The Aligned Career Method
The contrarian principle underneath everything I do. Integrate what's true about you first. Then a path becomes visible that you can actually walk.
The problem with most advice
Decide what you want, then go get it. For a senior operator that quietly fails, because the picture you'd be choosing from is incomplete.
Ibarra puts it well: reinventing your career is a journey through possible selves, not a straight march toward a self you already picked. The Aligned Career Method takes that idea and gives it shape. In four weeks, the four paths actually available to you get named, sized to your real constraints, and chosen between. You commit to one before any career action gets taken.
So we don't start with the choice. We start by making the picture whole.
The arc
The method runs across the two paid stages of the engagement: a four-week Career-Fit Plan that ends in a chosen path, and a five-month Career-Fit Move that walks it.
The diagnostic. You see the pattern you're in, what the current situation is costing you, and the four paths actually available from where you stand, each sized to your real constraints.
A written, dated decision on one of the four paths, a life alignment scorecard, and a report you can follow with or without me. The Vitality and Joy practices that keep the path sustainable are visible from week four.
The execution work, tailored to your chosen path (Reshape, Internal, Out, or Side), using five named methods: job-crafting conversations for the inside path, personal brand and positioning, hands-on CV and application support, interview prep, and mindset support through the interview process. What you leave with and how we get there differ by path; see the Step 3 tile on How I Work.
Body and identity practices, drawn from the Neurointegration training, run quietly underneath the career work so the multi-month push stays sustainable and the chosen path holds through the wobbles: a bad interview week, a boss who won't move, a market shift, a family situation. Supports for the career change, not a separate program.
The thread
Every phase works on three levels at once: Tactical (the meeting next week), Strategic (the next chapter), and Identity (who you actually are).
Underneath, three layers from the Neurointegration method Kate is trained in keep the engagement sustainable: Growth, the ambition and direction; Vitality, the body and energy base; Joy, the projects that keep the engine fed. They support the career work. They aren't a separate program.
Tactical
what you do this week
Strategic
where the role goes next
Identity-Anchoring
who's actually doing the work
Tactical
what you do this week
Strategic
where the role goes next
Identity-Anchoring
who's actually doing the work
The options
Each one sized to your real constraints. The both/and, turned into four real options.
Path 1
Redraw the boundaries of the current role without leaving.
Path 2
A better-fit role inside the same employer.
Path 3
Change company at the same function, possibly a different industry.
Path 4
A practice you build in the time you actually have, outside the day job.
The flexibility
We commit to one path and work the plan. The default is commit and execute, not "keep options open."
If the world for that path actually changes, your boss leaves, the role gets filled, the family situation shifts, the market closes, we re-commit to a different path from the same four-path map already in your Plan and rebuild.
The re-commit is the safety valve, used on purpose.
The research
The case for structured advisory rests on three meta-analyses of coaching outcomes (Theeboom 2014; Jones 2016; de Haan and Nilsson 2023).
The bore-out frame has its own literature (Werder and Rothlin 2007; Harju et al. 2024; Korn Ferry 2024).
Each phase names the research it stands on. The science isn't decoration. It's why the method holds.
What this is not
This is senior-corporate career advisory. It isn't therapy. It isn't C-suite executive coaching. It isn't generic career coaching.
The method is named, structured, and the same from one engagement to the next. Not advice invented on the spot for you.