We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mary Margaret Skelly a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mary Margaret, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

I have a lot of respect for teachers and the grueling nature of their jobs. I know a lot of them want change and lobby for it constantly and thanklessly. So I share my opinion just from my own memories as a student and from what I observe in people mid-career.

So much about education needs to change! A lot of people I work with are happy in their fields, but many are not. They got so used to “passing the test”. To looking around to see what people expect of them and doing that, without any regard for whether it might be something that energizes them. All of us have to do things we don’t love doing, and school is good about teaching us that discipline. Where our education system fails us is it doesn’t reliably encourage us to explore what we enjoy and double down on that. Some of us were lucky enough to have a rogue teacher who had enough energy left after a busy day to help us explore our individuality and open us up to new possibilities for ourselves, but there’s no guarantee this pivotal figure will show up for every student.

A lot of us feel like work has to be unpleasant and hard. There will be seasons of your life where this is unavoidably the case. But our careers don’t have to be this inexorable linear march up some joyless ladder. There are so, so many options available to us. We get in these ruts and we just need to be reminded. I’m not sure our standard school systems do a good job of showing us how to focus on things that energize us and minimize drudgery.

Of course, it’s easy to have opinions when I’m not in the trenches working in the education system right now. But if I could wave a magic wand, I would have students focus less on grades and competition (while still demonstrating the joys of attaining excellence and mastery). There would be a lot more exploration, a good balance between structure and imaginative “play” time (at all grade levels), and a spirit of possibility and curiosity rather than grim determination not to fail a test.

If this were the case, we’d all be better positioned to establish rewarding careers for ourselves. That said, if you had a negative educational experience, that’s usable too. It can provide fuel to do things differently and define out of contrast a kind of purpose for ourselves.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m an executive coach. I work with C-suite executives, government leaders, entrepreneurs, and emerging leaders as they seek to develop as leaders, plan major career shifts, and manage their energy.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Before executive coaching I spent a decade in executive search (placing executives within Fortune 500 companies, hedge funds, and large banks). The same thing that worked for me then works for me now, which is living by the motto “doing good work is the best business development”. I do the best I can for every person I work with and that helps me build out a client base steadily with a firm foundation.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I built an audience on social media and then after the pandemic I just couldn’t be in that space anymore. I started meeting people in person regularly again and it was such a relief to be a human being and not an avatar that I over-corrected entirely and got off the internet, mostly. Do I necessarily recommend this as a business strategy? No. Social media is free, effective marketing and can be fun! But this is just my experience. I couldn’t stomach it anymore.

And a funny thing happened – as soon as I made the decision, business started to flow in from different sources. It was a lesson to me that in business, if you get an impulse, don’t necessarily act on it right away. But listen to it over time, weigh the pros and cons using your linear mind, and ultimately trust your gut. You can do things differently from others and it might just be the powerful differentiator that moves things forward for you.

I’ll probably get back online over time because it’s an enjoyable and effective way to get a message out there, but for now I’m enjoying anonymity and 3D human connection.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.marymargaretskelly.com
• Instagram: @marymargaretskelly
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-margaret-skelly-461b3815/

Image Credits
Carla Coffing Lisandra Vasquez