127: Supercharge Confidence and Engineer Esteem with Maria Papazoglou | Top Executive Coach in Greece

[00:00:20] Zach White: Hmm. There is way more insight you could offer than we will have time to explore in one episode, but one thing we must do first, we met through a mutual friend and one of the only two time guests on the Happy Engineer Podcast. I call him Coach K, but his full name Khan Apostoli, which rivals very few guests in terms of the, uh, the difficulty of.

[00:00:48] Pronunciation for me as a Midwestern American, and of course your last name is pretty tricky to say as well. So Maria, would you first, like, how do you properly say your name? 

[00:01:00] Maria Papazoglou: It’s Maria Papa. It’s a Greek name. let me also say, a word in Greek because maybe from your respected audience. We have Greeks here, so.

[00:01:22] Zach White: That just sounds way more fun than anything. I’m gonna say, uh, this, this podcast, so, all right, Maria, what, what is your favorite vacation place in Greece? There’s so many beautiful islands and beaches and cool places there. What’s one of your favorite spots to vacation? If I was gonna come visit you in, in Greece, My 

[00:01:43] Maria Papazoglou: latest, visit was in the island of Paris, which is also very well known, in the u s A and all over the world.

[00:01:51] But if I would go choose for my next holidays, I would go to one of the hidden gems little Islands that people don’t know them. Okay. Latest experience was amazing. It was Paris 

[00:02:06] Zach White: Island. Okay. So. If I just was walking down the street in Paros and I saw you and I walked up to you to say hi, and I was gonna greet you, what would you say in Greek?

[00:02:21] What’s like a, a traditional greeting or, and you could speak Greek for me, I just, if I walked up and said, oh my goodness, Maria. Hello. What would you say back to me if we were on vacation at one of those little islands? 

[00:02:32] Maria Papazoglou: Yasu. Hello. I’m happy to see you. It is.

[00:02:39] How are you?

[00:02:43] Zach White: Okay, I’m gonna record, obviously we have to recording. I’m gonna practice those. I’m not even gonna try right now, Marie, ’cause it will be nothing but embarrassing. But, uh, I’m gonna practice those and then come visit you in Greece. Absolutely. So what’s so cool, and part of the reason I’m, I wanted to start here with you is not only are you today, Truly one of the premier executive coaches and trainers in Greece and now expanding around the world with your influence in the work you do.

[00:03:12] But you’ve had an untraditional career path to get to this point and these different chapters of very unique areas of work. And the first one was in tourism, which is really exciting. I mean, everybody loves to travel. I don’t have a single client I’ve ever worked with who doesn’t talk about. Wanting more time, freedom and able to travel more with their families.

[00:03:37] And so, you know, I am curious for you, what was it about travel and tourism that drew you into that first career, that first decade of your experience? What do you love about tourism and travel? Why did you go into that, that path? 

[00:03:54] Maria Papazoglou: I think what was important to me to the 22 year old Maria just finished university, have studied economics is that I want to travel the world.

[00:04:08] Hmm. What profession should I do in order to be able to make my dreams true go work for the tourism industry? So my decision was. Really easy to be taken and I never regretted. I spent 10 wonderful working years of my life in that industry. 

[00:04:30] Zach White: Hmm. Is there any place you wanted to go that you still have not made the trip?

[00:04:40] Maria Papazoglou: There are too many in my bucket list. 

[00:04:43] Zach White: Too many. Okay. Which many is, which one is next? What’s the most exciting? Like you really wanna make the trip and you haven’t gone yet? 

[00:04:53] Maria Papazoglou: Fiji would be an option. Okay. But I think I will be traveling to Chicago.

[00:05:00] In a few months for now. So there are many, you know, plans and ideas that are becoming true. 

[00:05:07] Zach White: you need to let me know when you’re coming to Chicago. That’s not far from where I’m at. So then tell me this of that passion for seeing the world and a decade in tourism for yourself, what would be the thing from that chapter of your career?

[00:05:26] That serves you now as a coach and a trainer and working with these amazing executives that you serve, is there anything that you learned in that decade that still serves you as a coach today? I. Absolutely 

[00:05:40] Maria Papazoglou: everything that we learn, through our, the process, through our career path, it counts and it is helpful for what we are doing now and what we want to become in the future.

[00:05:54] What I have kept from that decade is communication and interaction with people, different cultures, different perspectives. As well as, um, that ability to be flexible and also get the things done,

[00:06:18] Zach White: the comment you made there. All, all of our experiences provide lessons for where we’re at and where we’re going. I think that’s a fundamental coaching truth that’s easy to say. But sometimes hard, hard to do, hard to dig up the lesson, especially when we feel like we’ve made a mistake. Like I, I spent time in a path that ended up as a dead end, or it’s not, it’s not what I ultimately decided, or my destiny changed.

[00:06:53] You know, people go through these waves and you’ve had three big chapters, the tourism chapter, and then. You went into corporate communication and now coaching, and I’m curious for you, if I was to say, Maria, I think I’m in the wrong path. Maybe I’m working in mechanical engineering and I want to go into software or, I’m not even in engineering and I want to become an engineer.

[00:07:19] I, I chose a different degree and I wanna make that change or the opposite. I’m an engineer today and I don’t know if I wanna stay. In engineering anymore. Maybe this is the wrong path for me. What would you, as a coach now, and from your own experience of having made significant changes in the direction of your life and your career, what would you give someone or, encourage them or maybe a question you’d ask them to help with the, challenge of those decisions?

[00:07:52] Maria Papazoglou: career transition is a very common issue now, and indeed through my role as a career coach, I work with many coaching clients who want to make the next step. Mm-hmm. So I would basically ask them why are they satisfied from their current career? Because there a few times. There are hidden opportunities which they cannot see.

[00:08:23] And during the coaching process, a few of them discover that there are many opportunities and very positive things in their current, in the current, uh, job show. They remain to stay. Mm-hmm. If not, if not, I would ask them. Since now you have the opportunity to redesign. Your future as a professional, where would you like to go?

[00:08:52] What do you think that will fill your heart? Because you know, being 27 years in the corporate environment, I have learned to go after success and aim for success. But how about fulfillment From our job, we spend so much time within the day. for our career, And it needs to be delightful.

[00:09:22] and we deserve to feel fulfilled at the end of the day, at the end of the month, at the end of the year and, So the other question would be, what would you like to do? How do you want to feel in your next career step? Maybe who do you want to become to be able to achieve your goals?

[00:09:46] Zach White: Two words you said, really stand out to me, delight and deserve, I’d like to explore both because I think what you’re talking about here, success is pretty easy for most engineers to wrap our heads around. We’re very goal oriented. We’re very project management kind of mindset. You know, go find the right answer.

[00:10:09] Go hit the next achievement, the next level of success. Fulfillment is a little more difficult. We know it when we have it. We can feel it when we don’t have it, but a lot of times it’s, it’s harder to understand what creates that or, or how to move towards that. And then I think a lot of times we don’t, necessarily feel like that’s an expectation or something.

[00:10:35] We deserve something that we. We should have. We need to have, and the way you phrased that, like we need to delight in the work and you deserve to have fulfillment. I’m not sure everyone believes that. And so I’m curious to hear your perspective, is that a self-esteem kind of issue that holds us back, or is it just something about our, our culture or conditioning that hides that fulfillment piece from us?

[00:11:02] what do you think about? Why success is easy to focus on, but fulfillment is not so easy 

[00:11:08] Maria Papazoglou: I believe Jacque, we are not trained to acknowledge and be grateful of what we have. Hmm. We are more trained to go, change the next big thing. what I hear from my coaching clients is that they succeed a big thing.

[00:11:33] They do not enjoy. They do not celebrate it. They just go ahead for the next goal. So what is missing here? It’s missing acknowledgement. it’s missing feeling, grateful and proud of ourselves and fulfilled. In order to be able to have, the motivation and the strength to go on because we can achieve many more when we start from a level of appreciation and gratefulness than starting from.

[00:12:10] I miss that. I am late with that. I’m not happy with that. we achieve much more when we start from, a point of being grateful So if I would give an exercise, please to our, audience here. What I also suggest to my co coaching clients is to write down, The achievements of the day, all the big or smaller things that we do within the day between the different roles.

[00:12:45] In our lives, not only professional, but also personal, little or bigger achievements so that we can see, written down all that, that we can create in only one day. And little by little if we’re consistent, with that, daily routine, we understand that we, should acknowledge and feel better about this ourselves and how much we can deliver.

[00:13:12] Zach White: Hmm. I love the simplicity of that exercise and absolutely agree. It’s worth doing. You’re making me think of, a leader I’m working with named Charlie, who has gone through some really hard things in life, in his personal life and in his career, and it’s all piled up in a very short amount of time. And anyone who’s been there knows, like the stress of that and the all of what happens in our emotions and our energy.

[00:13:40] When everything’s falling apart at the same time, it’s really, really tough. in one of our sessions with our coaching cohort, we started with share a win, share something you’re celebrating, which is always what I do at the beginning of a a coaching call. And Charlie said, you know what, I don’t have a win today.

[00:14:02] I don’t have anything to celebrate today. I feel like life has only been dealing me. Losses and challenge, which I just deeply appreciated his vulnerability to be honest about that in the moment. we took that time to say, Hey, this is the most important thing you’ll do today. Forget all the other actions, forget all the strategies of, you know, landing your new dream job.

[00:14:27] All we need to do is shift that focus from all of the losses and just find some small, tiny, little things. That we can celebrate, that our wins, that our achievements, and we just cracked the can of that for him. And first little thing was, well, you know, I’m, I’m outside in the sun taking this call today and it’s really quite nice outside.

[00:14:49] Oh, awesome. Let’s be grateful for that. And then, Well, I did make a phone call to a recruiter today and we had a good conversation. Oh, awesome. Yeah. That’s a huge win. let’s celebrate that. And then another, and then another, and just doing the exercise you described started to open up a whole new awareness that even though life was really, really challenging, there’s still so many things going well to celebrate.

[00:15:15] you used the word training, like we’re not trained to do that, and. So Maria, in your experience, especially when we talk about executives, you know, people who’ve achieved really big results in their career, how do they get to those levels of success without ever experiencing or being trained in some of these other areas of balance and fulfillment?

[00:15:42] Like it seems so unusual to me that. Many of these executive leaders would have never done an exercise like this until they work with someone like you. And I’m just curious, like how does that happen? Are we completely missing the mark in the, education and training and corporate training in, in general?

[00:16:04] Or like, why are we so one dimensional around success? Do you have any theories about that from your work? Like why we don’t talk about this side very much. 

[00:16:17] Maria Papazoglou: First of all, I wonder all those successful executives that you have mentioned, how much more they would have succeeded if they were more familiar with working on their personal development.

[00:16:32] How effective and useful leaders they would be if they would first be able to lead their self, self-leadership. Mm-hmm. That’s where everything, starts from, isn’t that correct? 

[00:16:50] Zach White: All leadership begins with self-leadership. That’s one of my coaching mantras. I totally agree. I love that.

[00:16:57] Maria Papazoglou: question. Also, also think about it for ourselves, Jack. How would we be us as humans, as uh, professionals if we have had started the personal and professional development journey? A decade or two decades mm-hmm.

[00:17:13] Mm-hmm. Before the time that we started, how, how much more we could have, uh, achieved and yeah. the answer is very simple. 

[00:17:25] Zach White: So 20 years ago was the best time to plant the tree. The second best time is right now. And so if that’s true, Maria, where, where would we begin? If I’m an engineering leader, maybe I’m a manager or maybe I’m just.

[00:17:40] New to my career, I’m still a junior engineer and I’m hearing this conversation. I really wanna start taking action and personal development. Where do you encourage people to focus first? 

[00:17:52] Maria Papazoglou: I would encourage them to focus first on their self-awareness. Remember es the ancient Greek, philosopher was talking about, self-awareness.

[00:18:08] It’s, this is famous all around the world, and as long as we know ourselves well, we can start building our strategy, our goals, our communication being consistent. And also create, a personal brand, which is, now more than ever essential 

[00:18:33] Zach White: I like that link of self-awareness to personal branding.

[00:18:37] Mm-hmm. So I wanna come back to that in a moment because you’re right, the personal brand topic is really. Becoming almost a buzzword type of topic, even in engineering, which, you know, maybe five years ago would not have been the case, but it, it really is penetrating all industries. But first, before I, I pull that thread, I, don’t wanna forget that.

[00:18:59] Mm-hmm. Self-awareness. it’s easy to say that term, and I’m not convinced that everybody really knows what that means. When you would see two people and say, this person is very self-aware, this person is not, what are the characteristics or how would you as a coach make an assessment of the level of someone’s self-awareness?

[00:19:24] Like, what are the markers? What are the ways we know 

[00:19:27] Maria Papazoglou: if something I, I’ll keep it very simple. I’ll keep it very simple. How easy. I’ll ask the audience now to reflect on this question. How easy is it for you to answer authentically and spontaneously a question, like, tell me a little more, more about yourself.

[00:19:47] How would you describe yourself? Which do you think are your biggest strengths? You know, if you have, um, experienced interviews and you have an executive or an engineer, no matter the the level, and ask them, tell me a little bit, a little bit more about you. Do you know what they do?

[00:20:16] They repeat their, their resume. Mm-hmm. If it’s not written already. In the paper. So they have difficulty to express more characteristics, more about theirselves, their personality, their soft skills than the technical things that are fact and are more easy. So if you could say the difference between people who have self-awareness 

[00:20:46] Just make this simple question. Tell me a little bit more about you, which are your strengths? How would you describe yourself? 

[00:20:56] Zach White: Hmm. I know for engineers the, the typical type of response is exactly what you said. It’s. Well, I work at this company and I have this job, and I do this kind of thing, and I have a mechanical engineering degree and you know, I, I love technology and x, y, and Z area.

[00:21:16] I live in this place. Yeah, we, we just describe. Our, our, and you know, this is LinkedIn profile. 

[00:21:25] Maria Papazoglou: It really, the less useful in that conversation because all these are information that our, uh, the, the person that we’re speaking to already has, already has. So if we reply like that, we lose the opportunity to, to be to, you know, to show our uniqueness.

[00:21:46] Hmm. And our authenticity, if we cannot handle that. Otherwise, they would, just select the best candidate or who gets the project. Only by what the resume is saying. but this is not, uh, why we get in an interview or in a meeting room. It’s there where we have to express more about ourself and our uniqueness.

[00:22:16] And I love that authenticity and to, in order to be able to do that. We need to know our first. from the beginning. Yeah. And this is where I start every career coaching program. Self-awareness. Remember, or discover who you are. 

[00:22:35] Zach White: it’s like, doesn’t matter if you’re an executive or a junior engineer, we all start a coaching journey with self-awareness because who I am changes over time as well.

[00:22:45] Just to re I like that word rediscover. who I am. That, that’s a really powerful concept. So let’s link this to the practical idea of personal branding and how that, how that affects our careers. I think in the past it wasn’t really talked about. Now it’s this buzzword. Mm-hmm. And when you talk about uniqueness and authenticity, maybe d def, a definition, what do you think of as the key components of your personal brand?

[00:23:19] Maria Papazoglou: I would start again, self-awareness and this information will help us to, let’s say, to define our unique value proposition where, how do we want to be known for? Mm-hmm. Okay. And then another part of our personal brand should be also, discover, who our target audience is.

[00:23:43] We want to make a communication strategy, but who are we targeting? Are we targeting colleagues, potential employers, clients, or a mix of all these, together? Another significant, let’s say element of our personal brand is a compelling elevator pitch. Okay. Okay. And that’s, when I teach my personal branding, workshops also for engineers, because I’m working for many years on this field with, uh, the biggest, worldwide, technology consulting company.

[00:24:20] So I teach engineer engineers about personal branding. Amazing. Then start with, uh, the elevator pits. How we can con, let’s say engage. The people who are communicating with something really short, that summarizes our skills, achievements, and what we have to bring to the table as an engineer or as any other professional, I.

[00:24:48] Another thing is to, of course, leverage the power of social media and be consistent and professional across all platforms. That could be social media, it could be a personal website or a blog everywhere. Have a consistent, Appearance and a professional way to show and speak to, to others. also be, a little bit more conscious about the visual identity, like, how aligned is our visual identity with our career goals.

[00:25:29] Sometimes, we try so much. We study another certification much more time at work and all that. You know, we do the all, you know, all the technical part, but there are things like our visual identity, which is not aligned with our career path and where we want to go. 

[00:25:49] And we have the opportunity to, to, to say our story because people remember stories. Mm-hmm. Uh, and that would also the importance of, uh, networking on staying update, and be able to demonstrate and promote the best version of ourselves.

[00:26:12] Zach White: why does this matter? the skeptic in me, the engineering part of me that just wants to go do great work. I just wanna work on cool technology. Maria, I don’t care about all this, you know, self-awareness and personal branding and all these coachy, jargon, nonsense. Like I just wanna go be an engineer.

[00:26:32] If, if that were my attitude and you were. Convincing me that this matters, this is important. Why is this important in our careers? First of 

[00:26:43] Maria Papazoglou: all, I will say for those who think like that, well done. Because first, we should care about the result and the quality of our work, of the work that we deliver. So taking that for granted.

[00:27:02] And among a big number of colleagues, doing more or less the same thing, who will be able to differentiate? Mm-hmm. Who will be able to reach a bigger audience of those people, decision makers, managers, recruiters, Leaders that may be the ones that will give us the next career opportunity. Yeah. So get the job done is one, one thing, and be able to promote and demonstrate your greatness to others, and more specifically.

[00:27:49] To the target audience that you aim to is another thing. And many times we neglect that important part 

[00:28:00] Zach White: I’m curious if you’ve seen this with your executive clients and of course, keeping anonymous out of respect for them. But what I’ve seen at times is somebody who’s not intentional.

[00:28:13] To build a personal brand aligned with their desired values and, and the uniqueness and strengths that matter. They get to a certain level of success and they start now having to unwind some parts of their reputation and brand that were not so good. To go create a new persona and a personal brand that actually is aligned with what’s going to get them where they want to go.

[00:28:40] And so the sooner you can start this type of thinking, the better. But I’m curious, have you seen that before where somebody sort of wakes up to this Oh no. Like how I’m perceived today is not how I want to be perceived, and I have a lot of work to do to go change that. Is that something you’ve experienced before?

[00:29:00] Absolutely. 

[00:29:01] Maria Papazoglou: you know, better than, than myself that this is one of the questions that pop up during the coaching, uh, sessions. If our current personal branding and how we show up in the working environment really helps us to boost our career, go to the top or maybe the opposite. Yeah. So this, comes out easily in a coaching, uh, session and wherever you are, there’s still time to do things and progress on that, direction.

[00:29:31] Zach White: Mm-hmm. That’s a good, that’s a good encouragement to leave with an intention today. Wherever you are in this journey, it’s not too late. To take that next step. And it begins with self-awareness. I love this really, really powerful. Maria, there’s a hundred more things I would love to explore and your, your journey through life to get to this point.

[00:29:56] But I’m curious, just back to your own story and your own experience before we wrap up today. Having made significant transitions, you know, tourism to corporate work, to coaching, now you’ve supported so many incredible clients in helping them. Realize their dreams and goals in a balanced way between success and fulfillment.

[00:30:18] Is there anything you’ve seen come up again and again and again that you would just say like, this is important. This is that parting advice I would give to a young engineer or even a senior engineer who’s looking for more from life. What, what’s the advice that Maria would give that’s you just see again and again from your own journey and as a coach, what do you think?

[00:30:42] Maria Papazoglou: Something that I commonly see to the, the clients when I go and dig deeper in their stories is, uh, low self-esteem. So a piece of advice that I would give to everyone, no matter the level of self-esteem they are now there is more. Mm-hmm. Because self-esteem is building confidence and confidence will help us.

[00:31:09] create and present the best version of ourselves everywhere that we, show up in our life, in our career, in our relationship, social life, and everywhere. So a common advice would be built on your self-esteem and your self-confidence even more, and also have big dreams. And, transform them, transform the goals to be able to, uh, realize your 

[00:31:40] Zach White: dreams.

[00:31:41] Oof. I love that there’s no end to growth and development of your esteem. I think oftentimes, Maria, what I’ve seen with engineers is, Some people know it’s a problem. They suffer from imposter syndrome deeply, or they know they have low self-esteem. Those people will do the work in this area, but most people don’t think it’s a problem, and so they don’t do anything to improve it.

[00:32:09] But I think that’s a really powerful encouragement no matter where you’re at in your esteem today. Do the work to keep improving it because there’s an unlimited era amount of growth and return on that investment, so amazing. Maria, if someone wants to connect with you, what is the best way in place people can find out more about your coaching?

[00:32:32] If they wanna work with you or just explore the amazing content that you’ve created, where can they do that? 

[00:32:38] Maria Papazoglou: Easy and quick way is always LinkedIn so they can find me under my name Maria Papa, career coach. So we have an immediate interaction. And my new, uh, website, because I’m also working on rebranding myself as a professional, will be, um, Up and running in a few weeks from now.

[00:33:00] Hopefully when, uh, our audience will be watching the episode, it’ll be already up. It’s www.mariapapa.com. 

[00:33:10] Zach White: Okay, perfect, perfect. So we’ll put the links to both of those in the show notes. and for every happy engineer out there, I just wanna encourage you, connect with Maria, let her know that you heard about her on the Happy Engineer Podcast so she can, uh, accept the request and start a conversation with you and you will not regret doing that.

[00:33:30] And so, Maria, thank you so much for your time. I’m super excited to hear your thoughts on this last. Question as a world class and growing in your influence coach, not just in Greece, but now around the world, you know, as well as anyone. Questions, lead, answers follow. So if we want better answers in our careers, in our lives, we need to ask better questions.

[00:33:56] So what would be the question you would lead the happy engineer with today? 

[00:34:00] Maria Papazoglou: Who do you need to become in order to be able to enjoy the success that you deserve, to live the life that you desire and be really fulfilled? What kind of thoughts, what kind of mindset or daily habits do you need to abandon?

[00:34:23] In order to be able to create the best version of yourself and also what new initiatives, what, which new way of thinking do you need to work on in order to support yourself to get to the highest levels possible in your life and career? Hmm. 

[00:34:49] Zach White: So good. Who do you need to become? Maria, thank you so much for being here and.

[00:34:58] If you see Coach Kahan over there in the Greek Isles, say hi to him for me. And when you’re in Chicago, follow him around. Make sure to make sure to look me up and let’s connect. But such a pleasure and uh, we’ll do it again sometime.