I believe life is short, but the days are long if you’re not happy with what you’re doing or if you’re uncomfortable in your own skin.

I believe we hold more power over our paths than we typically imagine. Our original circumstances are certainly out of our control, but if we ask the right questions of ourselves, we often find that opportunities to ignite change are plentiful.  

I believe laughter and food are both medicine.

I believe that our breathing can be an amazing instrument of change.

When I wake up in the morning, my very first thought is how grateful I am for my health and how excited I am to be spending my day doing what I love. It breaks my heart knowing some people feel nothing but dread from the moment their alarm goes off until their head hits the pillow again.

I believe we often get in our own way, unintentionally, and that the power of human connection can be a magnificent force in helping us shift our perspective.

I believe in my mantra “To know even one life has breathed easier because you’ve lived- this is to have succeeded” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and hope to help you breathe easier. 

Photo by Pure Style Photography

I couldn't find a way to incorporate my assistant, Buster, into my manifesto so I'm sharing a photo of him with me to make my introduction complete! (It may not look like it in this photo but I swear he loves me too.)

More on Analysis Paralysis

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about what I do. When I describe it, some people seem surprised to see a passion for both career and health coaching while others realize how interrelated the two are.

One commonality I've noticed is that in both areas, I see “analysis paralysis” because of a tendency to rely a lot on other people and sources for making decisions instead of turning inward.

I see this in career coaching when people ask everyone (including Google) to tell them what to do with their lives. They’re left with a million opinions that are all based on the values of the people giving the advice. Every person has a different perspective because of their differing values and that, coupled with using the interwebs to get advice, leads to lots of conflicting information and overwhelm. 

In health coaching, this shows up when my clients try to follow all of the latest diet and fitness trends. The recommendations from one source are typically the opposite from another (For example: Fat is your friend! Fat is the devil!) and can lead to instant confusion and frustration. While there's a lot of good information out there, a lot of it assumes that what worked for one person will work identically for another and ignores the important concept of bio-individuality. 

This makes sense when you think about how we’re typically taught about wellness –  we often eat the way our families or the government has told us to, based on their traditions or definitions of healthy. With exercise, many people stick with the sports that were required in school or the general guidelines given by medical providers or social media.

So, what do I recommend people do differently?

The answer in both cases is essentially the same:

Stop. Slow Down. Breathe. Turn Inward. 

In career coaching, I always advocate for people to make decisions based on their internal drivers. Specifically, using their VIPS (values, interests, personality, and skills) to guide them can increase their likelihood of being satisfied with their jobs. Many people come to me when they’re finally ready to do this. They admit that they've had a nagging feeling in their gut all along that something was off, but they just followed the advice or expectations others put upon them.

In health coaching, I help people learn how to quiet the noise and chaos of the wellness world. I share ways to pay attention to not only what they eat, but also the way they eat it, and how they feel afterwards. I also encourage them to find the type of movement they actually enjoy.

When people change things up and eat the foods they feel nourished by, and exercise in the ways that their individual body craves, they're much more likely to continue than when they just go through the motions of following what they've been told they're "supposed” to do.

This may sound so obvious, but can you think back on a time when you behaved differently than this? Maybe it’s still going on in some areas of your life today? 

These are just two examples of how I see people tune out what their intuition has to say about the career move that will make them happiest or the foods that actually make them feel good. By solely looking externally, people get so much more overwhelmed by all of the options available and that’s often what makes them too afraid to make changes or take any action.

I didn't know what graphic to use for this post, so this my best attempt at an "I'm thinking" photo. Image by Pure Style Photography

Though career and health coaching are indeed very different, in both areas I help people slow down, cut through all of the information overload, and see that it really can be as simple as turning inward to find the answers. It all comes back to asking the right questions and taking the time to do the work.

If you’re interested in learning more about either of these areas of coaching, reach out here for a free 30-minute consultation!

Simple Resume Writing Tips

Has it been a while since you last updated your resume? Or perhaps you want a quick "how-to" on approaching this thing that has potentially been on your to-do list for ages? Below is my attempt to succinctly share how to navigate this process. 

Overall Strategy/Approach 

1. Always, always, keep it updated

This one is hard to stick to, but so worth it if you do. If you haven’t and want to start now, go back and take a look at past performance reviews, your job description, or even your work calendar for the last few months (or years!) to jog your memory of not only what you do, but also what you’ve accomplished.

Similar to what I discuss in my cover letter guide (grab it at the bottom of the page!), some people get paralyzed by perfection. Start where you are instead of feeling like you need to have the most beautiful phrasing in the world. You can edit and refine later but begin by pretending you’re telling a friend what it is you do on a day to day basis, season to season. This simple exercise has helped hundreds of my clients move from a blank page to a full resume.

2. Don’t have someone else do the entire thing for you

I’m an advocate for asking for guidance on your resume, but having someone else put it all together for you is completely different. The ability to use your own voice to describe your experience is such a critical skill to have in your life. You know your story best, and employers will want to hear the version of the story they read in your application materials. Make it your own.

I’ve worked with clients who have to go back to the person they paid to write their resume every time they want to change it. For everything... even a tiny tweak in formatting or the use of one new word. You want to be able to make tailored versions of your resume for every application you have, and having to go to someone for this every time will slow things down (and out of pocket costs will go up!).

Getting tactical 

1. Looks matter      

There’s debate about how long employers spend actually reading your resume. It’s safe to assume if they’re feeling generous, the maximum amount of time you’ll get on a first read is 30 seconds. So, while it may sound shallow, the aesthetics of your resume really matter. If you give them any reason not to want to read it (it’s too busy, it’s too long, and so on) they just won’t. Along the same lines, think about the way we read (left to right, top to bottom) and use the prime real estate on your resume accordingly!

2. Top 3 rules to follow no matter what industry you're applying to

I could write 100 pages on resumes and still not cover everything. This is how I summarize the most important criteria for content to everyone, no matter their industry:

• Be results-oriented: say what you did AND why it matters

• Quantify when possible: Taught 450 elementary students vs. Taught students makes a big difference

• Use bullets and start them with strong and varied action verbs: paragraph format takes too long for employers to read + the thesaurus in MS Word is a goldmine

3. General Housekeeping:

• Your margins should NEVER be smaller than .5 on all sides (at the smallest!)

• Always send your resume as a PDF when possible

• Be mindful of the file name for your resume – If you accidentally apply to Starbucks with “My Dunkin Donuts Resume” it’s going in the trash. “Resume Version 284” isn’t the best look either.

• Use spellcheck, but have someone else (like me or a friend) take a look at it – asses and assess are both words, but you’re a lot more likely to use one of those on a resume over another!

I hope this helps you get started on updating your resume, which is often the hardest part. Next up is deciding what to include in a cover letter.

If you have questions or need help, as always I'm available for a free 30 minute consultation, and resume writing is one of my favorite things to help clients through (nerdy, but true).  If you’d like to take an even bigger picture look at what it’s like to work with a career coach, the linked post goes into a lot of depth on that as well. Good luck!