Charmain Bogue on How a Psychology Degree Shaped Everything That Came After

The study of human behavior turns out to be the most practical degree you can get.

When people ask what I studied in college, I tell them psychology, and they almost always follow up with the same question: "So did you become a therapist?" No. But I use that degree every single day.

I earned my undergraduate degree in psychology, and at the time I thought I was preparing for one kind of career. What I was actually doing was learning how to read rooms, understand resistance, and figure out why people do the things they do, especially when those things don't make sense on paper.

That training followed me everywhere. When I moved into strategic planning and program management, I wasn't just looking at spreadsheets and org charts. I was watching how teams responded to change. I was paying attention to who spoke up in meetings and who didn't. I was noticing when a leader said one thing and their body language said something else entirely.

Charmain Bogue with a psychology degree sounds like a detour if you're looking at my resume from the outside. But from the inside, it was the foundation.

Years later, when I started doing executive coaching and advisory work, the psychology background became even more central. Executives don't usually need someone to tell them what the right decision is. They need someone who can help them understand why they keep avoiding it. That's behavioral work. That's pattern recognition. That's psychology.

I spent time in government, and I can tell you that the most complex problems I encountered were never really about policy or budgets. They were about people. People who felt unheard. People who were protecting territory. People who had been burned before and weren't about to trust a new initiative just because someone in a corner office said it was a good idea.

When I mentor women through programs or work with founders, I'm drawing on the same skill set. A startup founder who can't delegate isn't facing an operations problem. She's facing a trust problem. A working mother who won't ask for flexibility isn't facing a scheduling problem. She's facing a permission problem, one she's internalized from years of workplace culture telling her that needing anything makes her less serious.

Psychology taught me to look underneath the surface complaint. The thing someone brings to you is almost never the real thing. The employee who's upset about a policy change is actually upset about not being consulted. The team that's missing deadlines isn't lazy. They're confused about priorities because leadership keeps shifting them.

I went on to get my graduate degree in education, and that added another layer. Education theory is really about how people absorb information, what sticks, and what doesn't. Combined with the psychology foundation, it gave me a framework for understanding not just why people behave the way they do, but how to actually help them change.

That combination, understanding behavior and understanding learning, is what makes coaching work. You can't just tell someone to be a better leader. You have to understand what's getting in their way, and then you have to meet them where they are and help them build new habits from there.

I think about this a lot when I see job postings that list very specific degree requirements. A computer science degree for a management role. An MBA for a position that's really about communication. We've gotten very narrow about what counts as useful preparation, and I think we're missing out on people whose training gave them exactly the skills the job needs, just not in the packaging we expected.

My advice to anyone early in their career who are told their degree isn't "practical" enough: give it time. The threads connect in ways you can't see yet. The important thing is that you're learning how to think, how to observe, and how to ask the right questions. Everything else you can pick up along the way.