Hi, I’m Cyndi!
My name is Cyndi Bennett and I am a trauma recovery career coach who helps trauma survivors move from dysregulated, disempowered, and underemployed to regulated, empowered, and finding a fulfilling and satisfying career.
About Me
I started my career as an adolescent substance abuse counselor in an outpatient setting. I worked with teens and their parents to work through the issues that were driving them to use drugs and alcohol to cope.
It was an emotionally intense and stressful job because the consequences of not doing a good job could be fatal in the lives of the adolescents that I served, as well as their parents. To help them work through what was driving their substance use, we had to dig deep in groups and individual sessions to address what I now know as trauma. As a trauma survivor who had not yet processed my own trauma, this work was extremely triggering to me, to the point where I burned out. Oh counselor, heal thyself. I learned:
Unhealed trauma can cause burnout.
I tried to find a job that was not as triggering. I floated around picking up administrative and clerical type jobs because I thought they would not be as emotional taxing as the counselor job had been.
I did some work as a temp, which I liked, because I was there for a limited time and I didn’t have to worry about getting too close to people or office politics. However, the income was not consistent because there would ultimately be gaps in my assignments. I didn’t have a career, I had a series of J-O-Bs. I felt kind of lost because I had no direction and no one to guide me. I had no idea what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” I didn’t know who I was or have any career identity of my own except for being a wife and mother. I didn’t even know what I was good at. Every job or assignment taught me a little more about myself, what I liked and didn’t like, and what I was good at. This taught me that …
The work develops the worker.
I got my first corporate job in 1999, starting in the word processing department of an insurance brokerage company, where I was introduced to the field of consulting. I was very interested in consulting because it used a lot of the counseling and analytical skills I already had … without the emotional stuff that dragged me down.
When the company that I thought I would spent my whole life at downsized and I was let go, I decided I would pursue a career in consulting. This was back in the day before Google, so I contacted every consulting firm in Charlotte looking for a job as a consultant. I left no stone unturned. I was very thorough, but I couldn’t seem to get anything to call me back or be interested in me. I finally got the regional consulting manager of Accenture on the phone where we reviewed my resume together. He asked if he could be honest with me. I told him I wish someone would be. He went on to say that I have a lot of great administrative skills, but very little business knowledge. He told me that I could either go get my MBA and walk in the front door of a consulting company or I could use the administrative experience I had to get a role as an Administrative Assistant at a company that would train me to be a consultant. That bit of advice fundamentally flipped my whole job search strategy. I got a role as an Administrative Assistant for a company that had continuing education benefits and I ended up getting two advanced degrees for free.
I learned how to create a career plan that closed the knowledge gap and prepared me for what I wanted to do.
I worked hard to advance my career by closing the knowledge gap, taking on extra work, and performing well, but I noticed that younger, less experienced people were being promoted and I wasn’t. I started to question what was wrong with me and why I wasn’t being promoted.
It was rather frustrating and caused a lot of self-doubt and self-criticism. It wasn’t until I had a skip connect with my Sr. Executive that I discovered what I was missing…relationships. It wasn’t that I didn’t have relationships, but I didn’t relationships with the right people. I didn’t have strategic relationships. I learned that I not only had to ensure my manager knew the good work I was doing, but I also had to establish relationships with my bosses’ peers, because they are the one that sat around the talent planning table stack ranking who would be promoted. I learned how to influence without authority my business partners in order to collaborate on work that needed to get done. As a trauma survivor, relationships, in general, can be tricky due to the relational nature of the trauma we experienced. I learned:
Performance + Relationships = Advancement
In 2018, I was on top of the world from a career perspective. I was thrilled to have obtained my dream job, leading a large project across multiple lines of business. I had a boss that believed in me and was given the freedom to do what I thought was right in order to accomplish my remit.
Six months into my dream job, I had a zip file of repressed memories from childhood trauma open up causing me to go from a high-functioning overachiever to not being able to function at all in the workplace. I was emotionally dysregulated (crying through most days), my startle response was through the roof, and I could not focus on work because my brain was offline. My childhood trauma caught up with me and knocked me on my butt. I did not want to lose my dream job, so I began the most courageous journey of my career…facing into my past trauma and working through it. It was the most challenging things I ever did, but also, the most rewarding.
As I started to heal, my career aspirations started to change. I knew I was not the only trauma survivor who struggled with their trauma symptoms in the workplace, but no one was focused on it. In 2022, I obtained a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach (CTRC) certification through the International Association of Trauma Recovery Coaching, and Cyndi Bennett Consulting, LLC was born. In 2023, I continued with my training securing a Certified Group Trauma Recovery Coach. My clear calling was to help trauma survivors, like myself, overcome the lasting effects of trauma on their careers.
