Diana Enache
Let’s normalize this. It’s okay to not be toxically positive all the time. It’s okay to have a human experience and have down days or, you know, low affect days.

Sylvie Milverton
Hi, I’m Sylvie Milverton, CEO of Lynx Educate. This is Talent is Everywhere. We are here to talk about how to keep talent and how to develop talent in order to build a strong business. We’ll interview leaders to hear their best experiences of how they invested in people. So welcome. Today we have Diana Enache, who is a career and mindset coach in Romania.

Um, thank you for joining us. Uh, Deanna uh, works with clients internationally and also founded a community to support coaches in Bucharest. And before being a coach, she also worked in tech companies like DocuSign, Oracle Trade Shift, and then made the move, um, to coaching. And she focuses mostly on high millennial, uh, performers in tech.

So, welcome, Deanna, why don’t you, uh, tell us a little bit more, um, about your coaching practice.

Diana Enache
Wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me, Sylvie. Um, I was really looking forward to our conversation today, and just to give you a, a little bit of background and information about what I do and who I help as I’m, as you said, a career and mindset coach, and I help millennial high achievers who work in tech and struggle with perfectionism.

To get rid of self-sabotage so that they obtain meaningful career changes for them. Some examples of these career changes to make things more concrete are career pivots. Career transitions or promotions from a specialist role to their first leadership role. And when we say career pivots and career transition, there’s a difference between these two concepts.

Career pivots are, um, for example, someone moving to another role that has something in common to what they use to do or what they’re doing now. Uh, and a concrete example of that would be moving from an account manager position to an account executive position in sales, or moving from a customer service specialist role to a customer success manager role.

Those are examples of career pivots or moving to another industry, but on a similar role that they have now. Career transitions, on the other hand, are taking on a radically different role. And here I can give my own example. Moving from finance. I used to be a finance specialist some years back to learning and development training and then becoming a solopreneur coach.

So those are, those are the flavors, uh, or the career changes that I help for our clients to obtain.

Sylvie Milverton
Oh, that’s really, um, interesting. And I love how, like, specific you are, um, yeah, like about the kind of coaching you do and like what the different things mean. I think often like coaching can feel like, I don’t know, like one, uh, sort of generic or, you know, for those of us that aren’t directly in it, you know, it can feel kind of vague.

So, I love how specific, and so you did make this change. So, what inspired you to make the transition? Right, from working in tech, working in finance to actually becoming a coach.

Diana Enache
Mm-hmm. Yes. I used to work in finance for a number of years in various tech companies, uh, like multinational corporations, medium, huge sized companies and in 2020, that’s when I reflected on my own journey and was not feeling so satisfied, fulfilled, and it felt like I had an impact in my work in finance anymore, and I, with coaching and therapy at the time, I dug in deeply and I figured that, oh, actually I want to help people develop. I want to help them grow professionally, especially professionally, but also as a person in their profession.

And so, I made the conscious choice and conscious move to this training and L and D role full-time. And after that, the next kind of natural step, I guess for me was to research coaching schools and get specialized in this tool. ’cause coaching and training and mentoring, all of these are instruments, are tools that help people develop in one way or another.

And I. After I finished coaching school, I was like, oh, for sure this is what I wanna do. Um, I felt so connected to this going deeper with the one-to-one clients. Um, and I added it to my portfolio of skills and then in 2023, October of 2023, I moved from an employee role to a solopreneur. Started my own journey, combining coaching with training and facilitation.

So that’s where I am today. And I do work with people on career changes, and I do work with people on their mindsets because I used to be in similar positions myself. I used to be a perfectionist, not anymore. Thankfully, and I, I had these experiences of making career pivots and making career transitions in my own professional experience so far.

So, I, I know what pains and, and struggles it can come with mentally and practically as well. And that’s, um, that’s how I got to where I’m today helping people make those changes.

Sylvie Milverton
Yeah, I can so relate. There’s so much in what you just said that, uh, I can relate to like one, like as one is like making a transition like I worked in finance for a long time in big companies and then I decided to launch a startup, which like in retrospect, I think I was so naive about, you know, what a huge change that would be and how much like support I would need. But on the other hand, like realizing like, okay, this is my passion and I am going to follow it.

And you know, it’s hard, but I think I’m like, you know, doing a good job even though it’s like an uphill climb. And then the other thing I can relate to and what you said, just as like the entrepreneur thinking of the different support and I also, you articulate it really well. I never thought about it so well, but you know, like I’ve had a series of coaches over the past few years and sometimes it was like, you know, finding, getting centered.

Sometimes I wanted a coach that was much more about like high performance. It’s like, how can I. Super Excel. And then I’ve had different moments now is one of them where I’ve also added therapy to it. So sometimes it’s been more of that. So you’re right. And it’s like at a different moment, you know, you don’t always, you know, need the same kind of support.

And then when I was much younger, I had career coaches that were helping me figure out like a transition, what did I wanna do? So, yeah, it’s interesting, um, you know, how you frame it. And so, when people, like when clients come to you, what are you? I mean, I guess you’ve talked about, you know, the sort of things you support people in, but sort of we’ll go through, you know, the process you take, but like, what would be a situation, um, where you get a new client, uh, like where are they in their career that they’re gonna reach out?

Diana Enache
Yeah. Um, and just to your previous point before it gets into this one, I totally agree with different aspects or different phases in our lives needing different sorts of support. I myself work with a business mentor. I work with a business coach. I work in therapy still on different, you know, avenues and different aspects of my life.

I go to different specialists depending on what my need is at the moment, and I definitely recommend that to other people who are listening to us as well. And I’ll, in terms of process, and I’ll give you some concrete examples because I like that specificity and, and making things concrete. The way I work with clients and clients that come to work with me are usually people who have had some years of experience in their career.

Eight years, 10 years, sometimes maybe even more, and are at a crossroads, professionally speaking. And what we do when we work together, and I’ll give you this example of one of the programs that I have. It’s called made, MADE. M stands for mindset. A stands for alternatives. D stands for decision, and E stands for execution and evaluation. Why? because we work on mindset, moving them from fixed to growth mindset or from perfectionism to inner supporter.

From thoughts like, I’m not good enough. I don’t know if I am able to make this change. I can’t, I, I need to know everything from the start, from day one. Uh, those are all kind of self-sabotaging thoughts and we work to, to change them, to reframe them into, I, I haven’t done this, right. One of the examples is, I haven’t done this.

Okay. That’s the fixed mindset type of thought. We move from, I haven’t done this to, I haven’t done it yet. It means that we have space for curiosity, space for, okay, I haven’t done this thing, but I’m willing to learn. I’m willing to put in the effort. I’m willing to test it out and see how it goes and gain confidence along the way in, in the cases of the clients that I’ve worked with and in my own experience, confidence comes with experience with taking action.

So those are some examples of changing the way clients think. When it comes to mindset, also gaining self-awareness, learning about their values, learning about their strengths, and about their professional mission. That’s the mindset work that we do. Then we move on to alternatives and we analyze the options they have.

Some people come to coaching with multiple alternatives, don’t know what to choose, and that might keep them stuck, and I’ll give you a concrete example of that later on. So, we look at alternatives, we look at the criteria that they want to have in their next role, in their new career direction and map out to those options.

And then the next step, decision making, we make the decision. They make the decision, of course. And once that decision is made, they take action to implement that decision. And as they take action to implement that decision, they also evaluate where they are. Say someone moves their role changes, their role moves from one role to another, and they don’t stop at, “okay, I moved, I changed”.

They also look at, is this the right move for me? Am I in the right place? Do I like what I’m doing? Am I interested in it? You know, how are they settling in that new role? So those are the pillars of the process

Sylvie Milverton
And is it like, do they write all this down? Like do you have them like, come up? Is this like a deliverable, like here’s my paragraph about each thing?

Diana Enache
Not necessarily. Um, if someone wants to do that, and I’ve had clients who, um, like to journal or like to write things down and they do that for themselves. Some other clients just talk. So definitely we have the spoken piece, uh, in the coaching sessions and I help them decide on specific or tailored action at the end of the session.

And what we do from one session to the next is we do check-ins. I ask them at the beginning of the next session how their actions went and if there’s a need for adjustment, if it went well, and celebrating with them, if it didn’t. Let’s see, maybe why it didn’t work and was that the right move or the right action for you?

So, kind of like adjusting all the time and progressing ’cause my motto in coaching is coaching for progress. I want to help people see their progress, not so to move away from perfection, from doing everything a hundred percent from like from the get go, from the first time we do something to incremental changes and steps and progress.

So. some people write, some people don’t. Some people reflect; some people go into action faster. Some people go into action after like super concrete action. I mean here after two or three sessions; it depends on the person. Not everyone’s the same. So, when it comes to some concrete examples, ’cause you asked about that earlier, one of them that I can share with you is of Anne, and that’s not her real name.

I’m just like making things as specific as I can. Um, that came to coaching with feeling down kind of in her current role, feeling unhappy with low confidence, with a fear of networking at the time, and fear of attending industry events. She was quite isolated when we started working together. Working from home quite a lot of the time.

She was in this negative thought loop when we started and couldn’t see possibilities for herself professionally speaking. She started out wanting to have more balance in her professional life and her role. Then her goal became to change roles and go from this admin, more admin role that she had into a more strategic role in the same department, in the same, uh, type of role, but in a different company.

She wanted to change roles and move to a different company, and the result of us working together was first off that she increased self-confidence ’cause she started to take action and she saw that she could and change her negative patterns of thinking. That was another big thing. Because again, when she started out, she was feeling drained.

She discovered this idea that she could start a personal project, and she did, and that personal project gave her the energy that she needed to then go and apply to different roles and work on the criteria of those strategic roles that she wanted to have. So, taking, taking that specific action, and that’s what she did.

Then applied, went to interviews and got to that strategic role. Moved away from the admin side and now her role is more dynamic. She’s leading that department in that company and she moved industries. So that’s kind of a career pivot example right there. Um, so that’s one specific case. Another case.

And this one probably maps more on the MADE program, um, description or the structure that I told you is of another client that came to coaching and he wanted to make a change but didn’t really know what to choose. He had multiple options available to him and was kind of an analysis paralysis at the time.

So, what we did is we worked on analyzing the options that he had and then making the decision, choosing one of these options based on well thought out criteria. And then he took action to sign up to a course ’cause he needed to get a specific skillset in order to make that career change. And he’s now, ’cause we’re touching base, um, um, quite, uh, often he’s now in this course getting his learning in and learning about these specific skills that he needs to apply. He’s now applying these skills in his current role. He has a full-time job, but he, he has the space to do that in his role. And the longer-term plan is for him to move from employee to solopreneur once he’s done with the course, once he gains that experience, firsthand experience.

So, it’s. Working on mindset, working on these options, making the decision, taking action, and like evaluating, where am I? Do I like it? Yes. Is this for me? And then building on that experience, moving from the employee, um, status, let’s say to a solopreneur entrepreneur status. I wanted to say that those are two examples of people who decided to make a move outside eventually, right?

Make a move outside of the company. But that’s not the only those, or those are not the only scenarios, uh, that I had clients and I’ve worked with. There were clients that I’ve worked with that came to coaching not feeling, again, happy or motivated in their role, and initially wanting to leave the company, wanting to leave thatrole, but we figured along the process that the problem actually was a communication problem with their leader.

And once we coached around the topic of communication with their leader, they addressed whatever they needed to address with their leader. Things started to change. They started to get along better and then the client didn’t wanna leave the company or that role anymore, and their goal changed from leaving the company to how do I develop more in this role that I have?

Sylvie Milverton
And when I hear these cases, like what’s interesting, like sometimes I think we feel like coaching, it’s like this, like massive change. But a lot of these are like, first of all, the answer, all the people already had the answer. Like, whatever they needed to do, it was like already in them. And that, you know, maybe the first example you did, maybe that was pretty big in terms of like changing mindset or finding like a self-confidence, you know, that she didn’t have.

But for example, the second and so like when you tell like client and you tell me that story, like it’s actually really obvious what the person’s gonna do. And so, to realize that coaching, it doesn’t have to be this massive thing, it’s more just like having the space so that you can see clearly, you know, this is the path.

Like I’m in a job and I would like to be a solopreneur and I’m just missing this one, two things. Like just do the two things but you don’t see it. So obviously until you can like lay it out with someone to figure it out.

Diana Enache
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I’ve seen it over and over again with clients. They say usually when we start a process, they tend to say at the end of sessions that, “oh my God, this was so helpful.

’cause I got to verbalize all the things that I’m thinking”. Before the time that we started working together, maybe they were like in this mental loop and thinking, and thinking and not talking about what they were thinking or if they were, they were talking about it to family or friends, and it’s a different sort of relationship.

When we talk about to a-Talk about these things to a friend, and when we talk about these things with a specialist and just this has a value, a big value of talking and laying things out and getting clarity once you hear yourself talk. And it happened to me as well as a client and coaching. So, I can definitely vouch for that.

Sylvie Milverton
And also, I think that these decisions, especially around career and everything, it can feel like super high risk and super like high stakes, which in a sense it is. I mean, as you’re thinking like how you’re building your career and what decisions and it can kind of feel like you know of course you close the door and you open a new one.

Um, but I can see how like making the coaching, you realize like, it, you know, it isn’t so overwhelming, especially the examples you give about somebody who’s like not happy in their job. And I can just imagine, I mean, I’ve been in that situation, you know, years ago where you’re like, gosh, I just feel stuck and what am I gonna do?

But gosh, finding a whole job and my CV and who am I gonna talk to and what do I wanna do? And you’re like. Uh, you know, and so just to at least lay it out like what is the actual root cause of my problem and how can I solve it right? Does make it more manageable.

Diana Enache
Exactly. Bits and pieces and moving progress. Right? Making progress.

Sylvie Milverton
Um, I wanna tell you something else about mindset. ’cause I find this too. So I’m like a very, um, you know, like finance analytical person. And lately I’ve gotten into all sorts of like mindset and woo woo kind of ideas. But let say I’m not like, sort of made that way. But I do see the difference, like if I wake up and I will say also that I’m somebody, I am quite like high performer, perfectionist.

And I would tend to sort of have like. I dunno, negative thoughts, like I seem like happy and smiley, but I’m like very easily, like down on myself, let’s say. And I have seen the difference, like if I wake up in the morning and it’s kind of like a negative grump, it does make like a harder day, um, than kind of having like a quote, unquote, good mindset, but what are some, like, how do you do that? Like how do you not, you know, I mean, is it literally like wake up every day and look in the mirror and say like, “Sylvie, you are amazing. You’re gonna conquer the world”. Or how do you solve that? Like even so, like I have confidence, right? But I can definitely be like not in this positive way for myself. Right? What would you recommend?

Diana Enache
Yeah. And, okay, so let’s normalize this. It’s okay to not be toxically positive all the time. It’s okay to have a human experience and have down days or, you know, low affect days, even negative thoughts. It’s the thing with working on your mindset and moving from a fixed to a growth mindset is rather to catch when you think those thoughts and to shift those thoughts, not to believe, automatically.

Believe those negative thoughts you have about yourself, about your situation, about other people. Um, and here we can talk endlessly, probably about saboteurs and there’s a flavor of them from perfectionist to, um, victim to procrastinator, to judge to, um, avoid her. Yeah.

So those are just a few of them. Or hypervigilant. Um, hyper achiever. I am that type of person in the hyper achieving space. I need to work on my hyper achieving or people pleasing. Those are various flavors of these internal saboteurs that can affect our day to day. It’s a matter of catching them, and again, as I said, not believing, automatically believing these parts or these voices and having the resources and having the exercise, I would even say.

To change, to question those thoughts to is this really true? Is it a hundred percent true? How is it helping me? How is it hindering me? How or what is a better thought that I can have? That leads me to where I wanna get in my day-to-day.

And that’s, those are just three questions that someone can ask when they catch those thoughts on the spot. And it definitely shifts perspectives. It’s, it definitely shifts. ’cause we don’t want those like affirmation type thoughts or cookie cutter type thoughts. I am, no, everyone needs to create their own version of whatever works for them.

That’s the beauty of what we do in coaching. We tailor, right? So that’s the process with all those steps, but it’s not rigid and we tailor, or at least I do when I work with clients, what those alternative thoughts could be at something that’s believable for the client, not something that’s super blown out of proportion or exaggerated.

And then what we end up doing is we move from negative thinking to non-negative thinking and constructive thinking rather than positive thinking no matter what.

Sylvie Milverton
Yeah. Oh, I really like that. Right. ’cause yeah, for me it does, doesn’t sound natural to like always have positive thinking. Right? It’s almost like embrace, okay, we’re gonna have doubts, we’re gonna be scared, we’re gonna Yeah.

Have negative thoughts. And it’s crazy. I wonder if some of us who are sort of like high achieving, and I don’t, if perfectionist is the word, but anyway, our kind of people, if it’s even more easy to have negative thoughts like that from the outside people are looking at you thinking like, oh, you’ve got it all together and you’ve got all these degrees and you’re running a startup and you have a lovely life.

And you know, and inside you’re just like, oh my gosh, it’s a lot. Right?

Diana Enache
I can definitely relate.

Sylvie Milverton
Maybe it’s more common and yeah. Than I, than I realized. And I guess, you know, you also mentioned to me before, like this whole trap of the fixed mindset, like, you know, people who are talented and have good jobs. You know, that can also like get you into some traps, right? Where you feel like, oh, everything should just be easy and should be going my way. The fact that I’m struggling a bit means like something isn’t, isn’t right.

Diana Enache
Exactly. And for me and in my now I can talk from personal experience. I know that something that played a part in me having fixed thoughts when I used to have them and perfectionistic thoughts was the school system.

Because it rewards and it labels and it rewards this perfection, this, you know, 10/10. And like for us in Romania, the highest mark was a 10, 10, 1 to 10, the 10 was the highest one. And comparing with other kids and what, you know, what was their mark, what was their grade on the test or whatever. Um, so those, you know, social things have an impact on our upbringing and have an impact on our way of thinking.

But definitely we have the power. We have the resources to change them. We have the resources to turn them around and as adults to make conscious choices, to challenge and think differently, and act differently, not just think differently. Uh, and then moving from that fixed mindset space into a growth mind, a possibility type of space of I can learn this even if it’s hard.

And also rewarding progress, rewarding effort rather than rewarding. Oh, things like, or, or putting labels on things like, oh, “you’re so smart”. “You are so savvy, you are so whatever”. Great at this. Rather than saying that, saying, I put in so much effort into this paper. I put in the work and this project, and this workshop and this process with this client.

I can see my progress along the way. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but I can see my progress along the way. And it’s even like a daily, it could be a daily practice of seeing your progress along the way. And another element that could help here with this growth mindset and uh, openness to learning would be to look at what we are satisfied with or grateful for?

From small to big things. Of course, it depends on the person and the range. For me, for example, I tend to look at the bigger things. And be grateful for those. When I progress on something, on a project, on a workshop, on a process with someone, or I finish it. But I’ve taught myself to look at the smaller things because those I tend to ignore on a day to day.

And I know knowing that so having that awareness about myself, I’ve taught myself to look at the smaller things at a, at the level of a day. At the level of, you know, the first part of the day or the second part of the day or evening time, looking back on the day. And that, for me at least, and from my perfectionist type of uh, thinking has been really helpful to help me shift and change.

Sylvie Milverton
Mm-hmm. And I’m wondering, have you seen, I mean, ’cause you’re dealing, looking at clients I guess, like since the pandemic and now have, have you seen that shift in. I don’t know the things people are worried about. Like, I mean, if we look, you know, just like step back, like everything that happened with AI, the economy, big layoffs in the tech sector, uh, you know, and right now I just feel like world politics.

I mean, it’s hard. I suppose if you look hard enough, you can find some, you know, shining light. But let’s just say like generally if you open the newspaper, it’s like a lot of stressful news. I dunno. Have you noticed like in the past year, like people stress or worried about different things than before.

Diana Enache
Definitely layoffs. Layoffs has been one of them, as you said as well. ’cause it’s a reality. It’s happening in the market, globally. Um, that was one worry. And then another one was, is AI gonna take my job? That’s another one. I actually, I had a client that I worked with that had this fear when we, uh, kind of began, began working together and it changed throughout the process into, oh, AI is a tool.

I can use it in my day-to-day to improve on certain things, processes. Whatever communication. Depends on what they were using it for. So yeah, moving from the fear of, it’s gonna replace me? it’s gonna take my job too? How do I include it in my day to day? ’cause it’s really part of change. Change at work.

And if we think historically there’s been so much change in the world and. Again, yeah. Some, uh, positions, some jobs that have been made obsolete and some jobs that have been created with the advent of technology and not just technology. And definitely there will be stages in time where people are gonna be worried about different things.

Right now, the things that I’m seeing are layoffs and AI taking my job and here again, if I go back to the skills that we can build to deal with these types of changes are definitely mindset related, so fixed to growth mindset and adaptability, resilience.

In today’s world, we need to have these two skills quite a lot because things move fast and change fast and of course, a plan when we think things are getting iffy and we start fearing our position, let’s say in a company to adapt and learn. These new skills that will get us to a secure, in a secure space for us, like mentally secure and practically secure in the job market as well.

Um, so yeah, here I would even think about people and, and looking at the processes and the clients that I have and the work that I do of getting people in, making career changes, looking at their transferable skills as well. What is it that they’re already doing, that they’ve done that they can use in a slightly different role or in a very different role, and learn to communicate with examples those skills that can transfer from one role to another, from one industry to another even.

Sylvie Milverton
Right. And explain it. Yeah. Explain it in a good way as opposed to saying, I’m looking for a job where I can like, well apply my skills to an environment. Like what skills and how. Yeah, exactly. And that, definitely having that on the CV or having that on your LinkedIn profile and preparing some examples before going to an interview of how, what are the skills, how do I apply them and how can I take them further?

Sylvie Milverton
Right. Oh, I’ve learned so many things from you and I feel like one good takeaway, I mean one is like the skills we have in our job, but also thinking about mindset and thinking about building resilience as two skills to like work on, um, as opposed to it being like something innate in us that we just have to sort of, uh, you know, be that way. So, I, I like that. Uh, yeah, I like that thought of thinking that I can, you know, build the skill of a growth mindset and build the skill of resilience, I think is smart. Um, and so when you have clients, I guess, you know, how do you work with them? It can be one session or several sessions, or how long do they usually?

Diana Enache
Usually we work in programs which are three months or six months programs. Uh, rarely do I do one-off sessions. Uh, usually and with the topics that I cover, that we cover in coaching, one session wouldn’t do too much for a person who wants to change careers.

So then of course they would need more time. They, if they wanna get a promotion, it might be that they only need three months’ worth of work. If they wanna do a career transition to a different, really different role, really different industry than a six-month process would definitely be more suitable because they get to experience all the mindset alternatives, decision and execution parts.

Sylvie Milverton
Amazing. And if people wanna find you, where can they, how can they reach out or where do they get your information?

Diana Enache
I’d be happy to connect with anyone and everyone who’s listening to this podcast, and they can find me on LinkedIn by searching Diana Enache and Coach, or on my website, www.deannaanke.com.

Those are the two places that I’m quite. LinkedIn is my number one platform and then my website as well is where they can see things about my programs, the structure, the way we work together, see, uh, reviews from other clients that I’ve worked with in the past. ’cause I know that’s an important piece to see what others have obtained. Of course, by working with me.

Sylvie Milverton
Amazing. Um, well, we will link to your, uh, website in the show notes so that people can easily reach out. And this was, uh, a lovely session. Um, amazing to meet you, and I love your, uh, coaching approach and yeah, I learned so much. Thanks for joining us.

Diana Enache
Thank you so much for having me, Sylvie. It was a pleasure to chat to you today and yeah, let’s, uh, keep in touch and keep things moving into a growth mindset perspective.

Sylvie Milverton
Thanks for listening to this episode of Talent Is Everywhere. Make sure to subscribe if you like what you heard, and give us a follow on LinkedIn to continue the conversation on all things career mobility and talent development. Is there a topic you’d love for us to cover in a future episode or a guest you’d recommend?

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