GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEER, BUSINESS OWNER and SINGLE MOTHER

I retained Leslie’s services from October 2009 through January 2010 to help me through a particularly difficult time in my professional career. I am a geotechnical engineer, who has owned a small woman-owned engineering consultancy for the past 13 years. I am responsible for leading of team of 6 authors to write a major design manual for a public transportation agency.

My recent divorce, home relocation, and a series of changes to project personnel and writing responsibilities disrupted the original 2-year project management plan for the manual. With competing personal and professional issues, I fluctuated between avoidance and panic over the manual deadlines.

When I found myself a year late on the submittal and threatened with having the contract revoked, I also found Leslie’s advertisement for a series of organizing courses she offered through our municipality recreation department.

I retained Leslie’s services to help me individually chart a course through the completion of the manual. She helped me identify a plan for progress that was balanced with my responsibilities as a newly single parent and homeowner. She recognized my commitment to being available to my 11-year-old son and the challenges of working from a home office.

She encouraged me to identify the barriers preventing me from working on the project. She listened to my explanation of the issues and prompted me to identify the steps towards resolution. She saw that my intent to produce a perfect document was paralyzing me from working on the manual at all.

With focused questions and discussion, she helped me recognize my tendency to approach tasks in an all-or-nothing way. To highlight the benefits of making small gains, for the first week, she encouraged me to dedicate 3 hours per day for 3 days per week to the project. She instructed me to outline three most important tasks to be completed daily.

She asked me to submit an email report to her daily. She served as my accountability tool...providing the bonus of being my cheerleader, too. I looked forward to receiving the daily email “pat on the back”, which Leslie offered genuinely and enthusiastically. I was inspired by the progress that 9 hours provided, and so I was then motivated to continue working forward to the deadlines. My daily emails evolved into my time tracking tool for invoicing and progress reporting.

I was able to shed the all-or-nothing perspective, and I am now able to view large projects as a series of tasks. I find great satisfaction in completing on a daily basis 100% of my short list of tasks instead of just a percentage of the mass of work. I now define progress in small steps instead of completion. I enjoy mapping out larger projects into milestones and steadily meeting the requirements to project completion.

After 20 years of managing engineering projects, I now feel that I have a system for meeting deadlines and multi-tasking as required to accept the new challenges that are offered daily.

Since I began working with Leslie, I was offered the position as Technical Activities Manager for a 2600-member professional society for the deep foundations industry. I have taken this assignment on a part-time basis as my other commitments are completed for the manual. In my new role, I have responsibilities for guiding and encouraging progress on technical tasks being undertaken by our 17 foundation committees, our magazine and journal and seminars and conferences. I have often encouraged progress of others in the way that Leslie has encouraged progress from me.

I would not have been able to consider this promising career opportunity (my dream job) without having the manual project managed effectively. I would not be able to be successful in the multitude of responsibilities this job requires if I had not acquired the skill of progressive success as opposed to all-or-nothing.

While Leslie would say that I came to these conclusions and made the changes myself, that I was very ready for change, I can say with complete conviction that I would not be successful without her direction and instruction.

I would recommend her practical, thoughtful, insightful, grounded guidance to anyone who is looking for a systematic and responsive approach to managing life. She is warm, funny, bright and sharp. I am grateful that I happened to look through the recreation department catalog to find her course offering. Honestly, I don’t know what might have caused me to think I would have the time to attend. What a satisfying feeling to know that I can again accept opportunities with renewed energy and enthusiasm.