For more than 19 years now, I’ve been working as a career coach, mostly helping people who were in transition after losing their jobs. But I didn’t always do that. I started my career working for a travel agency and then ended up working for an airline. There I learned about sales and marketing and after 10 years, took the leap to go back to school. The year I graduated was a very difficult period for the economy. If you think the big crash of 2008 was bad, well… the bear market of 1989 was front page news we studied in business school. Jobs were hard to come by. I did manage to get a job, but that didn’t last very long and I moved on to another and then to another, all of which did not bode well in a culture that prized longevity in the job market. I worked in strategic planning for a non-profit for 3 years and then moved on to become Director of Marketing for a software company, where I stayed for 10 years. Towards the end of my tenure there, the company was sold to go public, and I ended up working in a different position, reporting to a different person, who chose to systematically undermine, humiliate, and demean me. I eventually had to go on sick leave, suffering from a severe depression, what we commonly call a burnout.