Interview With Mikaela Contreras – Career Development And Leadership Coach

Mikaela is a career and leadership coach specialising in empowering the careers of impact-driven HR and People professionals. After graduating from university with a degree in HR she spent a decade working across multiple HR functions across 3 countries. She discovered that most HR and People professionals are so focused on other people’s careers and development that they forget to nurture their own. After digging deep into her own values, vision and superpowers – she decided that her effort were best used for coaching and supporting people professionals on their career journeys.

Mikaela Contreras – Career Development And Leadership Coach

Hi Mikaela! Please, introduce yourself.

I was born and raised in Sweden, I’ve lived in Norway, Australia and several years in London but currently based in Abu Dhabi.

I’m married to a Salvadoran who is almost as energetic as I am (only almost).

I’m a lover of food, I get easily restless and never say no to an adventure.

I genuinely like people, so there is no surprise that I went into HR both in university and in my career since. I strongly believe in diversity and inclusion and constant learning and growing – we are all work in progress. I’m a massive TedTalks geek and can lose myself watching talks on motivation and psychology for hours.

I decided last year to combine my HR and recruitment experience with my coaching and create a career development and leadership program.

What is it that you do for your clients?

I coach my clients through my 1:1 program with the results of them coming out with complete clarity of their values, vision, strengths and motivators but also with clear goals and action-plans on how to achieve what they want. The ultimate goal is for them to achieve complete career happiness!

I also offer training, coaching and consulting to companies with focus on career development and leadership.

Who should hire/work with you?

I coach professionals from various industries but I specialize in coaching HR and Talent professionals since I know their pain-point’s first hand and also because I find that they tend to get so focused on other people’s careers and development that they forget (or don’t find the space) to nurture their own. I work with people all over the globe and don’t limit myself to one market. I consider myself a global citizen and I love connecting with people from different corners of the world.

I also work with organisations that understand the value of investing in their employees development and the risk of not doing so.

What is the biggest mistake people do when they are unhappy in their role and want to change?

A mistake we tend to do when we’re unhappy is to think that the grass is greener somewhere else so we jump into new things without spending enough time to research and reflect first.

Spending time on understanding what is important to you and what you actually like doing, will give you a much better direction on where to take your career. The first step is to get clear on your core values. (You can get my free values workbook on my website)

Once you are crystal clear on what you want, you can start exploring opportunities internally and externally by connecting with relevant people and expand your network with people who can give you insights, advice and introductions. That way you will be much more targeted in your search and won’t just throw a bunch of CVs out and hoping that something will stick.

What is your big goal? Where do you see yourself in 10 years from now?

That is the 10 million dollar question, isn’t it? I practice what I coach so I’m following my values and vision which is freedom, achievement and growth. The long-term vision is to build my coaching business to establish myself as a well-known expert in my niche and be able to continue the work I’m doing but on a bigger scale. I’d like to do more Keynote-speaking assignments and do new collaborations with other business and individuals as I strongly believe the power of developing new ideas and innovations with others. All this while living and travelling in various countries across the world – I’m not a one-country kind of woman!

How can people get in touch with you?

You can connect with me on LinkedIn or Schedule a call with me so I can talk you through what I do.

Read more from Mikaela!