Your Personal Career Throughline

I taught gymnastics for 10 years. In gymnastics, each skill builds on the one before. In a beginner class, you might first learn a forward roll, practice walking on your toes on the beam, and a glide swing on the bars.

And then there’s the handstand, the mother of all gymnastics moves. I say this because the handstand is used in every event: floor, beam, bars, and vault. On the floor exercise alone, the handstand is the building block for the cartwheel, roundoff, front walkover, back walkover, back handspring, front handspring, and handstand pirouette, for starters.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

In our careers, we have the equivalent to the handstand in gymnastics. It is that one skill that enables you to build other skills. It is a throughline that has been present with you your entire life. It gives you reach and range into new skills, functional areas, and domains that would not be possible without the basic skill. It even translates across fields, and gives you a strong base to start over in a new field. And chances are, you’ve been doing it all your life.

For me, it’s the ability to develop and equip others to stand in their power. 

When I was just 4 years old, parents of a younger friend of mine asked me to help their daughter learn to speak. She was 3 years old and hadn’t started talking yet. At the time, I was learning Spanish in preschool, and I thought if anyone was going to learn a language, it was going to be something other than their native tongue, so naturally, I tried to teach her to speak in Spanish.

When I was 14, I got my first job as a gymnastics instructor. I helped develop gymnasts for the next 10 years.

In my 20’s, I started to run 5-kilometers and signed up for a few races. I convinced some friends that had never run in their lives (one of whom had a mother battling breast cancer) to start training with me and run to raise funds for breast cancer.

At 29, I started managing teams at a global consulting firm and developing talent within my staff. 

At 38, I volunteered in my one-year old’s Montessori classroom and had the privilege of connecting children with the materials in the classroom that allowed them to discover their own potential. 

At 41 years, I founded my coaching practice and put all my eggs in the career development basket where I equip and help individuals develop themselves.

What did you love to do as a child? And how has that continued to show up in your life in all that you do?