My story: pivoting from a long-term corporate career to executive coaching

Hello, I'm Julie, your new career transition & leadership coach. When I meet with potential clients, they often ask —how did you make such a big transition from working in the healthcare industry for 25 years to becoming an executive coach?

Let me give you a quick review of my career up until this point. I started working in a hospital when I was in college —I was 19 years old and working as a Unit Secretary in Outpatient Surgery. I loved working with the doctors, nurses, the patients and challenging myself to learn medical terminology. From that starting point, I continued to pursue roles with more responsibilities and to advance with the ultimate goal of becoming a department administrator. I enjoyed working in a role doing work that helped people. Along the way, I started working with our Medical Director on quality improvement and disease management projects to help patients manage their care in better ways. That was the beginning of the next chapter of my career in quality, compliance, and education. As I made changes throughout my career and pursued ‘climbing the ladder’, I took on higher-level positions culminating with an executive-level role as Chief Compliance & Privacy Officer at a large academic health system. In between some of those roles, I started a consulting business with a partner focused on providing compliance services to smaller healthcare organizations and physician groups and spent several years at one of the large consulting firms before ultimately pivoting in 2020 to Executive Coaching.

_{Me as a keynote speaker at the HFMA Connecticut Chapter Leadership Program in June of 2023}

How did I find my way into coaching? It started with engaging a coach back in 2018 to begin figuring out…. what's next in my career? I knew that I wanted to make a change out of my Compliance/Administration role and do something different but had all the fears and doubts of how to do it as well as honestly not knowing what I wanted to do. We worked on understanding what I enjoyed doing and how that could become something I do for work. One of the questions that I pondered was —what is something I currently do for free that I truly love? The answer that kept coming up for me was mentoring and coaching. Throughout my career, I found myself volunteering to mentor/coach others regularly, both formally and informally. I enjoyed sharing my expertise with others and helping them work through challenging situations. From that insight, I started to look into coaching certification programs.

During the pandemic in 2020, I was let go from my consulting role. I felt like this was the time to pursue something different. I decided to pursue a coaching certification through iPEC. As I started my coaching training program in 2020, I knew the skills I obtained would benefit me no matter what I decided to do next. During my training program, I networked with my friends and colleagues to talk with them about what I was working on and just to stay connected. As I shared this idea of being an executive coach with my network—everyone said—oh my gosh, that is exactly what you should do—you are SO good at that! As I progressed through the coaching training program, I decided to establish a coaching business and begin coaching individuals 1:1.

Hello 2023. As a Career Transition & Leadership Coach, I guide and support Healthcare leaders to identify their next values-aligned career steps and transition with confidence. I understand how working in an industry/role for an extended period can cause us to feel stuck or like that is the only thing we can do. It can be challenging to navigate the landscape of pursuing something different. However, I found from personal experience of working with a coach and having that support, I was able to find the next step in my career and begin a completely new chapter. I can help you do the same thing!

Warmest regards,

—Julie