life@work

How Does Your Job Rate?

Photo by PhillipC

HR World features an article listing their take on the 10 most overrated and underrated jobs out there.

Where you do think doctor falls on these lists? Librarian? Tattoo artist? Cameraman?

If you're in one of the twenty careers listed, do you agree with HR World's take on it?

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

How Boomers Can Plan Working Until They're 97

Can you tell a member of Generation X wrote the title of this post?

Yes, it's my duty to occasionally poke fun at the huge and ambitious generation that has always cast a shadow on the misunderstood, whiny and poorly defined generation of which I am a member.

Some Boomers want to work until they drop. Why not? They've spent their whole lives working like fiends and are going to live a long time.

CareerJournal.com's article summarizing Tamara Erickson's upcoming book "Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation" offers some really useful ways for Boomers (and I would argue, even little ol' Generation X someday) to plan their retirement years.

Like any good career planning practice, the process Erickson describes hinges on looking inwardly first, then reviewing external opportunities and assessing their fit.

In a nutshell you look at both how you want to work and why you want to work, which makes complete sense, yet isn't something that everyone thinks to do.

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Attracting Your Perfect Job

Photo by Xerones

How attractive are you?

I'm not talking about your hair, your clothes, or your winning smile.

I'm asking what you're doing to be attractive to your perfect employer. Assuming you are in the market for a different and more perfect job and/or employer.

This is not a post about the Law of Attraction, per se. I haven't seen The Secret, and I don't have any magical affirmations to offer you.

But I am convinced that we can do a lot to attract the kinds of people and situations we want in our lives.

Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez's book, Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity, is one I turn to weekly as I develop and grow my own business. I have a business, and the business depends on customers. Every business owner has to figure out where those customers are going to come from. 

The tactic of running around, chasing after customers wasn't working too well for me. Imagine that. When I read this book, which was introduced to me by coach extraordinaire, Molly Gordon, I began to think about attracting perfect customers. I created something called a strategic attraction plan. And this changed my business entirely.

OK, so what does this have to do with you and your perfect job?

Everything. You can create a strategic attraction plan to attract perfect customers, a perfect job, mate, perfect vendors, business partners, or whoever. It's not magic, but is a fresh way to look at marketing or job seeking.

The book has all the details, but here are a few highlights:

• You are most attractive when you are like a lighthouse, standing still with a very focused beam of light, than when you are running up and down the beach, shining your light everywhere, trying to attract the attention of all the boats in the harbor.

This metaphor is about knowing who you are - in the case of being a job seeker, knowing your value proposition - and not trying to be what you think everyone else wants you to be. Focus is attractive, diffuseness is not.

Paring the process down quite a bit, your strategic attraction plan is the result of:

• Envisioning your perfect employer (it helps to have already worked for one that was awfully good), writing down their qualities and attributes
• Writing down what you choose your perfect employer to expect you to do
• Writing down what you need to improve to attract your perfect employer
• Working to improve what you decided you need to improve
• Reviewing the plan each day, to keep it alive

Creating a strategic attraction plan for a job search requires that you know yourself well, that you can imagine an ideal environment for you, and that you understand what you can do to make yourself more attractive to your perfect employer.

Just getting to the point of writing the plan takes a lot of thought and exploration! But it helps you become the lighthouse, someone your ideal employer will recognize as a great fit for their needs.

If you've done reading on personal branding, you recognize how closely tied the strategic attraction plan is to developing your personal brand. (Check out the 1997 Tom Peters article that started it all for more information). Dan Schawbel, among many others, is at the forefront of personal branding evangelism today.

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Despair Can Crack You Up (in a Good Way)

A friend of mine told me about Despair.com after reading my post on optimism.

This is an extremely clever website that sells products that spoof motivational items such as the posters some corporations choose to display. You know, the ones that are about being the best you can be, reaching for the stars, etc.

Those must be the same companies who shell out the big bucks for Lucite plaques as service awards, so keyed in are they to what truly motivates employees.

Be sure to check out the Bittersweets. Guaranteed to put a new spin on your Valentine's Day.

Optimism is good for you - but pessimism is funnier.

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Optimism is Your Career Ally

Photo by Vanessa Pike-Russell 

Is the glass half empty or half full?

How you see it has a huge bearing on how you recover from setbacks and how happy you are in general.

I'd like to say that I was born an optimist. I'd also like to say that I can eat all the chocolate I want without gaining a pound and that the sun is shining here in Seattle on January 7. But unfortunately none of this is true.

So while I nibble on small bits of chocolate and stoically don my rain parka, I'm working on cultivating optimism. And here's why: my career and my life are going to be better for it.

Here's what sets apart the pessimists from the optimists, according to Dr. Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life,

"The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of the world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case...Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder."

Our careers are filled with setbacks. We may have a bad boss, a poor performing employee, a project that has gotten way out of hand, unrealistic quotas, a boring job, too much to do, budget cuts, layoffs, or unethical leadership.

Career change offers up its own share of challenges, setbacks and bad times. Lack of personal contacts in the desired field, lack of education, low starting salary in our desired position, and so on. I'm getting depressed just writing about it!

I've coached a lot of people over the last several years on all kinds of career and life issues. The optimists simply have an easier time of it, and they get where they want faster.

The good news in all this is that even people with pessimistic tendencies can cultivate optimism. This involves learning a new set of cognitive skills, as opposed to repeating happy affirmations and hoping that someday you believe them.

Seligman's book explains these skills in detail. They are rather fascinating and take some practice and some time to get the hang of.

I highly recommend you buy the book or check it out from the library for all the information, but here are a few highlights around the so-called "ABCD" skills model.

A. Notice when you're experiencing adversity, even just a tiny example.
"I can't get a meeting with my boss this week."

B. Notice your beliefs (i.e., your interpretation) about this adversity.
"My boss is always ducking me. Why doesn't she care about what I'm doing?"

C. Notice how you feel and/or what you do (i.e., the consequences).
"I'm worried that I'm not going to be considered for the promotion I'm wanting, that I'm no longer a "player". I'm angry that I'm disregarded."

D. Distract yourself or dispute your beliefs.
Immediately shift your attention to stop ruminating. Or use evidence, alternative views, or decatastrophize. (These are very powerful skills that I just can't do justice here. Get the book!)

A little pessimism can be constructive. It can keep us from doing rash, foolhardy things. Back in our evolutionary history our pessimism mirrored the grim realities of the times: danger lurking around the next corner, most children dying before their 5th birthday, not enough food to last the winter, etc. 

But now for most of us, disaster is far less imminent. Yet the pull of pessimism can keep us stuck, unhappy, even depressed. We need optimism to inspire and fuel our plans and dreams and to propel us forward into unchartered territory.

I am deciding to be hopeful that the sun will return to Seattle, among other things. What are you deciding to be optimistic about today?

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com