Bianca’s dream job had turned into a nightmare. We helped her find a way out.
Bianca is 34 and is a born saleswoman, a complete natural. She’s got a brilliant personality, she’s engaging and she’s great at building relationships. Two years ago she was doing well in her job, but was ambitious to make the leap into a really senior role.
Then suddenly it all happened for her. After a call from a head hunter and a successful job interview she landed the Big Job she’d been after. The prospects were good, the salary was more than she could imagine. She was excited and determined to make the job a real success.
That’s why Bianca first came to dream on. She wanted advice and coaching in order to get the most out of her new position. The first meeting went well, and Bianca was upbeat and full of enthusiasm. But by the second meeting it was obvious that she wasn’t so happy.
We talked things through with Bianca and it became clear that she needed to work on fully understanding who she was. We did a number of tests with her to work out her strengths and personality type and to build up a clear picture of what she was about. Through this we worked up a vision of the type of business she would thrive in and the type that would suffocate her.
It became obvious during this exercise that the reason she was unhappy was that her current job was playing to all the things that were not her. For example Bianca’s very relational, she’s an extrovert and she’s not good on her own. Yet this job involved being by herself working from home, doing business by telephone and email and not getting out and meeting people.
At first our approach with Bianca was to work to try to make the best of her current job. She didn’t want to be seen to have failed. So we talked about how to set targets, and gave advice on business skills and how she could improve things.
These were tough times for Bianca. We provided her with a lot of support, and gave her a space where she could come and talk about how it felt.
After 6 months, things improved a bit, but it became clear that the best option would be for Bianca to find another job. We worked with her to make sure that this time she found a job that played to her strengths and that she didn’t fall into the trap of taking the first big job that came along or just looking at the salary. We advised her on the type of questions to be asking at interview. We wanted to make sure that she was interviewing the company as much as they were interviewing her.
And the good news is that Bianca has found her job. She’s back to her happy self and it’s going well.
Bianca’s continued working with dream on. She’s incredibly talented and by giving her a space to reflect, we hope that we can help make sure that her time in this new job will be a very happy one indeed.
dream on