The Career You'll Love » plan b

Facing the scary truth

Carl — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 21:20:44 +0000

This is the time of year that we celebrate the mysterious and spooky. But that’s different than what is truly scary.

What would happen if you got in an accident and were in the hospital for six months?

The Worst Career You Could Possibly Have

Carl — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:21:09 +0000

There are some careers that are held up as the most attractive. Those kinds of lists are often based on monetary reward, or power and influence, or popularity. Sometimes they look at reputation, like the ones that used to put bankers at the top and have moved them near the bottom.

We don’t tend to talk much about those careers on the bottom of the list. Presumably no sane person would want to do those, because they’ll never get rich, they won’t be popular, or they won’t get respect and recognition.

Read more on my Workbloom blog»

Seize the day!

Carl — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:27:30 +0000

The Career You’ll Love

Sponsored by Carl Dierschow’s career blog at www.Dierschow.com

Welcome to my career tips newsletter! I encourage you to pass this to anyone who might have an interest in revitalizing their career – instructions for subscribing are at the bottom.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”

- John Lennon

I continually run into people who are very future-focused, so much that they can’t appreciate what it means to live in the moment.

Don’t get me wrong; goals are wonderful. Having a vision is inspiring and powerful. But if these just sit there on the shelf, they can actually turn UNinspiring after a while.

Joseph has grand plans. He’s written a 30-year career plan (really!) which ends up with him leading an organization of thousands of employees before he retires. Joseph’s problem was that this vision was so grand that he didn’t know how to get started. He didn’t know what he should be doing today, and felt as if his current job was largely pointless.

I worked with him over the course of several coaching sessions, to bring that vision down to some current steps:

Building experience in managing people
Understanding what it means to manage a business, not just manage a team
Developing some key relationships to help his advancement into management

Without these steps, he’d still be in that strange gap, doing daily activities that didn’t seem to advance toward his goal.

I’d also like to point out that life never goes according to plan. It’s great to have worked out where you’d like to be in a year or two, and to be taking steps toward that, but then things happen. Both barriers and opportunities, and some events which seem to be a barrier might be a blessing in disguise.

The way to make decisions in this uncertain and changing environment is to have a set of values, principles, and goals. When your situation changes, go back to the basics and make a new plan.

It’s your life, so you get to change your plan. In small or large ways.

Carpe Diem!

P.S. I’ve seen a t-shirt that said that “Carpe Diem” means “seize the carp” but I suspect that may not be true.

P.P.S. That’s a joke!

Carl Dierschow is a Certified Small Fish Business Coach and author of the career management guide, Mondays Stink! 23 Secrets to Rediscover Delight and Fulfillment in Your Work. He is a career coach for those going through interesting transitions, and works with small business owners who need to create breakthroughs in achieving their business goals. Find out more at www.Dierschow.com and www.SmallFish.us.

If you are interested in individual career coaching, group coaching, or other resources which might help you with difficult choices, please contact Carl at carl@dierschow.com.

Connect with Carl on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to get timely updates and connections to a broader range of professionals.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to this newsletter, send an e-mail to newsletter@Dierschow.com

20 essential TED talks for new graduates

Carl — Thu, 26 May 2011 16:13:07 +0000

Here’s a great resource I ran across today: The 20 Essential TED Talks for New Graduates. As you might know, I’m a huge fan of the TED presentations, because they really do a great job of stretching your mind in new and interesting directions.

Emma over at the Accredited Online Colleges blog picked a great set of videos that would be useful for new graduates. But in many ways these are applicable for even more experienced workers, especially those who are in career transition.

So go check it out!

What the heck is a career plan?

Carl — Thu, 19 May 2011 03:06:39 +0000

You might have heard of the concept of a “career plan” – something that you put in place to help figure out what steps you’ll take to achieve your long term career goals.

I don’t know about you, but it sure sounds scary to me. I’m supposed to figure out where my career will be 40 years from now? Give me a break!

Read more on my Workbloom blog»

What If You’re Pursuing Several Different Career Paths in Your Job Search?

Carl — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 02:21:06 +0000

Back in 2009, I was pursuing two radically different career options, and I talked with a lot of others who were in similar situations. It’s very common for someone who is making a career switch, where you have a foot in the old market as well as the new.

Part of this is relatively easy:

Read more on my Workbloom blog»

The “when” questions

Carl — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:56:22 +0000

The Career You’ll Love

Sponsored by Carl Dierschow’s career blog at www.Dierschow.com

Welcome to my career tips newsletter! I encourage you to pass this to anyone who might have an interest in revitalizing their career – instructions for subscribing are at the bottom.

The “when” questions

In past newsletters I’ve talked about who, where, and what. So now let’s look at WHEN.

Timing is everything. But there’s lots of dimensions to think about here:

When do you have the need? When you have children, they put in place a timeline that will be in place for 20 years or more. Think not only of monetary needs (like a college fund), but what YOU need to be doing at particular ages. Before they are in school, you might want to focus your life more on raising infants and toddlers.
When is the job market at certain stages? This is especially important right now, because the market is in the midst of important changes. Some jobs are declining, some are increasing. Some skills are declining in importance, which can be tough to accept if you’ve built your past career around those skills.
When are the key stages of your career? The obvious stages of work are school – internship – job contribution – retirement. But each of these is being transformed, and a single “job contribution” stage of 40 years or so is ignoring a lot of interesting changes. Since workers today can expect to have 3-7 careers during their lifetime, it’s important to think of when you might want to move into your next career. Not just another job, but a whole new way of contributing and making a living.
When are the key stages of your life? Your body will enforce certain stages on you, as will key relationships in your life. Often a spouse or partner will be of similar age to you, so that’s not so complex. But it’s tougher to puzzle through the needs of your children and parents as they go through their lives.

After all this thinking and planning, you’d like to believe that you can plan out your life and career. Sorry. The key lesson of WHEN is that changes can come to you at any random time, whether or not you are prepared.

But it’s better to have a plan, because that gives you some preparation. Then when life hands you something unexpected, you’ll have greater flexibility to accept it and adjust with insight and creativity.

Make a plan, while accepting that you’ll never be able to live that plan exactly as written.

An important resource

Now’s the time that some people think about New Year’s resolutions. Of course, the common understanding is that resolutions are a joke, something you expect to fail at and therefore don’t make any serious commitment to.

It’s a shame. Taking advantage of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly cycles can be a powerful way to make important changes in your life.

Here’s how to make resolutions work for you:

Focus on one thing. Too many objectives just diffuses the energy from all of them.
Make it something that’s important to you. Sure, you might feel guilty about being out of shape, but be honest - is it really important to you in the next year? Or is it more important to focus on some key relationships in 2011? Be honest.
Focus on the benefits. When you’re constantly worried about the barriers and hard work involved, you’re sucking energy away from achievement. Focus on WHY you wanted to do this.
Tell someone what you’re committed to, someone who you don’t want to disappoint. Check out what I wrote about this back in September.
Check in every week. Looking at your goal 52 times during the year will help keep your passion and energy on the goal.

And have a wonderful start to 2011!

If you are interested in individual career coaching, group coaching, or other resources which might help you with difficult choices, please contact Carl at carl@dierschow.com.

Connect with Carl on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to get timely updates and connections to a broader range of professionals.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to this newsletter, send an e-mail to newsletter@Dierschow.com

Is it time to reboot your career?

Carl — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:19:56 +0000

Two hundred years ago, your role in life largely depended on the village where you were born and the vocations of your parents.

With the Industrial Revolution came the idea that you might have more choice in your lifelong career, although still heavily influenced by your family’s social status.

Nobody is sure exactly what the model is for the 21st century, but it’s a mixture of taking initiative, investment in your skills and education, finding a path to self-fulfillment, and being flexible as the world changes ever more rapidly.

Lightness and humor

Carl — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:14:42 +0000

I had a chance to work with over a hundred people last week in workshops around career planning. The theme of each session was on developing your own resilient career, which many people are struggling with right now. Worried about insecurity and job loss, many are finding it difficult to realize that they have options and choices.

But I wanted to talk a bit about humor, lightness, and energy. One of the things I worked hard on for those workshops was to create an environment which was significantly more upbeat than normal. As an introvert, this is quite difficult for me to do, and it takes an unbelievable amount of energy. But I’ve found that my clients are much more creative, and much more energized, when things are light.

I describe to people an image of you being in a head-to-head battle with your problem. You push on the problem, and it pushes back, and ultimately it ends up as a battle of wills – like two sumo wrestlers.

Rather like having a teenager, sometimes.

But when you are able to have some humor and energy, this gives you the mental and emotional agility to dance around the problem and look at it from different points of view. You become more resilient, and can see that few problems are truly insurmountable.

My purpose last week was to help people out of their current focus on the immediate problems, and instead to think more optimistically about the future and dance with it. If you were at one of the workshops, I’d be interested to hear about how this worked for you.

Remember: When you’re struggling with a problem, start dancing. Move laterally, with humor and grace, and it will help you see more creative solutions.

Creating a custom job out of thin air

Carl — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:57:45 +0000

I’ve been fortunate to have had opportunities during my career to create jobs. Ultimately I even ended up creating customized jobs for myself, based on bringing my best talents and passions to giving great value to my employer.

In the first article, I describe the general approach. In the subsequent 5 installments, I walk you through the process of creating a job which could just be the most exciting work you’ve ever done.

Read the series of 6 articles on my Workbloom blog»