Finding and Creating a New Professional Story: My Journey to Build a Coaching and Consulting Practic

Reposted from the Rabbinical Assembly Blog

Originally posted on Mon, 08/15/2016 - 12:00 In the spring of 2019, life offered me a new challenge; and a new opportunity.

Eighteen months into my tenure as campus rabbi at Minnesota Hillel, I learned that the organization would not support my position at the end of its initial grant-funded period. I had to chart a new career path. Taking a position at Hillel had already represented something of a career change. Prior to taking the campus rabbi post, I had mainly spent my career pursuing a position in academia. After receiving rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2004, I pursued and earned a doctorate in Midrash at JTS in 2011. Upon completing my doctoral studies, I had a few visiting professorships at various academic institutions including the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and Franklin & Marshall College. I left F&M (and academia) in the spring of 2017 for Minnesota Hillel when my family relocated to the Twin Cities so my spouse Hazzan Joanna Dulkin could start a new cantorial position at Adath Jeshurun. Now I was leaving Hillel while staying in the Twin Cities.

It was too late in the hiring season to find another academic position. I needed to think outside the box. I asked myself, what am I really good at? What are my generalizable skills? I settled on three main skills: leadership, strategic thinking, and communication. I could apply those anywhere. I worked with a career coach to reconfigure my resume away from academia and Jewish education. However, the more I tried to imagine myself doing something other than leading a Jewish organization or applying my rabbinic and educational skills, the less happy I became. On a deeper level, I felt like my professional narrative was fractured. I needed a new story.

During this transitional period, two additional factors kept surfacing. First, I have always been good at helping organizations suss out their purpose and refashion their operations to align them to their missions. I’ve spent a lot of time around congregations, organizations, and professionals who seemed to me to lack vision and purpose. What if I could help them engage in a deliberative process to rediscover why they were motivated to do their work in the first place? Second, I began to realize how important mentorship and coaching have been in my own life. I’m an avid jazz guitar player and a fitness enthusiast. In both endeavors, I’ve benefited from private instructors and fitness trainers who’ve nurtured my growth and kept me on track. What if I applied these principles for others in a professional setting? What if I could put these two things together — help individuals and organizations discover their purpose and mentor them along the way? The germ of the next phase in my professional narrative was taking shape.

Over the summer of 2019, I poured my heart into designing a consulting practice. With the help of my career coach, I set about creating a business plan. Following a very deliberative process, Midrash Values Based Consulting & Coaching, LLC emerged. Here is its mission statement:

Taking inspiration from the Judaic wisdom tradition, Midrash Values Based Consulting and Coaching collaborates with organizations and individual clients to develop values-based missions, strategies for its implementation, and practices to cultivate success. MVBCC values honest inquiry, empathy, and concern for the wellbeing of its clients.

In a nutshell, through MVBCC I use my vast knowledge gained from a lifelong inquiry into Jewish texts, my work as an educator mentoring students to gain competency in a particular subject, my leadership experience in reshaping organizations, and my pastoral listening skills to help people reframe their professional stories and where necessary, to help them get “unstuck.”

I love how my work is making a real difference in people’s lives, and I am excited for my practice’s growth potential. If you’re thinking about creating a solo-preneur venture or if you have one that you’ve already started and you would like to connect, I would love to speak with you. If you think you might benefit from entering into a coaching relationship, or if you think the organization you’re a part of needs a new direction, let’s definitely talk.