Before I start telling you about my experience, let me tell you a bit about Monika Ciereszko. Monika is a career and mindset coach who helps her clients to achieve their goals by changing their mindset. Monika works with individuals from a variety of industries and professional backgrounds. She combines the idea of wellness and mindset to her approach with career coaching, ensuring that each session with an individual is specifically tailored to them. Prior to becoming a career coach, Monika previously worked in HR for 15 years and 11 years at top global firm Shearman and Sterling. In addition to this, Monika has often said that she enjoyed working in HR but her true passion was to coach individuals and help them to be the best version of themselves.
My coaching sessions started off with Monika guiding me on how to make my CV stand out to potential recruiters. Within this session she emphasised how important it was to proof read everything more than just a few times and that attention to detail is crucial. Being able to write a short, detailed CV is a challenge and certainly a gift if exercised right. As Monika has worked closely with lawyers in the past, she told me that I needed to start writing like a lawyer which includes paying attention to detail, noticing mistakes and learning how to differentiate your writing style depending on who you are writing for. These key points not only allowed me to create a good CV but also helped me to gain some insight into how lawyers think.
As previously mentioned, Monika not only helps clients with career coaching but also mindset coaching. I was really struggling with maintaining a routine during quarantine which resulted in an increase of my anxiety levels. I told Monika about how I was feeling and she instantly started coming up with solutions. She told me that I have to be determined to face my obstacles and that I was in control of how I spent my day. We went through the perfect routine for me and I have been able to stick to it ever since. If you have read my article on how 'you are not defined by your academic results' then you would know that I have struggled with coming to terms that my A Level results are not the best. This is something that I wanted to address to Monika by explaining that I was worried about being able to secure a vacation scheme or internship in the future. Together we came up with strategies on how to overcome this internal block and went over how I can portray my other skills in an application form. This included how to carefully select a few skills for the application form and how to add context to them. Overall, I have gained invaluable knowledge and advice from Monika in just under two months. Not only have I been able to stay productive during quarantine, but I have also been able to find a balance between studying from home and taking care of myself. In addition to this, my biggest takeaway from coaching would be how I have restructured my mindset and worked on my bad habits. With the help from Monika, the bad habits that I had are slowly shifting in positive ones that no longer affect my productivity.
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