reflection Archive

Difficult conversations are hard. It’s hard to tell someone they’re not meeting your expectations, and, it can be hard to ask for and to listen to someone telling you how you aren’t quite measuring up. Of course, not all feedback conversations are critical. But frequently they are, and frequently they get caught up in messy […]

Whether you’re offering feedback or receiving it, the entire process can be rife with challenges. At its worst, poor feedback can be personally attacking, laced with opinion, or hard to make actionable; but at its best, feedback serves as the guidance we need to become better at our work and for ourselves.  Feedback is a […]

With so many employees working in both remote and hybrid office environments, many managers are thinking through what performance reviews should look like in the year ahead. In this article from Forbes, human resources professionals offer up tips for managers on how to approach the employee performance evaluation process.

Planning to look for a new job? The first step in any strategic job search process is identifying your career/job target. In this LEARN with @LifeAfterWake webinar, our Associate Director Lauren Beam (’07) will walk you through several steps and exercises for narrowing down what you’re looking for in your job search.

By Rachel Lord (‘13), Strategy and Operations at Clearbit in San Francisco, CA Ninety percent of start-ups fail. With venture backed start-ups, the investor’s business model is to distribute funding in anticipation that a few will produce outsized returns on a relatively short timeline. While this fact could seem daunting, there is so much growth […]

If we learned anything in 2020, it’s to expect life to veer off in a different direction at any moment. As you contemplate career and life goals for 2021, this article by Joan Michelson in Forbes offers up practical tips and prompts for crafting your goals moving forward.

By Mark Covington (’13), LPC, Psychotherapist and PhD Candidate, Washington, DC Disconnection, dysfunction, dysregulation, and distress are what therapists and those in academia call “The Four D’s” of why most people enter into psychotherapy. These are also reasons why I believe that my clients enter treatment. Most find that they are dealing with the throes […]

By Allison McWilliams (’95), Ph.D., Assistant VP, Mentoring and Alumni Personal & Career Development, Wake Forest University We can’t plan for every outcome or predict the future with any certainty. Indeed, too many of us spend too much time focused on the “what if’s” and not enough time on the “what now’s.” The “what if’s” […]

By Lauren Beam, M.S., NCC (’07), Associate Director for Mentoring and Alumni Personal & Career Development at Wake Forest University In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe developed the Social Readjustment Rating Scale designed to help individuals identify and score themselves on a list of 43 major life events, with each life event holding […]

The only constant is change. And, right now, we’re experiencing a lot of it. So, how do you work through it, effectively? How do you “control what you can” when everything seems so out of control? In this piece for Psychology Today, Allison McWilliams, Assistant VP for Mentoring and Alumni Personal & Career Development, shares […]