Lauren Eichner-Doyle, CEO of Getting Results, is a renowned corporate coach and behavior modification specialist with early career success in behavioral therapy, training, and development. Her book, Find Your Flavor: A Recipe for Discovering your Ideal Career, guides teens and young adults in creating successful careers. In this interview, we explore Lauren’s journey, coaching approach, and vision for personal and professional development.
What inspired you to write this book?
After helping so many young adults to discover their ideal careers and give them the tools to succeed, I was compelled to write this book. Even though clients came to me from different places, the outcomes were always amazing. The book actually evolved as a result of the coaching work. I realized that there was a real process that could help hundreds or thousands of people and not just the few that were lucky enough to come from families with means that could afford to hire a professional one-on-one coach.
I’m at the stage in my career I’ve achieved great success and using my purposed to help as many people as I can matters most. I’ve never set out to be an author. My books to date have always just needed to be written for the shear purpose of sharing a concept or process that my clients have found life changing.
Can you tell me about the book?
Figuring out your career path is the second most important decision you’ll make in your life, yet with limited life experience, young adults struggle to ‘get it right’. This big life choice is often met with stress, anxiety and even depression. They are mislead into thinking that it is as easy as picking a major, getting a degree and then, ‘whala’, make loads of money. Instead, determining a satisfying, life-long career is an evolutionary journey.
Choosing a major is like ordering off the kids’ menu–the options are generic (pizza, pasta or chicken fingers) and the flavors are bland. Imagine having to eat off the kids’ menu your whole life. You’d end up like so many in their careers, bored and discontented. Instead fulfilling careers are developed over time by introducing intriguing flavors to spice it up and making ‘work’ enjoyable and rewarding. I help readers sample with various ingredients related to their interests, lifestyle goals and blend that with the person they are at the core to ensure their chosen career is a reflection of ‘who they are’, not just something they do from 9-5, only to live for weekends and retirement.
What does the title mean?
The title is a play on the analogy I use throughout the book. As described above, discovering your ideal career is more a process of sampling different ingredients to determine the flavors that enhance your career recipe. Rather then pick from the kids menu when it comes to vocation (doctor, artist, programmer or teacher), they learn to discern the more intricate distinctions that take a bland choice from a list of majors to an exciting blend of interest to create a long-term, fulfilling career. For example, a mechanic is not limited to fixing cars his whole life, he can blend an interest in airplanes with the need to work for a big company that offers great benefits and end up building airplane engines for GE.
What did the subject(s) of the book think of it?
My clients are really the ‘behind-the-scenes characters’. This book was actually born as a result of the life-changing experiences my clients had when going through the process outlined in the book. Many of them were so frustrated and filled with anxiety about not being able to figure out how to choose a fulfilling career that they would be successful with that some of them even experienced depression that led down some pretty dark paths. So, writing this book was actually started long before I put words on paper. It was being written with each coaching session I had with my clients.
What are the subject(s) doing now?
This is the best part. I often hear back from my young adult clients and their parents months or years after working with them. And I love when they reach out to me to tell me the transformation that happened as a result of the process I outline in the book. I even had a call from a client’s father on Thanksgiving Day who wanted to let me know how grateful he was for the work I did with his son. Because the difference was remarkable. He went from being lost and depressed to being clear and excited about his path. From failing grades to all ‘A’s. Clarity and confidence in his path even sobered him up after relying on drugs to get through ‘meaningless’ days. So it is the stories like this that compelled me to write this book.
Did the book make you like the subject(s) more or less?
Telling others about the book made me realize just how important this book is as a resource for young adults. And really anyone who is contemplating their career path. I really enjoyed writing this book and was surprised at how easy it actually was to write. It was far easier than my first book, The Hijacker: Overcome Self-Sabotaging Behaviors. That one was a much more challenging book to write.
As a result of writing Find Your Flavor, I am more determined than ever to get this work out to anyone who needs it.
Did you find yourself more or less sympathetic toward the subject(s)?
Definitely, more so.
Do you understand the subject(s) better now?
I believe I do. I’d picked apart the various elements that go into successfully determining a career path. I like to say that it took a subject matter that I was ‘unconsciously competent’ at and forced me to consciously pull it apart.
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