Who Needs a Professional Story, Anyway?

A professional story is the story you use to talk about your education, motivation, skills, experiences, goal, and vision of the future. With a professional story, you can change the way you talk about work. Break free from the resume trap and start telling a story about what you do that includes you and not […]

Women Need Big, Audacious Goals

Here’s the situation this week. Really, it could be any week, but this happened this week. I’m giving a workshop on creating your personal professional story. Everyone has done their homework and brought their audacious goals. When it’s time to share goals, some people want to cure cancer or eradicate a disease. Others want to […]

How Your Audacious Goal Invites Others to Join You!

During a workshop, a participant asked me if using their audacious goal was honest. As she put it, “If I tell people then I am going to cure cancer am I lying to them?” The short answer is that it depends on your phrasing and situation. If you tell them you’re going to cure cancer […]

How to Set a Big Audacious Goal for Your Personal-Professional Story

Are you ready to start working on your ? It’s the story you develop to introduce yourself in a professional setting. Only this story isn’t just built on your CV, it’s designed to incorporate the rest of your life as well. Read my blog post about the structure for an introduction. The first thing you’ll […]

How to craft a personal statement that’s actually about you

About three years ago, I was on vacation with my family staying on the German-Austrian border. We were visiting Neuschwanstein, the castle that inspired the Disney castle at the tail end of a family road trip from the Netherlands to Croatia and back home. My husband was working on a grant application at the time […]

Self-Editing your Social Media

Everyone’s on social media and some people seem to mix the personal and the professional fairly willy-nilly. It’s not just Hollywood stars showing us their kitchens but also entrepreneurs posting gifs of themselves dancing with their babies. The personal and the professional are more intertwined than ever these days. If you’re posting on social media […]