life@work

What It Takes To Change Careers In Midlife

I get a number of calls every month from people in their late 30’s, 40's or 50's who want to know what kind of process I go through with clients to help them change careers. They’re all revved up about possibility and change. Some of them sign up for the adventure while others, sighing as they hang up the phone, do not. 

Changing careers after 10 or more years is an incredibly daunting task. It’s a complex process that takes a whole lot of energy, creativity, persistence and work. And chances are you are already engaged in a life that requires a whole lot of energy, creativity, persistence and work.

I was interested to read this useful piece that sums up the process of changing careers in mid-life. If you’re thinking about it, I recommend you check it out.

Here is an overview of the steps, with my editorial comments:

• Assess yourself (There are 468 ways to do this, including written exercises and various tests.)
• Know what’s important to you. (Pay, hours, tasks, challenge, industry, people contact, etc.)
• Find out what’s out there (Research online and/or use a career counselor or coach.)
• Narrow down career options. (Between two and four options is manageable and not overly limiting.)
• Talk to people in the field (informational interviews, attend professional association meetings).
• Volunteer, work as a temp, or moonlight to try something out first while minimizing risk.
• Engage your existing network of people to assist you. (This is one of your biggest advantages over younger career-changers, so use it!)

You've heard about all of these steps before - none are difficult to comprehend. A big challenge for most people is deciding exactly how and exactly when and exactly with whom they are going to accomplish the steps.

But perhaps the most daunting challenge is keeping up the interest, momentum and sheer stamina it takes to change careers, while at the same time navigating the ever-changing currents of the river called My Life Right Now.

Just because you're in the midst of engineering a career change doesn't mean you can't go through a re-org at work, or the dog won't die, or your teenager won't test your limits, or your spouse's mother won't need to move into assisted living, and so on and so forth.

It can be tempting in the face of such distractions to give up on your career change plan altogether. But with a little patience, and a caring person in your life to nudge you, you can do it.

I'd love to hear: What made it possible for you to change careers?

It's Time for Energy and Enthusiasm!

Bad news is everywhere - do you really want to read more of it on this blog?

So I'm turning my focus to subjects and people that inspire and expand, and away from news about the job search. There are many other great blogs where you can read about job search how-to's and all the data you could ever want about who is laying off and who is hiring.

Today's bit of energy and enthusiasm I have to share with you comes from twentysomething, Cody McKibben, of Thrilling Heroics.

Cody writes compellingly about his unorthodox career and encourages other to "Optimize your life, rock your career, and make the world your playground!"

Here's what I thought after reading his post today:

• Love his energy! What a breath of fresh air.
• Great idea to turn his blog into a community!
• Ouch! I'm afraid he's right about the K-12 experience being pretty inadequate. And I'm sending a kid to middle school this fall.
• I hope my kids figure out how to be excited about their careers, 11 and 14 years from now when they're out of college. If I can play a part in inspiring them to do so, I'll be extremely grateful.

What do you think? How are you rocking your career?

What Do You Want?

It strikes me that there are a whole lot of people succeeding in good jobs who have no clue what they really want to be doing.

It's the price of being both highly competent and habitually taking the next opportunity just because it has arrived. This pattern works for a while, sometimes many years.

And then one day when we take a look at the bigger picture of our career and our life, we realize that we lost track of what we really care about and enjoy doing.

Or sometimes we simply grow out of our job or industry. We lose interest, and we haven't thought of what could come next that would be a better fit.

Knowing what we want requires a little introspection, an activity many of us resist. Here are the top reasons why:

• I'm too busy to reflect.
• Being introspective doesn't get anything done.
• This is too large a question to solve, so I'll just stay with the status quo - it's good enough.
• Nobody gets what they really want, so I'll just stay with the status quo - it's good enough.
• It's a terrible economy - I better stay put.

But here's the good news: you don't have to leave for a week-long silent retreat to address this question of what you want. You don't have to come up with "the" magic answer or take risks greater than you can responsibly handle.

You can understand what you want, enjoy and care about at work by tuning in briefly yet frequently to what you're doing and how it's affecting you. Are you engaged or bored? By what? Are you dreading tomorrow or looking forward to the challenge? Why do you think this is true? 

By checking in often and perhaps writing a few observations down, you stay connected to yourself. You don't lose yourself quite so completely to the busyness of your days and the demands of your job.

When you frequently consider your desires, likes and dislikes about your career, it results in you having meaningful and fruitful conversations with contacts and knowing when to raise your hand for certain projects. You lay the foundations that attract the people and opportunities that will help you get more of what you want.

Knowing what you want in your career is not something you answer four times in your life, but something you consider weekly, in small portions. This is because most of the time getting what you want is a result of many small decisions and actions rather than just a few sweeping, dramatic decisions.

Whenever I meet with clients who tell me they want to change jobs, first we take a close look at what they've got going for them at the current one. Many times there is still room to improve their experience substantially without having to make a dramatic job change.

Don't be afraid to ask yourself what you want. Even if you have a high salary and an impressive title and believe you couldn't possibly walk away from that, realize that no one's asking you to. Just hang in there and see what happens when you dare to connect your awareness of what you want with what you're actually doing.

When did you last ask yourself what you want from your career? And how did that go?

Finding Happiness at Work

This post was contributed by Holly McCarthy, who writes on the subject of job search sites. She invites your feedback at hollymccarthy12 at gmail dot com

Finding Happiness at Work

For many people out there participating in the daily grind, work is not something that makes them happy.  As a matter of fact, getting out of work is probably the highlight of their day. While this may be the case for a larger than normal segment of the population, there is a way to find happiness at work—if you are willing to look for it. If not, maybe it’s time you started looking for something you might find more fulfilling.

Look Back and Reflect

Is this your career or just a job? Many people have trouble finding happiness at work because they are not doing what they think they would like to be doing. Looking back and reflecting on what made you ultimately start working at your current job can give some much-needed perspective to the situation.  Remembering our past motivations can give us insight on where we now find ourselves.

Visualize Your Ideal Situation

What would make your work day perfect? There are so many factors that contribute to our feelings throughout the day, from the commute you have to take to the rapport you share with your colleagues. If you could change anything about your current job or career, what would it be? This is a great question to ask yourself when dealing with the happiness at work scenario; it helps to know what is actually contributing to your feelings. Visualizing an ideal situation gives you an idea of how far you need to go to reach that end result.

Stop Focusing on What’s Wrong

As in other aspects of our lives, the more we focus on what is wrong with our situation, the worse things actually seem. If we continue to focus on the bad things, these bad aspects will be the only thing we see and feel, ultimately creating more negativity down the road. Start finding good things to focus on at work, whether it is a friendly colleague or the smell of coffee in the break room. 

Be Thankful

Keep in mind that there are many people that may feel the way you do; however, the current economic situation has put many out of work who would be happy to simply have any job to bring much-needed income into the family coffers. Be thankful for the gainful employment you do have right now and remember that there is always a way to make a bad situation better—if you are wiling to look for it.

Photo by greggoconnell

What to Do When You're Overwhelmed by Too Many Career Ideas

 Many of the people who hire me as their coach aren't struggling with a lack of career options. Rather they are stuck because they have too many ideas and don't know where to start to narrow them down.

This reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me who moved from the U.S. to New Zealand for a year. She lived in a town in New Zealand where the local store had four kinds of cereal, two kinds of soap, one kind of lettuce - you get the picture. Decision making was easy.

Fast forward to her first trip to Target after moving back home. She made it to the laundry detergent aisle where she was bombarded by twenty different choices. Powder or liquid? Spring-fresh or no fragrance? Big jug or little box? It was paralyzing. She had to leave the store, she was so overwhelmed by how complicated it seemed just to wash clothes.

Of course laundry detergent choices aren't exactly life-and-death. All of those products are going to get your clothes clean - it's hard to go terribly wrong.

But it would have made my friend's trip to Target less overwhelming if she had thought a little bit beforehand about what she wants in a detergent. Then she could have filtered out all the products that didn't match her needs. She could have made a beeline for the high efficiency fragrance-free powder and gotten the hell out of the store.

Obviously we want to take a little more time and care with our career choices than our laundry. But there are tens of thousands of different jobs. O*NET lists over 55 different job titles just in the "Healthcare Practitioners and Technicians" job family alone.

Career option overwhelm doesn't only happen to twenty-somethings who are still exploring. Even if you've been in one career for years or have had a succession of careers, there will come a day when the question, "Now what?" starts nagging at you, and you can think of ten or more options to consider.

Many of us "go shopping" in the job market before looking inward to decide what our career priorities are. We end up feeling like my friend at Target. We become dazed and confused from all the possibilities and have no idea how to choose. We end up having conversations with ourselves that go something like this:

"I could stay here and go for that promotion."

"Maybe I could try to do something with my photography."

"Microsoft has great benefits, and they are less likely to lay off people in my kind of work."

"An MBA is probably something I need if I want to keep going with this career."

"I've always wanted to make a difference the world - is it too late to consider the Peace Corps?"

The key to getting unstuck is to become clear about what you want.

Although this sounds pretty basic, most of us don't spend much time thinking about what we want in an ordered or systematic way that helps us make good decisions.

What do you enjoy doing? What are key priorities for you now? What elements are non-negotiable? What kind of work environment do you know works well for you (or is terrible for you)? Sometimes the answers are easy to reach, and sometimes they are surprising or even painful.

I help people ask and answer these questions about themselves so that they can make key decisions about their careers that are a good fit.

We live in a time and culture that overwhelms us with options. Clarity helps us stay calm in any context that presents us with multiple choices, whether it be creating a career plan, deciding which book to read next, choosing a cell phone plan, or buying laundry detergent. 

So what do you want? I'm interested to hear what you know is important to you in your career right now.

Drop the Mainstream and Follow the Unstream

Today I'm inspired by this post from The Illuminated Mind by Jonathan Nasman, about how following the mainstream is a dream killer.

To know what your dreams are you need to know how to listen to your own heart and mind. Jonathan offers the intriguing idea that following the "unstream" instead of paying attention to the mainstream, connects you to who you are and what you want.

When you key into the mainstream, you're following a template for your life that has already been designed by others (society, culture, your family). Embracing the unstream is about following yourself.

Even though these are very tumultuous economic times, there's still room to nurture and achieve your dreams. You may want to adjust them and expand the time frame on some of them, but you can still move forward with them, even in the tough times.

This is because over half of what you need to move forward with your dreams is a particular mindset, and you don't have to spend any money to get this.

You don't even need all the circumstances of your life to be aligned in some magical order to cultivate this mindset. This is handy, because perfect alignment comes along only every once in a while and lasts about two minutes.

The mindset that allows us to achieve our dreams is optimistic. It's open to risk, to experimentation, to setbacks, to failure. It's expansive and creative. It's fueled by a powerful belief in our dreams and a deep knowledge of why the dreams are important to us.

Following the mainstream is about doing "what works", and is not the mindset of dream achievement. Note Jonathan's examples:

"I’ve wasted a lot of time in my life doing what works. I can’t count how many times I’ve used this excuse to stall pursuing my dreams.

• I went to college because that’s just “what works.”
• I go to a job and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day because “it works.”
• I don’t work on the weekends because I feel I need to reward myself for a week’s worth of drudgery. I have to say… “it just works.”
• I do the expected things. I try to make art because I’m supposed to be creative. I read because I’m supposed to learn. I dress a certain way because I’m supposed to be cool."

You get the picture. "What works" is what we do because we feel we're supposed to do it. We stay inside the box, and we base our choices on what we believe the mainstream template dictates. Period.

Here is Jonathan's take on how to follow the unstream:

• "Take risks and possibly make a fool out of ourself once or twice (or 200 times).
• Make things up as we go along and generally have no idea what how we’ll get to where we want to go. We just know that we can’t settle for anything else.
• Listen to our hearts. See with our hearts. Feel with our minds."

When we embrace the unstream, we dare to believe in the wisdom of our own hearts and minds, even if we've got a "crazy" dream and a lot of unanswered questions about how we're going to get there.

Following the unstream still allows us to make choices that seem pretty mainstream. We can create our own path to an 8-to-5 job, a marriage, a mortgage, or a Golden retriever.

The key is that we tuned in to ourselves as we made those choices. We know why we made the choices, and it wasn't just because it's "what worked". 

It strikes me that all this is about recognizing the passions and drive that are within us and allowing those feelings more power over our actions.

What do you think? When has creating your own path and taking more risks than the mainstream would recommend worked out for you?

Don't Stop Doing What You Love

Do what you love and the money may or may not follow.

No, I don't mean to be a downer. But if you're beating your head against the wall because you can't figure out how to make a living wage taking photographs or acting or walking dogs or helping the homeless or playing Scrabble or whatever it is you love to do, take heart.

You're not alone, and you absolutely should continue doing what you love.

Seth Godin offers a take on this philosophy that I find realistic, wise and inspiring. If you can't make money doing that thing you really love right now, then make it your goal to keep doing what you love regardless, and find a way to love what you do to make money.

Who's doing this right now? Please share your story!

When Worry Beckons You

I hope you have at least one friend in your life whom you not only like to be with but whom you admire and learn from.

One such friend for me is Coyote Karrick. We haven't known each other too terribly long, and we now live in different states, but that doesn't diminish how much I appreciate knowing her.

Coyote tells a story in her blog, Place of Possibility, about how she chose to feel positive during a time when worry beckoned (kind of like the piece of bagel on the floor did this morning to my dog, Caleb. Practically irresistible.) She tells the story with such humor and grace that I can't help but be inspired.

I'm good in a crisis. For whatever reason, I naturally move toward calm, measured, reasoned choices and actions. (I save the falling apart for later.)

But if there's no imminent threat of disaster, I'm a worrier. So many of us are. The fretting, the hand wringing, the "what if" thinking - it doesn't get me much besides broken nights of sleep.

I'm learning to postpone worry, to choose to anticipate, to stay more calm on a more regular basis. I don't think it means I'm putting my head in the sand and ignoring reality. In fact I think those practices leave me more skilled at recognizing reality and dealing with it.

What worry are you willing to let go of, even if it's just for today? See what happens when you push it aside and choose to see your situation through a different lens.

What Work Rules Do You Play By?

As a life and career coach I read and write about job searching, happiness, change, decision science, and productivity, to name a few of my favorite topics.

My favorite productivity/simplicity blog these days is Zen Habits by Leo Babauta. There's always something smart, cool, or, well - Zen - on this blog. Just knowing that Leo is a father of six and somehow manages to do what he does with an inspiring attitude makes it slightly more likely that I will become mellow someday (when I can fit that in!)

A few days ago he wrote about how traditional work tools and customs are being replaced more and more by new tools and new rules. It strikes me that many of these newer ways of working are much more likely to contribute to career happiness than the traditional ways.

Highlights of the new rules include:

• Collaborate on documents rather than email them.
• People don't have to be in an office.
• Small teams are better than large teams.
• Reduce meetings because most of them are a waste of time.
• Rest is as important as work.
• Focus, don't crank through a million tasks while multi-tasking.
• Consider that communication is a "stream" in which you wade, take what you need, and get out.

I love this last rule. We can't possibly process everything in our in-boxes like the olden days. There are too many emails, blog posts, IMs and Tweets to keep up with. We all need to admit that we're going to miss some stuff, and move on. Revolutionary!

There are work opportunities that offer some or all of the new rules. It's worth it to think about which ones resonate with you and see what you can do to adopt them!

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

A Plug for More Cheering in the Workplace

Photo by artfulblogger

I was reminded yesterday of the power of applause and cheering when I attended my daughters' annual ballet performance.

The show was in a real auditorium, with a backstage, costumes, lighting effects, flowers for the dancers, a curtain call - the works. It's a very exciting setting for the kids, and the mood is upbeat and fun rather than restrained.

The audience was asked to clap, cheer, hoot and holler whenever we saw something we liked. You can imagine the noise in the theater when the first group of four year-olds came out to do their number.

Whether the kids were four, fourteen or somewhere in between, whenever we would applaud or whistle, you could feel the energy swell and see the dancers beaming. We were encouraging them and showing our appreciation clearly, and they were responding with light hearts and their best work.

When was the last time someone clapped and cheered for you? Didn't you feel glorious and excited? Most likely you were playing a sport or performing in some kind of show.

You probably weren't at work.

A standing ovation is not what typically happens in the American workplace, but we do want to know somehow in some way that we are noticed and valued for the good work that we do.

Unfortunately many managers are bad at the skill of giving positive feedback. They don't know how, or they don't think it's important, or they think that kudos should be rationed like sugar in WWII.

But sincere and meaningful feedback is cheap to produce and takes very little time to provide. If you supervise people and you can't remember the last time you told your team something positive about their performance, do it today. If you work for someone who is stingy with feedback, ask for it.

My kids love to dance and would do it even if they didn't get applause. But during a stressful event such as performing on stage in front of several hundred people, the applause is just the boost of encouragement they need to relax and enjoy themselves.

Just because we've grown up doesn't mean we've outgrown our tendency to shine when we're appreciated.

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