Helping Career Changers Around The World

December 2009

Hello!

Welcome to the December edition of The 5 Minute Career Coach!

I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but do you realise that it is only just over 3 weeks to Christmas. Are you ready for it? Have you even started your preparations?

No I am not trying to make you feel guilty here, honestly!

There are times in life when other things just take over for a while and it makes more sense to go with the flow rather than struggle against it.

You may be really committed to making a career change, you are trying to push yourself to make progress with it, to keep the momentum going, but now with the festive season coming up, you are feeling the pressure of many different demands on your time.

OK, so how about you take time out from your career change, just give yourself permission to put it to one side for a while. This is not a question of giving up or abandoning your plans, rather it is a simple case of acknowledging that you can only divide your energy and attention up so much. If you try to keep too many balls in the air, something is going to slip.

So if need be, just pop your career change plans up on the shelf for a few weeks. Imagine you are putting them in a pretty box, nicely gift wrapped to yourself, in keeping with the season. They’ll be safe up there for now and you can open up the box again in the New Year.

In the meantime, take some time to enjoy the celebrations with friends and family. Relax, unwind and recharge your batteries.

If you want to keep things just gently ticking over in your mind, then take a look at my article on setting goals. Then when the New Year arrives, you will be ready to return to your career change goal with renewed energy and commitment.

With very best wishes

Cherry

Cherry Douglas
Your Career Change Guide

How To Change Careers

Community Member Spotlight

Here’s where I say a particular hello to one individual member of the 5 Minute Career Coach Community, just picked at random from the steadily growing list of career changers round the world who have found the How To Change Careers website. It was 129 different countries when I last checked!

For December I am sending extra best wishes to Balbir.

Hi Balbir! I hope you are enjoying the newsletter and finding it a source of encouragement and inspiration. I’d love to hear if any particular ideas were helpful and how they are helping you in getting on with your career change plans. Just use the contact link at the end of the newsletter.

Please don’t keep me a secret!

Feel free to share this newsletter and my website with your friends. I wouldn’t mind betting that there will be a few of them who are unhappy with their own careers.

Remember that they can get their free copy of 11¾ Ways To Kick Start Your Career Change when they visit the How To Change Careers website.

Know Your Personality, Know Your Career

• Would you like to get greater clarity over what kind of work could be right for you?


• Are you intrigued by the idea that your personality can guide you towards the right career choice?


• Would a list of career ideas that match your personality be useful?

Then take a look at Know Your Personality, Know Your Career and find out more.

What’s in this Issue

• Quote of the Day
• Your Career Change Goal
• The Career Change Question
• Recommended Resources
• What Help do You Need?
• Useful Links

Quote of the Day

This seemed to me to be rather a suitable quote for the Christmas season! Go on, enjoy the festivities, and then when the New Year arrives, promise yourself that you will continue to take every opportunity to live to the full. Does staying in your current career allow you to do that?

Your Career Change Goal

OK, so you are allowing yourself a little time off from your career change over Christmas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a few ideas bubbling away in the back of your mind in the meantime.

Changing career is a goal you have set yourself and you may well on the way already. But while you are allowing yourself a bit of ‘time out’ it is worth revisiting what makes some goals more likely to succeed than others.

I am sure many of you will know the saying ‘if you don’t know where you are going you will probably end up somewhere else’. It may be stating the obvious, but it makes sense that if you only have a vague idea that you’d like to be doing something else but you don’t know what is, that is not going to give you enough of a push to make that change happen.

When you are setting goals in your life, you need to add much more detail to them so that they have a good chance of succeeding.

So what are the factors that will help to ensure that your career change goal becomes a reality? Here are my top tips.

Make it a big goal
It is the bold steps in life that really enthuse and motivate you over time. You might feel tempted to go for something relatively easy to achieve, but in the longer term, check whether the quick fix will really be the answer to your current frustrations at work.

Be clear about why
Have you thought through what you will gain from achieving your goal? Have you got a clear and detailed picture of how things will be for you once you are in your new career? And have you also considered the reverse – how you will be feeling if, in a year or two’s time you have not changed and are still stuck in the same boring job? Creating a detailed picture helps draw you towards what you want.

Be honest about possible obstacles
Nothing really big in life comes easy. You can be sure that there will be difficulties and challenges as you move towards your goal. Prepare your mindset so that you are not surprised and deterred when you encounter an obstacle, but are able to stay positive, creative and solution focused.

Have a clear timeframe
Career change does not happen overnight, so give yourself permission to take time over making the right choices. But at the same time, if you have no deadline at all in mind, your goal can easily become one of those things that you are always going to get on with tomorrow – and then it just never happens. So give yourself a deadline.

Set milestones
A big goal and a clear timeframe will take you a long way, but do set smaller milestones or journey goals along your path. Big goals are exciting and can act as great magnets, but if you can celebrate smaller steps as you go along it will help to keep you moving.

Get a support team
Don’t try and go it alone. Gather a support team of friends and family who you know will be encouraging and supportive and who will celebrate with you as you progress. You can also get them to hold you gently to account and help keep you on target when your motivation is slipping.

Understand your motivation
Motivation is not something that you have or have not got. Your energy levels for change will vary from week to week, so don’t beat yourself up if you are struggling to keep up the momentum some days. Allow yourself a breathing space if you need it, but then remind yourself of that big goal and of your vision of how life will be when you have made the change so that you are inspired into action again.

Just let these tips on goal setting filter down into your subconscious mind for now while you take a break. Then when you pick up on your carer change plans again, you will be able to review your goals and check that you have got everything in place to make a successful outcome as likely as possible.

The Career Change Question

Challenging questions are a key tool in helping to create change.

Each month I offer you a question to think about. Just let the question wander round your mind for a few days, or even weeks and see what answers unfold for you. The questions are designed to get you thinking in new ways and hopefully gain insights that may open your mind to new possibilities for you career and for your life.

You are the author of your life. What steps will you take to make sure you are writing the book with the right title?

Recommended Resources

This month, for a change, I am recommending an online personality assessment from Finding Potentialwhich you might like to try.

The Finding Potential Personality Questionnaire

There are plenty of online tests available, but this one has been developed by a team who have all worked for many years within the occupational psychology and testing arena and so you can be confident that the personality assessment on offer has been very carefully developed and tested.

As you will know if you have visited the How To Change Careers website, my personal favourite amongst personality assessments is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®.

However, another popular group of personality assessments are based on what are commonly called the ‘Big Five’ personality traits – extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and resilience.

The assessment available on the Finding Potential site is based on this Big Five model and you might find it interesting to compare your results in this test with your MBTI® preferences.

The online questionnaire
You will find the online questionnaire here. It asks you to describe your behaviour, preferences and approach in relation to different aspects of your life. It takes about 15 minutes to complete.

When you have taken the assessment, you will be sent a 15 page report which shows where you fall in relation to the 5 categories mentioned. Each of the 5 categories is broken down into 3 subsections, for example Extraversion has scales for Assertive – Unassertive, Gregarious – Low Profile and Engaging – Guarded.

Your report also gives you an outline of your work preferences according to your results on each of the 5 main scales and suggests a number of possible career ideas for you to consider.

Finally, the report gives you an indication of how you are likely to operate in a team situation, highlighting which roles will be more natural for you. The team types are Chair, Driver, Innovator, Critic, Networker, Perfectionist, Team Player and Implementer.

Click here to see an example of the report you will get.

Thinking about your results
These scores are based on how you have rated yourself. You are the best judge, but bear in mind that others may see you in a different light depending on the context in which they know you.

As with any kind of psychometric assessment, do not take the results as the fixed and unchangeable truth about you. It is a self assessment and you might well respond differently if you were to complete the questionnaire again in a few months time and under different circumstances. Use the results as to shine a spotlight of insight on yourself and use the information together with the other self assessments you may have done on values, skills, interests and achievements to build up a detailed understanding of who you are and what kind of working contexts might feel comfortable to you.

Finding Potential are developing further online tests including ones covering Skills/Abilities and Values/Motivation, so it would be worth adding their site to your favourites and checking back over the next few months.

More recommendations
If you would like to see more recommendations for books and similar resources, follow the link to the Career Change Books page of the How To Change Careers website. Do keep popping back to it as I am adding to it all the time.

And if there are books and resources that have inspired you and that you would like to recommend, there is a place for you to do so on that page.

Useful Links

Read more articles about career change on the How To Change Careers website

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