About Jess

The engineering chick is me – Jess Ryan. This is my story.

Jess RyanI love helping people,
particularly engineers,
optimize their most complex system -
their lives.

I have been an engineer for more than 15 years, and can confidently say that I understand the engineer ‘species’ (at least as much as that is possible!).  I lived the life of stress that most engineers face; obtaining my Masters in Electrical Engineering while experimenting with many different types of engineering – systems, testing, analysis, software, algorithm development, technical writing, and eventually management (I kind of got ‘bumped’ into it by a boss’ maternity leave). I was actually looking forward to management because I thought it was my chance to solve some of the problems that were ticking me off every day. I thought that I could make my co-workers happy. Well, I found out the hard way that just isn’t possible. I can’t make other people happy. Nobody can. We can only make one person happy (you got it - ourselves). To be honest, I kind of sucked at management. I had a difficult time with the politics and the bull dung. I wanted management to care more, to put less stress and crazy deadlines on us, and to appreciate what we were doing and how we sacrifice our personal lives and often our own health and well-being. I wanted them to really listen to what people had to say and try to work things out. The Organizational Management field of study works to improve larger-scale company-level issues such as these. My own passion lies in improving the larger system (the organization) by helping to optimize individual parts of the system (a.k.a. people like me & you)! I’ve had no shortage of experience dealing with glitches in my own system (see below if you are interested).  It was these ‘glitches’ that brought me to Life Coaching. I feel like I’ve been coaching all of my life, and I also have extensive formal training and hands-on experience. I am a certified Coach with Harvard Grad, New York Times bestseller, and overall IAHB (Insanely Awesome Human Being) Martha Beck, dubbed by NPR and ‘Psychology Today’ as “the best-known life coach in America”. I am trained in the Co-Active Coaching model through the Coaches Training Institute, an accredited ICF training program.  But my most important qualification is that coaching is my “North Star” in life. This is what I was born to do.

My Glitches
I am (or rather was) the type of person who, while being no slacker in the Laziness department, tends to take on waaay more than I can actually handle. My most recent (and hopefully last) example is in January 2007, the year that my New Years’ resolution was apparently to make my own life as hellish as possible. With my 50+ hour job and two kids under 3, I thought it might be a great time to buy a <understatement of the year> fixer-upper </understatement of the year>. Everyone thought it was so hilarious to bring up the movie ‘The Money Pit’ in every conversation. Strangely, it wasn’t all that funny to me. Trying to manage all of this was stressful to say the least. My essential self was SCREAMING at me for some relief. It provided me with a few ‘subtle’ hints. I wouldn’t listen, so finally it grabbed me by the collar and said “Listen to me Jess Ryan - I’ve given you hives, the shakes, slapped 40 pounds on your a**, robbed you from any semblance of enjoyment with your children, and gifted you with an eating disorder, depression, and pneumonia. Apparently your receiver is impaired. I’m in charge now and I say STOP.” And my life turned upside down. I took a 7-week leave from work and had my midlife crisis early. It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, as it led me straight to Coaching.


Contact
Jess Ryan
jessica(at)theengineeringchick(dot)com
315.382.8554

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