Episode #12
Chrisa Zindros: Fashion & Visual Merchandising to Executive Coach and Entrepreneur
Chrisa Zindros wanted to be an archaeologist. She never became one, and in a sense she never stopped being one either. She grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, the daughter of immigrant parents who built their own version of the American dream through work they owned outright, including a father who ran an ice cream truck for decades and taught her that any position of influence carries an obligation to help someone else up. When a Barnes & Noble opened near her in middle school, she went there to read philosophy while her friends went to parties. She never quite found her crew. What she found instead was a lasting fascination with what lies beneath the surface of people and the artifacts they leave behind. Archaeology gave way to business. Through college she held two jobs at once: admin work at an insurance company, and a keyholder shift at the mall, where she was the one working late enough to receive the shipments and lay out the floor sets. A relationship with the company's visual merchandising lead turned into trust, then into a job offer opening sixty stores. She picked the mall. From there came the circuit: nearly every brand you can name, remodels, rebrands, websites built for the first time, entire functions collapsing and being reinvented underneath her. Then came the morning she now describes to clients walking down Seventh Avenue toward a corner office, twelve-dollar coffee in hand, inexplicably irritated. She had everything she'd wanted. Something was off anyway. There was no breaking point. When her company was bought and sold she took the package, assuming she'd land as a CMO somewhere. Walking out of the building that day, the CEO of the coaching firm she'd been moonlighting with for six years called. The role she took for a few months lasted ten years, at a fraction of her old salary, and led eventually to her own practice. The pay cut, she says, was never the hard part. The identity work was. This conversation is about the quieter kind of reinvention, the kind that doesn't require a crisis. About restlessness as information rather than failure, and about what it takes to become someone new on purpose. Connect with Chrisa at: Website: https://www.czbconsulting.com/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chrisa-zindros-boyce Follow Raymond: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondmlee/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raymondlee.co Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clockingoutpod X: http://twitter.com/hrentrepreneur Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@clockingoutwithraymondlee/videos Become a guest on Clocking Out: https://bit.ly/46sqClq
