March 01, 2009
Helping Career Changers Around The World
March 2009
Hello!
Welcome to the March edition of The 5 Minute Career Coach!
Well, I am pleased to say that having had a little bit of real winter here in the UK (about 8 inches of snow that stayed with us for several days - OK, don't laugh! I know some of your really understand what winter is about!), the weather seems to be turning its thoughts in a more forward looking direction today and as I write, the sun is shining in through the window. Feels like there could be a hint of spring to come at last.
It was the first few crocuses and snowdrops peeping out in the garden that made me reflect on the way that changes sometimes need to be left to lie dormant for a while and when they are ready, they will begin to emerge. Maybe there is a message in there for your career change too? Take a look at this month’s article.
February also brought me an unexpected meeting with an old friend which reminded me that you never know when delightful surprises are round the corner just when you are least expecting them.
What matters is that you keep your mind open so that you can grasp at opportunities when they present themselves. So if you are still waiting for career change inspiration, remember that the answer you are looking for may be closer than you think.
Last month, I mentioned the special offer on my ebook Know Your Personality, Know Your Career. This was due to finish at the end of February, but to allow all the new subscribers to my How To Change Careers Community to take advantage of the offer, I am extending it for just one more week to March 7th. If you’d like to find out more about how your personality influences your career choice, and access your special offer copy of my ebook, just click here.
I hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter.
With very best wishes.
Cherry
Cherry Douglas, Your Career Change Guide
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.
What’s in this issue
- Quote of the day
- Timing Your Career Change
- The Career Change Question
- Recommended Resources
- What help do you need?
- Links
Quote of the Day
I love some of the quotes and aphorisms that you find in careers and self help books. So often they seem to encapsulate something I have struggled with in my own life or seen others struggle with. I hope the quotes I offer can inspire you too.
George Bernard Shaw
OK, there is a lot of ‘finding yourself’ in the career change process. It is important to take stock and reflect on what has gone before, working out what makes you tick, what your priorities are.
But Shaw points up the critical last step in the process. It is down to you to assemble or reassemble the pieces of the jigsaw that you have found to create a new career identity. The result is something new and unique and you are the only one who can take the responsibility for making it happen.
Are you ready to create a new you?
Timing Your Career Change
Timing a career change can be tricky. And on this occasion, I don’t just mean whether you do it this year or next, I mean managing the timing of the overall career change process too.
Taking the first step
As a coach, I often find myself encouraging clients to take action, even tiny little steps, so that they can begin to create a sense of momentum that will move them towards a career change.
In most cases this is the best approach, because probably the biggest barrier of all to any career change is inertia. It is just so easy to stay stuck and to feel that there is no way out of the career misery you find yourself in. Somehow you find you have struggled through another day, week or month and still nothing has changed.
So taking personal responsibility for making change happen is a vital step – if you do nothing, nothing will change. Obvious really, but so many people do nothing and still expect that they will wake up one day to find a magic transformation has occurred.
So your first step is always to get into the driving seat and start on the personal and career exploration that is necessary to make a really well considered career change. (Read more about getting started here).
Uneven progress
But this does not mean that once you have got moving, your progress will be a steady drive. The speed and timing of your career journey will fluctuate as you go along – and that’s fine! There may be moments when you have to take your foot off the gas and let the career change process coast for a while.
This can be often be a useful tactic when you have done quite a bit of research into yourself but you are still waiting for the career ideas that will really inspire you to emerge.
Maybe that is when you need to be patient and let things gently ‘marinate’ in your mind – rather like the dormant bulbs in the ground over winter. Then it may just take a ray of sunshine (a chance encounter with someone inspiring, a book pressed into your hands by a friend) to get the bulb - or your new career identity - to begin to grow.
Creative breakthroughs
So often, truly creative breakthroughs come in this quiet ‘down time’, when you have stopped actively working on the problem and just leave your intuition (with maybe a gentle nudge from some unlikely quarter) to come up with the answers.
So if you feel that your career change plans are getting stuck, remember that the timing of the process may well not be even. The way to free things up is not always to move into more action. Maybe you have reached a moment when you need to relax the timing and give yourself permission to take a breather and wait and see what emerges. Just take care that your ‘down time’ doesn’t turn into weeks and months!
And during the pause in the timing of your career change, make sure that you capture any career ideas that emerge for you in your Career Ideas Log ready to look at together with all the other information you have been collecting about yourself.
The Career Change Question
Career change is not easy. It often requires a lot of hard and deep thinking about how you have been living your life up to now and how you would like it to be in the future.
Because I am a coach, I strongly believe in the power of asking challenging questions. Questions can help you explore where you are and where you are going.
These questions should not be given a quick and glib response, but instead you can just let them wander round your mind for a few days, or even weeks and see what answers unfold for you. They are designed to get you thinking in new ways and hopefully gain insights that may open your mind to new possibilities.
Here's my question for this month.
I am a great believer in looking to others around us for inspiration. There are many people who can teach us and inspire
us – and these are not necessarily great public figures (although I have definitely got Barack Obama on my list of
inspirational figures!).
What about the ordinary, everyday people around you? Who seems to be happier in their work or managing their career better than you? What do they do that makes the difference? What can you learn from them that will help you with your own career change?
Make a note in your Career Change Project File of the thoughts that come up for you as a result of thinking about this question.
Recommended Resources
This month’s recommended resource is a great book on finding work that you will really enjoy.
How To Get A Job You’ll Love
John Lees
UK career coach, John Lees has written what is rapidly becoming one of the career change classics. First published in 2001, this book is regularly reviewed and updated so you can be sure it is bang up to date.
John offers you lots of practical exercises to help you think about what you want from your career and he also suggests a range of different ways of using the book according to where you are with your career change. This means you can just dip in here and there and do not need to feel daunted at the prospect of reading right the way through. He ends each chapter with a ‘must do’ list to encourage you to make the most of the tips and ideas he is presenting.
John covers a range of key career change issues, such as:
- Understanding some of the blocks to career change
- Identifying what gives you career satisfaction
- Exploring your interests and knowledge
- Working out your key skills and achievements – and how to sell them
- Looking at broad fields of work and how they can help generate new career ideas
- New approaches to problem solving using creative thinking
- Different ways of working eg portfolio careers
- His own action planning model
He then moves on to the job search process covering creative job search and selection interviews.
He provides a series of useful checklists at the end of his book as well as lists of useful websites and information on choosing a career coach.
There are lots of useful ideas packed into this book and if I have any criticism, it is simply that he tries to cover too much and so some areas are rather skimmed over. The whole job search process is well covered in other books and I feel he would have done better to have kept his focus on the challenges of identifying what your new career is going to be rather than trying to cover everything.
That said, I would still recommend this book as a useful addition to your career change toolkit!
What Help Do You Need?
The 5 Minute Career Coach is my way of keeping in touch with aspiring career changers all over the world. I know there are many of you out there who are trying to find the courage and/or the inspiration to take a big step forward in your working lives so I hope you find this newsletter a useful source of ideas and encouragement to help you get on with your career change plans.
However, I want to be sure that it meets your needs, so please let me know how I can improve both the newsletter and the How To Change Careers website.
Let me start by prompting you with a few questions.
- What is your biggest question or concern about changing career?
- What are the biggest challenges you face in changing your career?
- What one thing would help you most with your career change?
- What other information and support would you like to see on the How To Change Careers website or as an ebook, ecourse or teleclass?
Do let me know what you think and tell me how you think this newsletter or the website might be improved.
You can post your feedback here.
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