49: Need some A.I.R. with your career change?

Madeline Miller, a Gen Z and Millennial career and leadership coach, shares her A.I.R. Formula—Alignment, Influence, and Resilience—to help professionals connect with a more fulfilling career. 

Drawing from her own career switch as an entertainment attorney turned entrepreneur, Madeline breaks down the mindset shifts needed to:

• Align your work with your values 

• Build influence

• Develop the resilience to keep moving forward

"If you are going through a career transition, mindset is the most important part," says Madeline, founder of Coaching with Madeline. 

Episode Highlights:

• Madeline's career trajectory that led her to develop A.I.R.

• Alignment: Finding a sense of purpose by aligning your work with your values and skills

• Influence: The gap between who you are and how you want to show up

• Resilience: Developing healthy emotional resilience to get through setbacks

• Managing impostor syndrome

• Handling uncertainty

• How to get started with A.I.R. for a career change

Find Madeline Miller at:

Website: https://coachingwithmadeline.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madelinemillercoaching/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/millermadeline/

Career and Leadership Coaching Packages: https://coachingwithmadeline.com/career-leadership-coaching-packages/

E-book: Redefining Success: The Burnout-Free Formula for Influence and Impact

https://coachingwithmadeline.com/ebook-the-burnout-free-formula-for-influence-and-impact/

Music credit: TimMoor from Pixabay

Podcast info:
What's your career switch? What do you think about this episode and the show? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Lixandra: Hi, everyone. I'm Lixandra Urresta, and this is Career Switch Podcast. This show is here to encourage you to take action with whatever career change you're considering or working on. Maybe you're trying to switch industries or professions or break out on your own and start a business. In some episodes, I talk to people who've made their own career switch, whether by choice or circumstance. They share the good, the bad, and the truth about their journey, including what worked for them and what didn't. In other episodes, I speak with experts who offer their best career advice on challenges that can come up during the process of making a career change. After all, it takes guts to switch things up, and it's not easy. However, it is possible. So I hope you hear something in this episode, an idea, a suggestion, a piece of advice that'll spur you into action with your own career switch, whether it's taking that first bold step or trying something new. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. 

Perhaps you're contemplating a career switch or you're at that beginning stage where you're still figuring out what else you can do with your skills. Or maybe you're in the thick of it and you've hit some mental snags. You could likely use some AIR. That's A-I-R. And if you're in your 20s, 30s, or early 40s, this episode is especially for you. 

My guest today is Madeline Miller, a Gen Z and millennial career and leadership coach who specializes in helping young professionals connect with a more fulfilling career. As the founder of Coaching with Madeline, she developed the AIR formula after navigating her own career switch. 

In this episode, Madeline shares her journey from entertainment attorney to entrepreneur and how it led to greater self-awareness and a career that truly reflects her values and skills. She breaks down how alignment, influence, and resilience, or AIR, can open new possibilities and get you through the tough times when making a career change. 

Hi, Madeline. Thanks for joining us today. Let's dive in. Who are your clients, and how do you help them?

Madeline: So when I started coaching, I recognized there was a real need for coaching that would reach Gen Z and millennials. What that means in practice is that I would tend to coach more one-on-one millennial managers. And then with Gen Zs, because they don't tend to have their own one-on-one coach and the company's not providing that kind of thing for them, I tend to do more group coaching. I have a lot of social content, which I hope supports them. I'm trying to create a kind of community where they can turn to for advice and support. One of the things I am going to produce, well, I am in the process of producing, is a self-paced online program that I'm really hoping Gen Zs will be able to take advantage of, which embody the practice of executive coaching, but in a way that's much more accessible for them. So they're the main people I work with.

Lixandra: Are any of your clients also career changers or in the process or even thinking about switching careers and they come to you for help?

Madeline: Yes, yes. And that's actually sort of how I started because I was somebody that changed my career a lot. Even within the first five years of becoming a lawyer, I changed jobs and industries four times. When I say industries, like within law, So I sort of thought that my practice might just be with people undergoing career transitions, but as it grew and I developed my formula, I realized that there were different aspects of work life that I can, I could support people with, but really I initially started coaching to support people through career transitions because I'd gone through that process myself.

Lixandra: Yeah, let's dive into that because your own career's transition helped you develop your AIR formula, which is the topic of this episode. So tell us about your career switch.

Madeline: I went to law school in my late 20s, which in the US is not uncommon, but in Australia, it sort of tends to be because we do law as an undergraduate. So I sort of had spent my 20s, I had a college degree, obviously, but I'd spent my 20s really searching for something that I thought might give me a sense of purpose. And this might resonate with a lot of people, particularly early career people, but I felt like I'd done nothing but wanted to do everything. And so I tried a lot of things. And I think when I went, not I think, I know when I went to law school, it wasn't so much a burning desire to be a lawyer, although there were parts of being a lawyer that appealed to me, it was, I felt like that would give me my sense of purpose. I would learn this body of work and therefore I could turn up and say, Hey, I'm a lawyer. And I, therefore I had an identity. And so I got through the law degree, I did a JD in Australia, and then I started out in the law firm. And that first year I really struggled because I think I felt like this was the moment it was all meant to crystallize and make sense for me, but it really didn't. And I was incredibly anxious. I actually had full-blown insomnia, I remember. I mean, I definitely catastrophized how bad it was for me at work. But having said that, I didn't really feel like it was the right environment for me. So I then went to the UN in Cambodia and worked in international criminal law. After a year, I realized, oh, hang on, there's a lot of more qualified people than me. I'm not sure where this will take me. I'll go back to Australia. I landed in government. I worked as a government lawyer. After a little bit of time, I was like, oh, hang on. I'm not sure this is for me. I want to do intellectual property. I moved my way into becoming an entertainment lawyer, which was no small feat. And then I eventually moved myself to the U.S. to do a master's in entertainment law at UCLA to land in Hollywood. I'm sure most people would find your career trajectory very impressive. On one hand, if you look at my resume, It could look like there's this very strong through line. Okay, she became a lawyer. She was like wanting to be an entertainment lawyer. She moved her life to Hollywood. You know, she did it. But really, I mean, underlying that is just a lot of me bouncing around in my early to mid thirties, still not really knowing what I wanted to do and feeling like all these external changes were going to provide the answer rather than realizing that it's going to sound a little bit corny, but that, you know, the answers really lay within. So that was my kind of progression up until being a lawyer.

Lixandra: Did you also think that because you had invested in law school, I mean, the expense that comes with it and the time, that you had to make law fit?

null: 100%.

Lixandra: That's why you tried all those different types of law.

Madeline: Absolutely. There was this huge sense that like, this was meant to be the thing. And if it didn't, like the big existential question was like, what's wrong with me? And 100%, there was a lot of money that went into it. It was a big commitment. And after going that far, I was like, well, what am I going to do? What will I do now? I think I even was looking at doing another master's degree. I'll do something in communications. I was like, no, you've just got to see this through. And I will say like seeing it through was a good decision because I really did get some excellent opportunities, right? Like working and living in Cambodia, I was interning at the war crimes tribunal. It was amazing, right? Like having worked in corporate law was really good for me professionally. coming to Hollywood, getting that job at a production company, ending up as the production attorney on the James Bond franchise. Like it was incredible. And I learned a lot. So I'm not somebody that goes, Oh, I regret, I regret, but it definitely was marred by the fact that I wasn't really connecting, I guess, my interests and passions and skills with how I really wanted to be showing up. And that was just this thing that was niggling at the back of my mind all the time. So how did you end up in coaching? I found in the workplace, a lot of people would come to me, particularly younger women, but not exclusively, asking for advice as to how to manage this conversation or how to ask for this, whatever it is, promotion or what they should do in this situation. I really enjoyed strategizing and thinking through the interpersonal dynamics at work, the power imbalances, how we can show up in the workplace in a way that feels really good for us and has a lot of integrity. And I simultaneously noticed that I wasn't showing up that way, right? Like I didn't, I was getting more senior and I didn't like who I was becoming. I think that I was in really stressful, conflict-driven workplaces, like, you know, law and entertainment. They're pretty big industries. You put them together, right? There's a lot of difficult, big personalities. And I felt that I'd never really taken the time because I'd been searching for like this job. I'd never really taken the time to work on myself professionally and think about what type of leader I wanted to be. So I had this sort of dual tracks, like I was being sought after for my advice, but I was also really struggling with how I was showing up, right? I didn't really like who I was being. So I had to go really deep into myself and sort of consider, okay, like you possibly are a person that people look up to and are seeking advice from, because that's sort of what's happening to you. Like, what is the best use of your skills? And I thought, you know, I really, enjoy working with other people. I really enjoy helping and trying to be of service through my own experiences. And I've now done a lot of work to sort of think about how we can be doing better. So, you know, it sort of was like a natural evolution. And then somebody I knew, a friend of mine from back at the UN, actually, she had been doing coaching. You know, we had big discussions about work and all these things. And one day she said, Oh, I've got another client. Like, would you like this client? And I just, I took the client and then I was like, this is it. This is what I want to do.

Lixandra: Great. So now that we know about your career journey, Madeline, tell us about AIR, the formula that you developed for coaching your clients.

Madeline: So AIR stands for alignment, influence, and resilience. And it was really driven by my own experiences, but also by observations, working with people around the globe. I believe that everybody wanted to feel like they were doing work that was of value to them. So they wanted to feel purpose-driven in their work. Now, Purpose driven does not necessarily need to mean mission driven. You know, I think there's this conflation of purpose with you have to be saving the planet, right? It's not like everybody needs to be an activist in some way. I would say purpose, and there's a lot of research on this. Purpose is really when you feel that you are doing something that aligns with your skills and gifts, right? Like you have an aptitude in. and that you get a sense of satisfaction, completion, whether that's through recognition or reward or just your own sort of personal, like I can tick that box and close that loop. So purpose is subjective. So I always say alignment has to do with finding a sense of purpose in your work and connecting your work with your professional values. So that's the sort of key piece of alignment.

Lixandra: Yeah, I can see how that's such an important part of our lives overall.

Madeline: Yeah. Otherwise it's sort of, I didn't like to tell people at parties, this is what I do for work. Hmm. That's so telling. Yeah. Cause I was like, well, that doesn't reflect who I am and they're going to think I'm this way, even though that way may not be bad. It's just not who I think I am. And that is a huge psychological thing, right? Like I want to be seen for who I am and valued for what I have to offer. So that is the alignment piece of air.

Lixandra: Well, for me, when I worked in pharmaceutical advertising, I just didn't want to talk about my job with anyone because I was just so unhappy and unfulfilled.

Madeline: Yeah. Cause I mean, I worked in law and that's kind of boring. Right. But then I worked in entertainment law. That sounds interesting, but I still was like, eh, yeah. I don't want to talk about it.

Lixandra: Oh, that's actually a red flag to anyone listening. I mean, if you don't want to talk to anyone about what you do.

Madeline: If you, if you are not the least bit interested talking about what you do, you know, that might be a problem. Yeah.

Lixandra: So A is for alignment and the I in your formula?

Madeline: I is for influence. So influence is obviously connected to alignment because through alignment, we're trying to find out, okay, what do you want? Who are you? What's important to you? And then the influence is really building on that because I work with people to understand this is who you are. And this is how you want to be showing up and how you want to be seen by others. What is the gap? You know, what are we, what are we missing here? And then that's how we start to dive into sort of topics that we might more naturally associate with influence, you know, like effective communication, building out executive presence, nonverbal body language. But a lot of it, or in fact all of it, comes back to who are you and who do you want to be? How do you want to be showing up? Because I find when we have conflict at work, when we have to manage a difficult conversation, when we're feeling demotivated, the way we choose to respond or react to those situations has to be, again, in alignment with how we see ourselves and how we want the world to see us. And to me, that's the best sort of barometer. So yes, I work on sort of like, I guess, the more traditional forms of influence, again, like communication, but it really comes from that strong sense of identity that we've worked out through the alignment part. So that's how I work on influence. It's not a quick fix, right? It's not like, okay, just stay this at the meeting. It's like, let's go into how you want to be seen, what's not happening for you and why. And that's how we're going to start changing your behavior.

Lixandra: Okay. And the last part of AIR, resilience.

Madeline: Resilience, I say, is the third part of the formula because if you have great alignment and you're building out the right influence, you will naturally develop healthy emotional resilience. And the reason I describe it that way is I think resilience comes from as Brene Brown was getting in the arena, having a go, getting knocked down, getting back up again. But if you're not doing that from a place of self-awareness, alignment, and influence, like maximizing the skills you have and developing the skills you don't, you're not going to recover in the same way. I would say it's not a sustainable form of resilience. And I think that resilience has been positioned a lot socially as just hard work and grit and pain and suffering as like, well, that's what makes you strong. And I'm like, no, if you're not doing it from a strong place of alignment, and if you're not really understanding how to build influence, like it's never, it's not going to be a sustainable form of resilience. So that's why I say like alignment, influence and resilience are the three, you know, ingredients for as a formula for sustainable success. But it's not like I teach resilience, the resilience will come from you continually taking action, but from a place of greater self-awareness.

Lixandra: And would resilience help you deal with some of the setbacks that can happen while making a career switch?

Madeline: Absolutely. If you haven't worked out the alignment and the influence, you're not going to be strong enough, in my opinion, to make bold decisions. And if you do make a decision, you're going to have so much more anxiety than you need to. And that was like me, all the decisions I made were filled with anxiety, filled with chaos, filled with drama. Like I made my life so much harder. And I think you can make bold decisions, but if you have that healthy emotional resilience, you're going to deal with setbacks better. You're going to bounce back from failure, rejection, all of those things.

Lixandra: So one common setback for career changers is imposter syndrome, which you mention on your website. Another one is uncertainty, since we don't know how long it'll take to make a career change and if it'll work out the way we want. How have you helped your clients through these kinds of setbacks?

Madeline: So I think imposter syndrome and uncertainty are part of every career. And I think, you know, thinking we can eliminate those things is not practical. It's how we manage them. You're 100% right. If we do decide to make a career transition, that can be really terrifying because we're so, even if we're not happy in what we're doing, we're sort of familiar, right? We have the skills, we have the knowledge, whatever it might be. And suddenly taking that into a new terrain is going to be scary, right? And there's a lot of self-help stuff out there about like, you have to feel the fear if it's not scary, your dream's not big enough, all of that stuff. Having done the shift myself recently into a fully entrepreneurial platform as a coach, I now understand where those things come from because every decision is mine and every responsibility lies with me and there's no blueprint. In terms of how I manage it, It is much more of a mindset piece than I ever experienced when I was working beforehand, because before there was a little bit more structure laid out for me. Now, not everybody doing a career transition is going to become an entrepreneur, right? Like they might be transitioning into another sort of executive career. That is still going to be scary. If they're so used to getting the recognition and relying on the skills they have to suddenly need to perform in a completely different way. and try and impress upon new people that they got this. So this is where the healthy emotional resilience comes in, because it is going to be for them, just like it is for me, very much around mindset more than skills. And I think imposter syndrome is less about the skills you have or you don't have. It's very much around the way you view yourself and the way you're going to be showing up. So it's a mindset thing. If you are going to go through a career transition, the mindset is the most important part.

Lixandra: Can you give us an example that illustrates this point?

Madeline: I had a client who was transitioning. It wasn't like the sharpest transition. It was still somewhat tech related, but for him it was a big transition, right? And a lot of people, a big one in tech and other related industries is like going from say like a Google or something into a startup. Or the other way, right, from a startup into like a large organization. But the organizational culture and infrastructure is completely different. And that's when, you know, what they grew up with in the workplace and got to know is taken away from them. And they have to struggle with a whole new set of experiences that don't have a lot to do with their technical ability necessarily. One of the clients I'm coaching now was exactly that. He was at a large tech company. He's now moved to a startup. And his big thing is like, he says to me, like, I feel capable in my technical abilities, but I've never had to manage a team in this way. Everybody's looking at me for solutions. Like everyone's looking at me for not just solutions. Everyone's looking at me for support. because it's a senior position, like I'm now responsible for like rallying the troops together and like consistently keeping them motivated about this vision. And he said, I don't know how to do that all the time because I'm sort of also just adjusting to this whole new workplace. And I also feel like my time is sort of taken from me in ways that wasn't before. I have a lot of people who need me, right. And they're needy. And I've never experienced that because before it was very like structured where I was. So with him, we worked out that an ongoing theme in his prior job, which was continuing in his new career, was that he was a people pleaser and he didn't like to set boundaries with the people. When he was in a different environment, those tendencies didn't show up as much because there was a lot of buffering and his role was quite defined. When he moved into a different workplace with a different set of needs, those tendencies were starting to really deplete him. So we didn't work again so much on his professional capacities and how to articulate a vision. We worked on his interpersonal skills and how he was going to be better at setting boundaries with his reports so that he wasn't being completely depleted at the end of each day. So my point is that when you make a career transition. We think of imposter syndrome as, oh, I'm not good at my job, whereas actually it can come from like, oh, I'm being pulled and stretched in ways that possibly I've managed to avoid until now. And this challenge is making me feel like maybe I'm not up for the job. And it's often the interpersonal stuff that makes us feel like an imposter, not necessarily the technical skills.

Lixandra: Okay Madeline, so for any listeners who may be intrigued by what they've heard so far, walk us through how you work with a new client who's looking to make a career switch.

Madeline: There's two types of people. There's people that say, I want to switch careers and I don't know what I want to do. I want to switch careers and I'm deciding between this, but I'm still scared to do it. How do we approach it? I would always start from the same place. The first few exercises I do to work through my alignment module is like, okay, do you know your professional values and what they mean to you? Do you know your negative professional values and things that you really want to try and avoid? And often it's easy to know what you want to try and avoid when we've had a little bit of experience under our belt, right? Like, I don't know what it was for you, but for me, I was like, I don't like hierarchical environments. I don't like closed door policies. you know, I really value consistency in, you know, these types of things that I haven't had that. Now, it's always going to be a bit of a crapshoot when you take a new job. You don't know entirely for sure what that culture is going to be like. But I do say to clients like understanding your professional values is going to help you so much when you either start your job search or when you're interviewing, because you are going to be able to ask really insightful questions to try and elicit as much information as you can to understand how that culture operates. So the values are key. Then we would begin to craft a purpose and mission statement. And for that, I would again, go high level. Like I wouldn't even think necessarily just about work, but I would ask them to come up with a few examples of times they felt really engaged in their life. You know, when they felt really fulfilled, satisfied, proud, whatever it might be. And then I would ask them to extract some of the feelings they felt and then some of the things they were doing that made them feel good. So that's how we start sort of working out like the skills. And you know, it's interesting at work, often the things we feel the best doing are very aligned to how we feel in our personal life. So again, like if you like being of service that will show up in your personal and your professional life. So we will craft this purpose and mission statement, which may not be relevant to any specific job, but it's meant to capture the essence of that person. And I've seen that work really well with clients. I've had clients in the category where they're like, I don't know exactly what I want to do. I've done all these things, but I don't know what's next. And working, you know, spending some time working through the values and the mission statement has given them this beautiful kind of personal statement that they use as their baseline. Right. And from there we can explore industries, category of work, and we can always use it as a kind of thing to assess against. I had a client take her purpose and mission statement, which was, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was very much about using certain gifts to create certain types of environments so people felt a particular way. It was very broad. We didn't know exactly what that meant. adapted that for LinkedIn. And then on LinkedIn, she was sought after. She actually was headhunted on LinkedIn to be a membership manager at a private club. And suddenly she was like, oh, membership management in particular. This is it. This is my skills. I love creating a nice environment. I'm a creative. I love people to feel good. I love like that kind of, you know, personal customer care, like all of these things she really cared about. She didn't even know that world of, of work existed. Right. And suddenly by putting that on her LinkedIn, people came to her. And now she's a membership manager at a luxury spa in Los Angeles, right? And she loves it. She works with people that are really aligned with her values. She gives, you know, she feels like she's of service to people. So the values and the purpose and mission statement are so key because they can open up entirely new worlds that you may not have thought about because they're really reflecting your essence.

Lixandra: So your AIR formula helps open the possibilities for your clients because, you know, when you're trying to figure out what else you can do with your skills, you need a wider net.

Madeline: I've had a couple of people who've come to me and they're like, I just want to find a new job or I want to start applying for jobs. And they really just want to look at industries. And that's part of it. You need a good resume. You need good LinkedIn. You need to be looking at job boards, but that's not what I do. I'm not there to help you look at job boards. I'm there to do that preparatory work. So you have exactly that, the creativity and the freedom, and you've opened your mind up to possibilities that maybe you didn't consider before.

Lixandra: Great. So as we wrap up, how can listeners find you, Madeline?

Madeline: So I have a website. It's coachingwithmadeline.com. I'm also on LinkedIn and I'm on Instagram at Madeline Miller coaching. I also coach one-on-one and people can send an inquiry through my website.

Lixandra: And you specialize right in working with Gen Z and millennials.

Madeline: That's right. Yeah.

Lixandra: Gen Z and millennial managers.

Madeline: And I do more work now with companies working on sort of intergenerational differences and group coaching for younger employees. Cause I do think that a lot of this stuff I teach should be introduced at an early age. And I think that's where we're sort of missing out, right? People are not being taught to think about these things early on.

Lixandra: Thanks to Madeline Miller for being our guest today. You can find Madeline on her social media and you can learn more about her coaching programs on her website. coachingwithmadeline.com. That's where you can also pick up her ebook, Redefining Success, The Burnout-Free Formula for Influence and Impact. You can find links to the resources mentioned in this episode and more helpful information in the show notes and on our website, careerswitchpod.com. So what's your career switch? Are you motivated to take action after listening to this episode? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. We'd love to know, along with any feedback you have about the show. Let us know too if you'd like to be a guest. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn at careerswitchpod. And please rate, review, and share with your friends and colleagues. It'll help get the show out there. Thanks for listening today. Till next time.