The Career Explorer's Journal in 2011

Free on Smashwords, Barnes&Noble NOOKbooks, Sony ReaderStore & Apple US & UK

(Also available on Amazon's KindleStore US & UK)

A New Year always brings in the new

The 2011 Edition of The Career Explorer's Journal is here to bring something new to the way we think about and experience work - one career, one person at a time. Maybe your something new will be a better idea of what you want for the future or a clearer picture of what you're working towards. Maybe you'll discover something a little more fundamental, like new feelings of progress on a job search or a sharper sense of focus on that all important next milestone and what it looks like for you.

The Career Explorer's Journal is free now and for the rest of 2011 and it offers something new to everyone who finds it. ExploreYourCareer.com is also there for you to tell us what you think and share your experiences before, during and after your reader's journey. It's my hope that 2011 will be a year full of new career discoveries for everyone who picks up this book. From your very first choice to become a career explorer you'll join me and everyone else who has already taken exactly the same first step. Every single one of us on a mission to discover where we want our careers to go.

Wishing all the very best to you and your career in 2011!

Paul

Take Courage

We might have our doubts...

We don't really know what's going to happen

We're not sure what will work out for the best

We never know if time will prove us right or wrong

It must be a sign!

[Image courtesy of geese on Flickr]

But we can always be certain that

No one knows what's going to happen

No one knows what will work out for the best

No one knows if time will prove them right or wrong

You can also be sure that no one else is even half as motivated as you are,

to make the best choice possible and make your choices work

* * * * *

Oh, The Places You'll Go!

On the subject of book reviews, I have one simple criteria: if it relates to your career, it's relevant here.

The above statement was the only way I could think to start this post because otherwise - as you read on - you might wonder what on earth was happening.

Allow me to explain a little further...

A friend mentioned a career book to me recently but his recommendation was so unusual, I thought he was playing an elaborate joke.

"It's a great book," he said. "Full of advice about making career choices and it doesn't pull any punches either!"

This sounded like a book I had to read.

"Who's it by?" I asked excitedly.

"Dr. Seuss," he said.

When I checked and double checked that he was being serious, I discovered that the book was called 'Oh, The Places You'll Go!' and ordered myself a copy.

Title: Oh, The Places You'll Go! - Author: Dr. Seuss - ISBN: 978-0-00-715852-2 (2003, UK soft cover re-print)

You might still think I'm joking (or that I fell for my friend's joke despite trying to avoid it) but I was amazed at what I read.

It was indeed good, solid advice that focused on decision-making and the variety of situations the world presents us with.

The Author didn't assume that he knew best either. He assumed the opposite in fact. That when it comes to your career, you're always the one in the best place to choose.

Here's one short passage to give you an idea what you'd be getting into by reading this book:

"You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself

any direction you choose"

OK, so this book won't answer all of your career questions in anapestic tetrameter but then again, it doesn't try to.

Instead, all it does is try to equip you with the knowledge that you will face choices, that things will sometimes be tough, that there will be ups, downs and everything in-between.

This book not only fills you with what organisational psychologists might call an increased tolerance for ambiguity, it also puts a smile on your face. Maybe Dr. Seuss knew that this is what you need most when you're, "in a slump" as he puts it.

Maybe Dr. Seuss wrote this book for the adult readers as much as the kids they would read it to/with. But even if you couldn't bring yourself to see this book as deserving of anything other than a pre-schooler's bookshelf, you would have to grudgingly admit that the subject matter of careers looks distinctly more interesting when it is touched by an artist in this way.

On the question of whether you should buy this book or not, allow me to respond by borrowing a little from Dr. Seuss's style:

If you're in two minds then all I can say

Is decide for yourself, today is your day!

(Plus £4.99 is all that you'll pay) :)

All the best for now,

Paul

www.ohtheplaces.org

800 CEO Read - Oh the Places You'll Go!

Oh, the Places You'll Go!, Waterstones UK

Drawing Conclusions

If you add up the posts, the comments, the relationships and everything else here on work/life fusion, what conclusions would you draw so far?

Here are a few I have come to:

✪ Work/life fusion doesn’t try to offer definitive career answers but it does aim to maximise career opportunities whatever your individual situation

✪ Work/life fusion does try to show that individual career choices can make a difference and that career choices/decisions are best taken by you, wherever possible

✪ Work/life fusion does try to secure your belief - with evidence and fact - that your career can move forward, even if it has stalled

✪ Work/life fusion doesn’t stand or fall on individual career successes - yours, mine or anyone else's - but it's important to know what it stands for

What conclusions do you draw so far?

[Puppy Love - see more at Saundra's Flickr Photostream here]

A big Thank You to everyone who has read, commented and linked here throughout the year. I'm taking a break from blogging in August but will be online for email and comments too.

If it's Summer where you are, I hope you're enjoying it. If it's Winter or just one long season all year round, know that you probably won't see as much cloud and rain as I will here in the UK :)

See you all in September!

All the best for now,

Paul

Managing Career Change II

If you stopped by last October, you might recall reading about Prem.

Prem wanted to break into a new industry but he was finding it difficult. He was battling the perception that his experiences had no relevance outside his old work.

✪ Could Prem change these perceptions?

✪ Could he prove his experiences were valid in this new field?

✪ Could he get anyone to give him a break?

When Prem and I first spoke, he was already feeling like his choices were running out. To give us both the lift we needed, first we focused on the good news: at least Prem had choices!

We followed this up by establishing a shared belief in the fact that Prem's choices were actually the biggest single factor influencing his career success. Prem's intention to move his career into a new industry was his choice and his chief motivating factor after all.

[Louvre Voyeur - - see more at Saundra's Flickr Photostream here]

Managing Your Career

✪ Are you in a situation like Prem?

✪ Have you successfully switched from one industry to another?

✪ How did you get your big career break?

✪ What does managing our careers give us in common?

Comment is welcome & free!

All the best for now,

Paul

Related posts:

✪ Prem's story: Short & Long-term career planning

✪ Managing career change

✪ Career choice

The Trappings of Success

Why trappings?

Why make success sound like a trap?

[Trapped? Looks pretty good to me :) - see more at Saundra's Flickr Photostream here]

Some language students call the English language, 'easy to learn but difficult to master'. I suppose that goes for most languages but maybe it is words like 'trappings' that make things tricky. Even life-long English speakers could be forgiven for wondering about this one.

Is the English language confused or is it highly enlightened. Are they just words or do some words offer us a tangible, everyday link to the full range of human experience and learning throughout the ages? Yes it describes but can it really teach us pitfalls at the same time?

In my opinion [around the subject of careers of course] trappings can only make us feel trapped if they are things we don't want. If the trappings of career success also deliver fundamental satisfaction and fulfilment, you are unlikely to feel trapped.

If however you feel forced to follow a particular career path [i.e. your career decisions are limited by the trappings of success] feelings of discontent, disappointment or dissatisfaction would seem more likely at some point in the future.

What are your thoughts on the trappings of success?

All the best for now,

Paul

Where the research leads...

The longer I spend in career-related work, the more supporting evidence I find for self-led choices being the best method of delivering sustainable, career-long satisfaction and success.

Work/life fusion has focused on researching, understanding and assisting this form of career decision-making and direction-finding since its very first post but - since you are asking for clarification - what exactly are self-led choices and where can all this research lead?

It is too frustrating and too simple to say that you already have the answers but there is some truth in that statement. It is more accurate to say that you can arrive at meaningful career answers through experiences that you already possess. [It also helps that the latter of these two statements can be qualified and is much more defensible too.]

This blog has referred to our past career experiences as assets. Over time, the belief that our career experiences are genuine assets hasn't changed but maybe it has become easier to express.

[Peace within a storm - see more at Saundra's Photostream here]

In the past, career support services (advice, guidance, outplacement, etc.) were happiest when they were defining our external search. In other words, individual career support was largely based on helping us find something that was missing, something that we hadn't yet found. Once an individual could see what the missing piece was (whether it was a job, a job-title, a certain level of earnings or anything else) their strategy in its simplest form amounted to little more than 'Go get it!'

Growing evidence I have encountered suggests that 'career services' will behave differently in the future and that one of the key differences will be a new emphasis on supporting self-led choice. Self-led career choices are more relevant to our individual career experiences, based more firmly on individually relevant evidence and possess a much closer fit with our individual values, talents and goals.

As it always does, time will provide the ultimate proof but the results of structured research into what each of us wants and can achieve from our individual careers, in my view creates career opportunities too exciting to miss!

Here are a couple more posts on the broader subject of self-led choice:

Ash's story - Career Decision Success!

Career Management from within

Career management & self-esteem

Career management & belief

All the best for now,

Paul

Career choice

The choices you make have a greater influence on your career than anything else. In other words, choice is the single most important factor in individual career success.

[Career choice won't get you everything but it can get you more than started!]

Last night was Oscar night and plenty of journalists & bloggers know that writing about the Oscars (and filling your article with all the names of the big winners & losers) can win plenty of new readers. Despite the risk of being labelled a shameless bandwagon jumper, I had to include one very small sentence that brings home the power and influence our choices can wield.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, A.R. Rahman said, "All my life I've had a choice of hate or love. I've always chosen love and I'm here." (Here is the link to his speech in full: http://theenvelope.latimes.com/awards/oscars/env-best-worst-oscars-2009-pg,0,6012367.photogallery?index=26).

This very short, simple sentence hides the huge effort (hours of learning, dedication, sacrifice, overcoming hardship, fine tuning expertise, etc.) behind his career to date. It also obscures the number and the complexity of choices and decisions that shape a career and get it to something like the very pinnacle of success (i.e. last night's awards).

What this sentence does not hide however is the importance of choice. Every time a choice is presented, we can choose how to go forward.

Mr Rahman will have no doubt chosen to study, he will have chosen to dedicate himself to his art, he will have chosen to stay the course even when the outlook was uncertain and he will have chosen against short-term gains where there was harm in the longer-term.

Career choice is never as simple as love vs. hate but it is made a great deal simpler when we know that we do have a choice and that our choices - large or small - are inescapably linked to our overall success.

Read more about the importance of choice in your career & personal success:

Making intelligent career choices

Career choice is critical

Knowledge, choice and understanding

Ash's story - Career Decision Success!

Ash's story - Career Decision Making

Test, re-test and test again

All the best for now!

Paul

Who are the partners in your career?

Career articles sometimes have questions for titles but how many ask us for an individual answer?

I won't pretend to be completely blameless on the annoying rhetorical question front but this is one question that can only be considered independently. Yes, a career is something we all have in common but we are all individuals. There are times when only thinking for ourselves will do.

Here is one question that can only be answered by you: Who are the partners in your career?

[Look closer and you might see something you missed!]

Last year I wrote about the people who have a long-term interest in your career. That article highlighted the difference between the people showing an interest in your career today and the smaller group of people who are with you for the long haul. This article is really about clarifying that small group of interested people and considering partnership from the perspective of our careers.

Partnership goes further than interest because it is more active and involved. Our career partners are the people who help our careers to develop; the people who offer us the benefit of their experience; the people who volunteer an opinion as we deal with difficult questions; the people who challenge our beliefs and intentions to help us succeed.

Successful careers always have partners and they create partnership opportunities for others too. The most important partners in our careers can be people we already know as well as people we are yet to meet. Realising who our partners are, how they have helped us so far and how the benefits of partnership can be extended in the future, is all the incentive we need to answer this question for ourselves.

_________________________________________________

Here are a few partnership & 'independent career thought' related links:

Interest in your career

Looking back, around and ahead

Boulos's story: Job satisfaction

Seek to understand

Time

Splitting decisions

Have a great weekend wherever you are!

All the best,

Paul

Making intelligent career choices

The ability to make intelligent career choices is open to us all.

This may seem like an obvious statement but I am not convinced that everyone would agree with it.

Some might argue that you can only make intelligent choices if you yourself are intelligent. Others might go on to say that because intelligence is shared out unequally, not everyone can make intelligent choices.

Personally, I do not subscribe to either view because I am convinced that intelligent choice is open to us all (I also don't believe that intelligence is unequal but that is another story).

Regardless how clever others say we are - or how clever we believe ourselves to be - we can all make intelligent choices. Just as it is also true that the very cleverest of people make foolish choices too.

Intelligent career choice relies - among other things - on our individual ability to understand our relationship with work. It also depends how we are judging or defining career success to ourselves, as well as to those around us.

Intelligent career choice is therefore something that we can learn more about and - another thing that levels the playing field - there is no barrier to entry other than our own motivation to better understand our relationship with work.

Anyone with the will to spend a little time on this subject will begin to make more intelligent choices and make progress in their career along the way.

[P.S. Where is Tom Cruise when you need him?]

For more posts on career choice and understanding your relationship with work visit:

Looking back, around and ahead

Career leadership and Personal success

In career choice, less always means more

Career management & self-esteem

Know what you are doing

It is a great compliment to be told, "You know what you are doing".

This simple statement is a real confidence booster. It's also a pleasure to say about someone else too.

"You know what you are doing" can be praise for a single piece of good work. It can also be said about an individual's attitude & professional skill as a whole. High praise indeed when that is the case!

["Of course there is enough light for me to photograph this lunar eclipse, I know what I am doing"]

To know what we are doing also has an interesting meaning if we apply it to our careers. Not everyone can think about their career and say in all truth, "I know what I am doing".

In fact, it is probably a minority who really know what they are doing with their career.

[Don't agree? Try these simple questions as a test: Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?, What do you see as your strengths & would others agree with you?, What would you like to do more of in the future?, Who are the people with a long-term interest in your career?, How do you define success in your career? & What beliefs define your relationship with work?]

If you know what you are doing, the above questions should be familiar. That doesn't mean you'll have all the answers but the more time you spend on them, the more you will learn about what you are doing.

One day you may even be the talk of your friends and co-workers, "There she goes. She knows what she is doing" (N.B. Feel free to replace 'She' with 'He' if you are that way inclined).

Have a great weekend!

Best Regards

Paul

Prepare for the worst (Question that is..)

Time

What does personal success feel like?

What would you like to be doing 5 years from now?

What would you like to be doing 5 years from now? - Revisited

What you want and how to get it

Your experience

What would you like to do?

Why I write

Interest in your career

Bruce Dickinson Teaches Personal Career Success

Bruce Dickinson has an interesting CV. He is probably best known as the lead singer of Iron Maiden. Later in his career he became a commercial airline pilot. Bruce’s career is full of achievement to the outside observer but Bruce Dickinson’s career is also highly successful from a modern career management perspective and that is why it is interesting to us here.

No-one else created a career path for Bruce Dickinson. It is unlikely that Bruce’s parents (careers teachers or any other advisors/mentors) mapped him out a dual career in music and piloting commercial jets.

Little Bruce (and Bigger Bruce as he got older) wasn’t following anyone else's notion of success as he made important decisions throughout his career.

'Heavy-metal-rock-star-to-commercial-airline-pilot' is the change in Bruce’s career that is most interesting and revealing to any of us making career decisions of our own.

If he wanted to make changes, Bruce (older, wiser and richer) could have done almost anything he wanted for the rest of his career. But with almost unlimited choice in front of him, Bruce chose to train as a commercial airline pilot. He chose this long, expensive, rigourous and technically demanding path because it was the change in career direction that best described personal success for him. For Bruce, no other career had the same potential for reward, fulfilment and satisfaction.

Bruce Dickinson’s example may seem an odd choice for a career case study. Isn’t it all too easy for millionaires to change careers on a whim? Regardless of risk or cost or time?

This may be true but Bruce’s career is relevant because you do not need money to follow his example and use your own choices to define career success more personally.

We could speculate about what was behind the decisions Bruce made but it is probably more productive for each of us to learn from his example and try to define personal career success through the choices we make. At important moments our individual values, talents and goals [often mentioned previously on this blog] can guide us along the way.

For the record, I am not an Iron Maiden fan, nor am I connected to the airline industry but - after learning about his example recently - I am a fan of Bruce Dickinson’s career decision-making and his shining example of defining personal success.

My hope is that Bruce's example is one that translates well to the career choices you might be facing now or may face at some time in the future. As always, I will only find out if you let me know what you think via email or comment!

Best Regards

Paul

Career choice is critical

"I didn't suddenly think I could master whatever I put my mind to but I did start to question what I believed I was capable of. Little by little, I realised that more was possible. That I could ask more questions to discover what I was really interested in."

"Instead of just accepting what was offered, I started to focus on the choices available to me. It sounds like a simplification but I just made choices based on their potential to move me in the career direction that interested me the most."

"In my opinion, the most valuable asset we have in our careers is choice. Choice was also the thing I was most wasteful with, but not any more."

I apologise that this story is told anonymously but it is the only way some insights can be shared. I would normally add a footnote too but in this case it feels a bit like eating a sandwich after a gourmet meal.

Have a great weekend!

Best Regards

Paul