Dr. Relly Nadler: Today’s show is creating your personal vision and mission. We are going to take a closer look at how Maggie Mistal can help anyone to engage their heart and mind in pursuit of their talent by creating their very own personal sense of purpose, and statement, and how you can too.
Cathy, welcome to the call.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Hi. Thanks, Relly.
I am delighted today to welcome a friend to the show. Maggie is going to really help all of us understand what we can do to create our own personal vision and mission.
We are going to participate with her and hopefully, our listening audience will be able to create their own vision and mission with us today.
Today, we are going to talk about self-management and about how you can be your best.
Maggie Mistal is one of the most exciting career coaches that I have ever met. Maggie is not only a career coach, but she is a certified life purpose and career coach. After being director of learning and development for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for several years, she became the Martha Stewart Living Radio Career’s Coach on Serious Radio and XM Satellite Radio.
Maggie hosts, Making a Living with Maggie, every Wednesday at 4pm eastern, 1pm Pacific on Serious 112 and XM 157. So, if you are keeping track it’s XM 157.
Now, if you would like a free trial of a visit to Maggie’s Serious Radio show, you can go to www.maggiemistal.com and we will get that out to you again as we go through the program.
Maggie is also a career expert who has been someone who has appeared on CNN, and her media is quite available to people and she is going to be talking today about how to create a mission and a vision statement. I’m sure she’ll give you some more website information as well.
Maggie’s passion to be honest with you is her career consulting practice and working with individuals to identify their ideal careers and allowing them to make very meaningful career changes if necessary.
She has worked very, very hard and very tirelessly with unsatisfied employees of all levels and backgrounds to help them to seek out what’s best about them and her coaching to get them on track to their careers that are really going to make them deliver on their sense of purpose, is what Maggie is all about.
Top corporations have visited with Maggie, such as Pepsi, Coke, Credit Suisse, Martha Stewart Living OmniRadio, and they also seek Maggie’s help in developing their employees and managers.
Just in case you haven’t noticed, Maggie has been quoted in the New York Times, the New York Post, Foxbusiness.com, New York News Day, and the Boston Globe, just to name a few. To read any of these articles and to check out Maggie’s free career videos, you can visit the press page on her website. Again, that is www.MaggieMistal.com.
You can find Maggie volunteering for street wide partners using her career coaching services to help unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers which is fabulous. She finds time in her busy schedule to always help others.
With her spare time, she continues to paint. She loves to do impressionistic style artwork and she actually sings in cabaret.
We are going to talk to Maggie about this new passion of hers but she also has a weekly career advice blog and you can go to www.maggiemistal.blogspot.com and we will come back to that in case you didn’t catch it.
I just want to take a moment and welcome Maggie to the show.
Hello, Maggie.
Maggie Mistal: Hello, Cathy. Hello, Relly. Thanks for having me on the show.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: It is our pleasure. We are delighted that you have found time between all the things that you’re doing to spend a little bit of time with us.
What Relly and I really want to talk to you about is this vision and mission statement development process and we are going to get into that. But, Relly and I always like to find out a little bit more about the folks we have on the show.
So, if you could just help us by telling us about how you became interested in being a career coach. We will kick off with that question.
Maggie Mistal: Oh, sure. It’s an interesting story and I’ll try to make it brief.
Ultimately, I was struggling. I love how you gave such a great introduction because I really do work tirelessly to help people who are so unhappy in their work because I was one of those people. I worked at Arthur Andersen, fresh out of college. I was actually an accounting major and CPA. I got my CPA, so that was my undergraduate degree and I found out that I didn’t really like numbers that much. It was a transition within Arthur Andersen, thank god it was a good company that supported people and I was able to work my way into consulting and eventually to organizational development consulting, which is more the people side of the business.
But still there was something missing, so it was really the Arthur Andersen debacle. If you remember Enron, that was my wake-up call. I really was ready to move on from consulting. The lifestyle was very draining being on the road and working long hours. When Arthur Andersen went away with the Enron scandal, I was basically set free, in my mind, that this was my chance to really figure out what I really wanted to do with my life.
In Body and Soul Magazine, I found the Life Purpose Institute which is out of San Diego, and I went through their program and I liked it so much that I got certified as a coach and started taking all of my Arthur Andersen friends through the Life Purpose process. My coaching practice has grown since then from helping these folks.
So, it was really exciting for me to take a problem that I had, find a way to solve it, and now be able to help people do the same.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Maggie, tell us a little bit about, we always like to ask this question, who has influenced you as a leader? Then we’ll get into more specifics of what you’re doing today.
Maggie Mistal: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it is amazing. I think over all the years, and I think you guys would agree, in our own ways and in our own lives.
The folks that have really influenced me are the ones who lead by example. For me, in most cases, those have been my managers and my mentors.
I mentioned that I worked at Arthur Andersen, which as a company really did develop leaders through mentoring. I had some amazing managers, senior managers, partners who took an interest in my development and my goals, and really taught me how much further you can get, and faster you can get in your career when you have that kind of support and experience.
I have to say most recently, my recent manager at Martha Stewart when I was a director of learning and development. He was the vice president of organizational development there. Ron Thomas is becoming, he has already been a thought leader in my mind, well known as a thought leader in the HR realm because of his leadership.
What I learned from him is that you need to include the people you are leading in the process. So, if you are developing a new system or a new way of doing things, do focus groups, incorporate the employees. I do the same thing with my coachees, I don’t tell them what to do, I really enlist them in the process and as a leader, I think that is so important.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Well, that is always really important I think. Cathy and I talk about leaders, that the more you get people involved, the more committed they are going to be and which is exactly what you’re saying.
Maggie Mistal: Yeah, you’re not designing things in a vacuum. I think that was one of the struggles I had as a consultant. We would go into organizations to help create change, whether that was putting in new systems or new processes to get things done more quickly or more easily. As a consultant, you can’t come in as the expert, even Arthur Andersen’s approach was to really team up with the client.
I think a team effort and a team approach yields better results and better answers than any one of us could on our own.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: I could not agree with you more. Having been, as you know Maggie, in a sister company originally, as you know, Arthur Andersen was an umbrella organization for both Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting. Back in the late 1990s, Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting separated, so, I became a part of the Andersen Consulting organization, which then grew into Accenture.
Maggie Mistal: Which thankfully still exists today.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Yes, and it is one of the top consultancies globally because of the teamwork and the mindset that you just shared with our listeners. You always come up with better answers when there is more than one person helping to solve a problem like they say – two heads are better than one. That’s why Relly and I do this radio show together because two heads are better than one.
Dr. Relly Nadler: That’s right.
Let’s get into a couple of the other questions that we wanted to ask you, Maggie.
So, how did you come to work for Martha Stewart Living Radio?
Maggie Mistal: Well, Relly, it’s funny because again I have to practice what I preach, that’s another leadership quality right?
My favorite career tool is the informational interview, and I think it can get you new opportunities, new jobs. It can help you figure out your career.
So, the informational interview is where you go talk to someone in the line of work you are interested in. So, when Arthur Andersen was ending, I asked my network of mentors, these wonderful people I had the opportunity to work with.
I said, “Listen, I think the place for me is within the HR function within an organization. I don’t want to travel, I want to work locally in New York. Do you know anybody who has done HR, in companies in New York?”
And it so turns out that the head of HR at Martha Stewart was a former Arthur Andersen senior manager and I had actually worked with her husband.
It was a really nice warm introduction to the world of HR and I really just went to speak to her about what HR is like and would my skills translate from being a consultant in organizational psychology and development and how would that work. The best part about it, Relly and Cathy, is she basically said, “We are looking to build a management curriculum, we are looking to expand our career development tier. Is that something you would like to do?”
So, I didn’t go in looking for a job, but once we were able to learn more about each other, she had a need and saw me as a person who could fit that need. So, that is actually how I landed the role. It was really through my network and doing an informational interview.
I recommend this to all my clients, especially people who are trying to figure out if they want to make a career change or if they want to try to get a foot into an organization. That’s the best way to start, is really on the information side of things as opposed to just depositing your resume through the website. That can be a black hole sometimes.
Listen to the entire interview, above.
Relly
