The Career Library
The Myth of Scarcity
Join the Free-stream
Power Communications
Creativity Trumps Fear
The Hidden Job Market
Your Perfect Resume
Break Out of the Box
The Quality of Life
A Hero's Journey
The Myth of Scarcity scroll here
A primary fear of scarcity keeps people working harder than they need to and being more panicked than they should be. A belief in scarcity as a life context will inhibit you from taking actions that lead to winning. It is hard to have a breakthrough life in a scarcity mentality.
For example, to pick just one area: jobs. The prevailing economic myth about employment is that there are only a limited number of jobs that are created up there by industry and government, so some must do without when there is an economic disruption. You have heard it: There are no jobs out there, employers arent hiring, I sent out 50 resumes and got no responses, jobs are scarce!
Every dip in the unemployment rate cause shivers and chills to run through the economy and the press. Rarely does anyone point out that even with a ten percent unemployment rate there is 90% employment rate -- one way of thinking about it this way: great odds! Scarcity thinking rules by fear of being left out, rejected, unwanted. it then becomes self-fulfilling when people decide to wait out the scarcity.
After a public lecture in Chicago, a woman named Janet came up to describe her situation. She was a college graduate and a single mother, She spent a decade raising her kids. After she broke free to return to work, the economy sagged and Janet grabbed a part-time menial job just to make ends meet waiting, she said, "until something better comes along".
Years flew by from paycheck to paycheck and nothing better came along. By now Janet had reached the point where she hated to go to work and knew she could do better, but with another dip in the economy, she feared if she complained or quit she would be out on the street longer than she could afford.
This intelligent woman had sacrificed almost a dozen years of her life to junk work because she believed it when others told her there was nothing out there.
In 10 minutes of coaching, helped by others who were there with Janet, we brainstormed a dozen different avenues she could easily check out. Just this chance experience showed her how confining her thinking had been because of her fear of scarcity.
Janet left with a big smile-and some tears- and the names and phone numbers of two of the people she had just met who were going to be her support system.
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Join the Freestream scroll here
Mainstream corporations, pressed for ever greater returns to their shareholders use sophisticated technology and practices to compartmentalize and automate workflows in ways that cut the human cost elements in their profit equations.
Digital processes measure and provide ongoing feedback and correction to every element of the business. Positions and functions that once required, say, a dozen skills, are reduced in scope or de-skilled and dumbed down so that lower cost job grades can be substituted.
This is why after a major economic tumble with millions of jobs lost, the job recovery takes significantly more time than the downfall. Companies foraging for efficiencies slice and dice the work in ways that allow them to pay less for more. Shareholders vaccum the savings upstream.
However, in a surprisingly dynamic rebalancing of forces, that same range of technology and its limitless access to knowledge, individuals and organizations, is opening fresh pathways to personally customized work opportunities at an unprecedented rate. I call this combination of possibilities the Freestream.
The Freestream is a domain of rich ideas, rocketing personal technology, creativity, and instant access to a universe of over one billion minds. The idea of the free stream embraces social networking, just-in-time learning, virtual work teams, and countless startup potentials often with fewer than a half dozen players.
I invite you to explore the possibilities of the Freestream: to discover and capitalize on ventures where fresh, and perhaps niche ideas can add value to customers and potential users, and reward you for the benefits delivered.
Ask yourself where you can leverage your skills and motivations to produce something useful to others; and then start doing it in a way that racks up some success points. Focus primarily on services and low capital endeavors. Look at small partnerships and collaborations. Start locally and dont worry if your first attempts cost more than they bring in.
The Freestream offers a new way to think about working that disconnects you from dependence on mainstream institutions for your livelihood. There are at least a half-dozen ways to increase your independence, and tap into multiple sources of productive and exciting work- right where you stand, and in the world at large.
With your coach you will find opportunities and connections you might never have seen if you hadn't stepped out of the conventional hiring paradigms.
Power of communications Scroll here
To put it simply: there are really only two ways to get something done; one way is to do it physically, and the other way is to do it through your communication. Thats it.
What is communication?
Most people, asked this question, speak of messaging, listening, transferring information, writing, speaking, conversation, give-and-take, and similar characteristics of the ways we communicate. All of these are useful, but don't get to the heart of it. The best way I've found to define communication is this: real communication is being 100% responsible that a message is received and re-created. Regardless of all the variables, whats most important is that an exact message is fully understood by the person or persons to whom it is directed. Without it, no real communication has taken place.
To be 100% responsible for communication is to hold the position that if the other person didnt get it, you didnt communicate. Communication is not 50-50. Its 100-100% responsibility. If you are shooting at a target you dont get to blame the wind for the fact that you missed it. Don't explain a missed communication by complaining the other person wasnt listening. As true as that might be, to have communicated, you would' ve needed to penetrate what was in the way.
What often passes as communication is simply conversation, fuzzy verbal interchanges, and misdirected statements. What's left is the syndrome called "talk and blame". Take the example of telling a prospective employer of a great benefit you ccould bring to the organization, and then realizing the message wasn't heard. One response is to explain the problem as the inattention of the recruiter. A better response is for you to look for a more powerful way to get the message across and try again.
In accepting responsibility you have the incentive to find new methods, new language, new approaches. By defining the problem as being in the receiver you learn nothing.
Of course, as a listener, you are also 100% responsible to get the message. Nothing is gained by blaming the speaker, complaining of distractions or other explanations of why you didnt get it. Your focus should be on how to try again, ask for clarification, or just admit you missed it. A good coach will set high standards for your communication. Candid responses, role-plays, feedback and good examples will enhance your self expression.
Communication style is important, and the substance of your message needs to be compelling. With coaching you will focus your resumes and interviews on how you will deliver high-powered value and results. You will also practice responding to inquiries in ways that reinforce your strengths, and realize your ability to make things happen the way you want them to happen.
Creativity trumps fear scroll here
A cold shudder of fear courses through the population with every new announcement of financial upheaval, layoffs and lifestyle uncertainties. With so many facets of the economy and social structure stressed at the same time the reverberation accelerates uncertainty.Top down mainstream employment has its limits; a few crooks or incompetents can cause the loss of millions of livelihoods.
In such conditions, long term plans and expectations are tabled or downgraded. Thousands who have unexpectedly lost jobs experience fear, and self doubt, crumpled hope and anger. The country's resourcefulness sags.
Fear sells. Media play off the down side. A 90% employment rate is meant to sound like doom, and for many, the idea of considering a new career in this limp economy seems foolhardy. Why risk an unknown future now?
Well, your coach answers, why not?
Consider this: the entire government, most industries, advocacy groups, technologists, scientists, and forward looking companies are all in a mood to take on new initiatives. Yes: cut costs, but double yes: find new customers, new value propositions, and better ways to get work done. A jobs revolution is out there waiting to emerge, and the true scope of opportunity is larger than several moon shots.
Just as financial markets and corporate purpose need to be reinvented, career and job markets need to be freed up to be more responsive to personal initiative, self-direction and informed choices. We dont need more dumbed down slots to fill, we need more work that grows people's resourcefulness and applies it to benefit all of us. Learning needs to be built in to work.
A rising new paradigm -- we have called the Freestream- is from grass roots up with more flexibility more hybrid skill sets, more work satisfaction. Many are already moving in that direction as people collaborate, network, form small webs of capability and skill and discover ever more entrepreneurial ways of working together.
Relying on your past to build your future and looking in the same places for jobs you once had won't work. Here is where creativity steps in.
How does creativity triumph?
Creativity and innovation are singularly important tools for workplace growth, personal development and national prosperity. Creativity is an inherent human quality; a powerful force for responding to change by inventing new scenarios. This is true on a national scale and very true on an individual scale.
In a conformist' culture creative juices atrophy like unused muscle fibers, yet with the right jolt they can be recharged. Unleashed, creativity is a force that can find its way into deep roots of understanding. Art, music and culture reflect this. At a more basic level creativity generates and multiplies possibilities. Its circuits are in the channels of thinking and imagining outside the prison walls of old assumptions, opinions, generalizations, and dated mental models. Creativity defies predictability.
Possibility: something that could exist as a reality if the conditions were right. In spite of the mind's relentless demand for proof and probability, by setting up a free zone for possibilities to incubate and multiply, a population's potential for changing their career and life work expands quickly.
For many of our clients the anti force to their creativity and possibilities comes from a simple, popular negative: "be realistic". Ginny G. and her husband decided that the constant tension and insecurity of working for mainstream corporations was cramping their lifestyle big time. Ginny said "I was in purchasing, locked away in a cubicle warren with five others and an invisible boss. We knew nothing outside our department and the rumor mill. It was like being in the boiler room of a ship to nowhere."
A friend told them of a franchised lawn care service for sale in their area. They were excited at the opportunity and had a reliable source for funding. Ginny went to her brother who was a CPA and discussed the situation. Ginny said, "He looked up at us as though we were idiots and said 'in this economy? be realistic' I felt both stupid and hurt; something closed down."
Ginny's husband on the other hand was not slowed down. He realized that the external economy wasn't the issue at all. The price was right, the service was a useful one and the two of them could do what it took to make the service fit the market. The deal went through and there was a happy ending when the business prospered.
Creativity doesnt stop to worry about the realities. It invents new models, new products, new attitudes and new ideas. Starting from a world of possibility, this nation will create, design, fill and reward four to five million new jobs in places where today there are simply voids. These jobs, focused on fresh vision, new levels of resourcefulness and renewed energy are all out there as potentials to be harnessed.
Right where you are today is the place where they start. Unhitch from your fears, turn on your creativity and you will see your path to them.
Penetrate the Hidden Job Market
There are now over a thousand public and corporate sponsored digital job boards listing scores of thousands of job slots and millions of resumes by keywords, location, education and salary levels. Input queries vary from a few select descriptors to more complex profiling.
On the hiring end employers use data mining software to pan for hits which are then turned over to relatively low level phone screeners who ask canned questions to pare down the lists to a level where legitimate recruiters can do the next level of vetting.
On the whole, this procedure is effective for identifying highly definable job slots- mostly technical in nature. In another way they are distracting and shallow. Although I dont advise people not use them, I suggest not putting everything else on hold waiting for the call center to ring.
One of my early, and most useful books out of print now- was called The Hidden Job Market, and its major premise holds true even more now than it was then: that most job opportunities - as many as 80% - are not publicly advertised or loaded into the monster digital mixers.
People do get leads and jobs from computer banks just like they did and do from newspaper "Classifieds", however ,studies show that placement rates from networking and personal referrals are not only several times better, but also produce a better match.
There are several reasons for this. The first is that prior to almost any job opening being advertised there is first an informal internal search looking for people already in or close to the organization; someone with a human connection.
There is also the timing of how and when a job is actually open. Is it when a new contract is pending- one that will require more people to work on it-? Is it when breakthrough technology shows up and there are fresh business opportunities, or a market shift that alerts management to a need for change in workflows?
Not only is there a question of timing, there is also the challenging question of what skills and talents do you really need here? Many job slots get loaded into boards using limited descriptors or out of date terms trying to define something that really needs more than a paragraph to explain.
One of the most important engines of job growth comes from individuals or micro size organizations that see needs others have not recognized or paid enough attention to. Most work around innovation, convergence of skills or fast changing markets requires a conversation not just a listing.
When you work with a coach you'll find a focus on challenging assumptions, rewriting job titles, creating job possibilities where there were none, and redefining talents, skills, and capabilities to fit one-of-a-kind possibilities out there waiting for you to discover them.
Your Perfect Resume scroll here
The perfect resume is the one that is custom tailored to attract employer interest to you related to the specific job you want to meet about. To make a strong penetration, the perfect resume must accomplish the following:
1.Despite your need of a work history, your resume must convey more about your potential for future impact than past triumphs. The resume and cover letter should be the implicit answer to the question that hangs over all hiring: why should I hire you?
2.Given the mechanism of digital processing your resume needs a header paragraph that carries a well-selected set of keywords that interpret your competencies into present tense strengths.
3.Together, your resume and cover letter must show that you know about the company you are applying to. You understand their business, their products and markets, their competitors.
4.The format of your resumes must be neat and uncluttered. Obviously, perfect editing, and with the most important info standing out at the first reading. There should be an electronic ascii version as well as a quality print version.
5.Outcomes are always more important than activities. Make them as tangible as possible. Quantify where possible. Use the cover letter to translate your achievements to the challenges of the new opportunity.
The best way to build your resume includes a dialog and feedback with a trained career partner working together to strengthen your communications and improve your marketability.
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Break out of the Box scroll here
A Box is a model of reality that constrains growth. It tends to be invisible from inside. Once broken open, the potential for breakthroughs arise. Inside the box you are tied to a particular reality for which you have a mental model. The object is to be able to summon new was of thinking, and challenge the prevailing so called reality.
At Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY an instructor took his class outside to a large field and broke them into two groups.
To the first group he (privately) said that this field had a rare abundance of four-leaf clovers due to conditions. They were to have a game of who could count the most in ten minutes. Separetly, to the second group, he explained that four leaf clovers were rare everywhere, and especially scarce here, and that they were also hard to see. So they should look very carefully to try to find some.
Each participant was given an index card to mark how many they sighted in a given search area. it was 10 minutes for each group. The instructor privately named one group "abundance" and the other "scarcity".
When they were called back together in ten minutes the scarcity group had counted an average of 3 or 4 shamrocks per person, however to everyone's (except the instructors) amazement the abundance team had counted an average of 15 each. This was so much higher than the scarcity team that they accused the other team of playing a joke or having been given a special area to search. Suspicion and disbelief.
To convince them, the instructor asked the abundance team to go to the scarcity area and in five minutes pick and bring back as many four leaf clovers as they could. Most came back with 8 to 10. Even with this, many people on the scarcity team couldnt believe the exercise wasn't rigged.
The coach asks: how does the four-leaf clover example apply to your own ability to see beyond what news media and others say about your chances?
A job is an opportunity to solve a problem. Clearly there is no scarcity of problems in your vicinity, and therefore many opportunities for solutions and value creation. What there is a scarcity of is people who know how to transform opportunity to cash and other rewards.
A Career Hero's Journey scroll here
Introduction
Unless youre an executive, a small business owner, or otherwise enshrined in the elite professional class of Americans, you are probably concerned about the future of your work, your finances, and the quality of your life. If youre not, you should be. The character of the American workplace is changing radically and if you arent prepared, some rough tides could sweep away your career and lifestyle. Human values in mainstream corporations are eroding so quickly and heartlessly that even to have a chance at rewarding work you need to reconsider everything you think you know about careers, companies, jobs, and lifestyle. You may have to break free, reinvent yourself and become as a Career Hero.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949, is Joseph Campbell's archetypical work of mythic dimensions and extraordinary influence. It is the universal story of each persons quest to emerge from the commonplace by facing challenges, overcoming alien influences, seeking the advice of wizards, and finally becoming self-actualized, proactively valuable and prized by the community.
The story of the hero is everywhere present, in any society or civilization as far back as recorded history. It echoes through all levels, all occupations, all income groups and all workers; many of whom are striving to find its elusive path. Campbell traced the Hero's Journey through the world's myths and religions, from Apollo, Odysseus, Isis and Osiris to the Buddha, David, Christ and Muhammad. In recent times, his work formed the inspiration for George Lucas's Star Wars movies. Today, Luke Skywalkers are all around us, awaiting the call.
My job is to help you see if the journey applies to you and your career, and if so to help you get on with the trip. If this model appeals to you let me know and I will explore how you can make it happen with some coaching.
The Heros Call: A Zone Unknown
My work takes people through a heroic journey, and before the journey begins, I ask them to recognize that they are the protagonists in their own lives. I then engage them in an honest conversationabout negative cycles happening in the mainstream workplace. These are frequently conditions that, once seen,motivate them leave their comfort zone and find new ways to blaze the path to their future.
I know that, lying deep within everyone, obscured by layers of compromise, false beliefs and opinions of others, is a vision of our true selves. An heroic vision. To see it clearly, you must sweep away the blinders of old assumptions and labels, and unlock more of your individuality and independence. Once clarified, with coaching help, this baseline understanding can manifest and transform into a proactive force that encourages you to walk away from work you deem to be heartless and towards a future style of living that motivates and rewards you.
The seven challenges: Overview
A career hero's journey does not involve a midnight trip through a lightning storm or a search for a golden goose in an ogre's castle. Instead, it involves a directed voyage through seven real challenges; accompanied by exercises, questions and stories describing internal and external challenges. According to wizards, a journey of thought and self-knowledge must first precede the pursuit of actual change. The first dragons slain along the way are those of our own self-limitations.
The first challenge asks you to walk away from familiar roles that hold you in place. Being passive and accepting of the status quo may push down stress levels; but if the reader intends to change the direction of his or her future, the role that best fits feels like a trailblazer, adventurer, entrepreneur, explorer. A hero. By learning to stand in this new role, you will see actions and choices that were previously invisible.
In mythology, the first challenge comes when the hero realizes his or her unique strength and power. Joseph Campbell described it as crossing the first threshold. And just as the future King Arthur took the sword from the stone, I will encourage you to reexamine preconceived notions about your own influence in the quality of your life and realize that alternatives can and should be explored and you already have the ability to do so.
The second challenge is a purely inward part of your journey. It is the "rejection of the challenge". You may hesitate because you don't think it can happen. Here is where you seek the knowledge to understand more about yourself, about the nature of your own power. In mythology, it is when the hero collects the weapons, charms and spells that will help to vanquish the enemy.
For my career coaching clients, this process involves the examination of values, beliefs, principles, family, ideals, self-esteem and more. The goal: to assemble your deepest values and strongest inner motivations and to articulate them. These internal forces must be expressed and understood before they can be satisfied. Assessments and exercises help clarify and prioritize your personal values.
The third challenge is for you to forge a personal purpose statement setting out the quest you wish to follow. Before one enters the labyrinth, one must be sure of the destination at the end. Belief in a defined purposeful direction is by itself a call to action, stepping away from heartless work prescribed by others into freedom of choice with meaningful direction and destinations. Most of us, immersed in social conformity, are not schooled in setting a direction for our lives, and like the heroes of mythology, will need courage and commitment to complete the task.
The fourth challenge invites you to break free from the trance of conformity, rejecting deeply embedded assumptions and challenging the media-driven view of life as a series of products and stereotypical roles that are supposed to make people happy.
Joseph Campbell referred to this stage of the hero's journey as "meeting with the temptress". Scholars have also referred to it as the temptation away from the true path. This is where the enemy: conventional conformity- tempts the career hero with worldly goods, attempting to co-opt the quest and end the heroic journey.
Here I encourage you to challenge old ideas and assumptions, break with prepackaged realities, and contrast our culture's celebrated standard of living (having stuff) with the superior value of quality of life (living each day to its fullest). In this challenge, I advise my clients to challenge traditional notions of success and look at what it means to truly prosper, free from heartless work, and trapped with meager earnings.
In the fifth challenge, readers use a variety of capability assessments to translate commonplace skills, job titles, experience and education, the traditional careers vocabulary, into strengths: the ability to produce high-value results, or to pull the sword from the stone. This corresponds to the time in myths when a hero overcomes a great enemy and begins to understand the special nature of his or her power. At the end of this challenge, a hero like you can open channels of communication and potential previously hidden from view.
The sixth challenge is about turning ideas into action and overcoming the internal and external resistance to making things happen. Fear is a natural response to change, and it stops people cold. Avoidance and denial slip in to protect against rejection and risk.
Small courageous actions are the best remedy, because they grow larger with practice, especially if a reader is open to coaching and feedback. Positive reinforcement and feedback is essential for a true Career Hero. At the end of this challenge, you will have begun the great and heroic task of making your life and career work for you. People who succeed at this stage will have begun to experience the joy that comes from changing ones own reality.
Extraordinary performance is the seventh challenge: it is about keeping oneself in trim, producing exceptional results in any undertaking or value chain. It is where the hero truly becomes, in Campbell's terminology, the master of two worlds.
Here is where you set your own terms as a producer, whether in conventional work environments, consulting, or starting your own business. High performance, innovation and vision always make a mark and will keep your worth fresh and valuable. Performance is not simply an issue of know how; it is the ability to harness a combination of factors that keep people in a leadership role in whatever they undertake. Having a good coach on your side will help you maintain extraordinary performance in whatever you take on.
The Conclusion of the Journey
The conclusion of the career hero's journey reaffirms the benefits of being in charge of your work and your life and considering them to be united. Those who complete this journey will find themselves richer with the rewards of freedom, happiness, passion, and meaning. At their core they will discover the joys of self-direction, discovery and honoring their most deeply held values and beliefs.
Copyright 2009 Tom Jackson
With full acknowledgement to Joseph Campbell
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The quality of life scroll here
Ask yourself some questions:
• How close is your life to the way you want it to be? Consider Americas founding values: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On a scale of 1 to 5 whats your score today?
• What categories would you use to design your own scale?
• Are you driven by a culture of conventionality, or do you have your own distinctions?
• What are your assumptions about money? How much more is enough to produce a quality life?
• What ways of being do you value most day-to-day, week to week or year to year?
• How do you define success?
• To what degree do others define the quality of your life?
Examine the difference between the standard of living and the quality of life
The standard of living tends to be based on what you have, the "stuff" to put it bluntly. Not that stuff is bad, and acknowledging it includes health insurance and investments, it is a balance sheet of sorts. You have it or you dont.
The quality of life, on the other hand, is the experience of living life. It includes your feelings, your relationships, your personal interests and commitments. Living mostly happens in present time: today, tonight, now. Even though the quality of your life is influenced by your standard of living, it is not dependent on it; and in many cases too much emphasis on standard of living can dilute ones quality of life.
Your work; your career and your job are spaces where the quality of your life and your standard of living interact. "Work itself" the direct mind/body task oriented actions is where they merge. Inside the work itself are your personal strengths, motivations and sense of ownership; also your potential connection to the needs of others; the community, the population and the planet. When you integrate your self into your work your rewards range from material, sensory and thoughtful to intangible - deeper meaning- and unique - it is you doing it. Real work is where you connect yourself physically, mentally and responsibly to where you live.
Your coach is committed to your whole self and to the balances you want. He will discuss them, lay out various pieces as options, and ask you to get other input: family, friends, mentors. Your coach could become a mentor or help you find one.
And then there is the money itself. Money is important. You deserve to be paid above average for above-average work. You will look for work models that generously reward and compensate employees.
Your coach will help you draft an earning plan, and learn salary negotiation and how to upgrade your marketability. Your coach will invite you to lay out a learning plan since skills and knowledge are translatable into hard currency.
A spirit of nonconformity is an important ally in furthering your journey in the pursuit of happiness. It is an attitude of questioning and rethinking you will acquire as you continue to challenge your assumptions, beliefs and roles.
For example, you might rethink the assumption that working harder will bring more success and consider if working better and smarter will bring you a higher quality life.
Maybe neither is true for you, but taking a nonconformist viewpoint allows you to consider the alternatives as a starting point.
Nonconformists move in and out of many cultures and roles and choose those that strengthen their valued purpose. They are driven by the maxim: the best is yet to come. Just showing up as an iconoclast or maverick is not the point. Your coach will help build the qualities of nonconformity that will find doorways that others miss.
If Tom Jackson is your coach, you have a man rich with the experience of working successfully in several careers; including being a U.S. Navy test pilot, a world-class sailor in a rebuilt wooden yacht, a computer pioneer, an author, a career development expert, entrepreneur and world-class consultant. His clients have ranged from hourly workers to managers to executives and all diversities within. You will be challenged to rethink your self image.
www.theBostonCareerCoach.com
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