Category: career life coach

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One True Career?

Do you have only one true career? And if you miss it, will you be doomed to unhappiness at work, or a gnawing feeling you should have chosen a different career?

Choosing Careers–Not a one time thing

Not if you are a man I’ll call Tom. Tom, in his late 50s came to my class. Unlike some midlife career changers, he had no complaints about his current work. When he completed college, he became a high school teacher for about 15 years. Choosing a career helping kids learn worked out very well for him. He loved it. But after 15 years, he had more career ideas he wanted to explore, other passions to turn into careers. He decided to move on. He loved cars and opened up a car detailing company. That succeeded. He loved that too. And almost on schedule, about 15 years later, he was ready to start work on choosing his third career, which is why he came to my class. By the end of the class, he had decided he was going to go into a home remodeling business with his son. Third true career.

Lots of people change jobs and careers all the time. But his story was a great example of someone consciously choosing a sequence of authentic and passionate careers that were meaningful to him.  Multiple career visions.

Choosing careers that don’t exist…at least for you?

You might say, that’s fine, but every time you think about choosing a career you’ll love, you get depressed because you know it’s impossible, so it isn’t about any sequence of passions but not being able to get any to materialize. Maybe you want to open your own travel agency and can’t get the money, or you did open it but couldn’t get enough business. Maybe, you are like one woman who asked me a question on a call in show where I was responding as a career life coach. She HAD found her ideal career, and she had been living it. She was a farmer. Her problem was that an illness had made it impossible for her to continue farming.

In these cases, the lesson of Tom is relevant. You are a mix of lots of passions, and the world is so complex, there are so many ways to express those passions that any one career idea–even if it doesn’t work out or no longer works out–can be altered and leave you fully satisfied. In other words, you are a complex being with so many ways to express yourself that you don’t have to fear being shut down. You can almost always generate new, passionate career ideas.

You can look to other passions as Tom kept doing. Or you can find out what you most loved about being a farmer or becoming a travel agent, or whatever it is, and try to find a different way to express that in a work setting.

For instance, it turned out that the farmer also loved kids, so she could write about her experiences as a farmer and even about overcoming her illness and disappointments for a motivational and educational kids’ book. Maybe what the potential travel agent loved about opening an agency wasn’t booking standard flights to Chicago and San Diego, but helping people find exotic adventures.If so, maybe our travel agent could talk to an existing travel agency and see if they might be willing to offer a specialty in exotic travel that he could run. Maybe he didn’t really want his own agency with all those headaches anyhow. He just wanted to do something out of the ordinary. Or he might decide he could fulfill his passions another way by serving as a tour guide to unusual locations.

In short, yes–do look for what you really want to do and go after it with great enthusiasm and persistence. Don’t give up easily.At the same time, you have to be flexible and creative to find the best and most realistic ways to express that passion and contribute your talents and gifts to the world.

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Career Ideas 101–Occupational Outlook Handboook 2012

If you’re looking for career ideas, and especially if you’re looking for some concrete info to help in choosing a career, here’s an incredible resource.

Inspiring? Not so much. But it’s an unbelievably complete resource for finding out the nitty-gritty facts (presented in a very readable format by the way, not as statisitcal lists) about pretty much every occupation you can imagine–and many you probably never thought about before.

I’m talking about the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook. Yes, it sounds like the ultimate cure for insomnia, but it’s actually a way to find out (according to the BLS website):

  • the training and education needed
  • earnings
  • expected job prospects
  • what workers do on the job
  • working conditions

For people curious about what some jobs entail and the education required, this is very useful. For students just looking to browse through careers to see what might interest them, it’s also helpful but more difficult to use online as there are so many listings that it would be hard to just randomly be clicking around.

In short, this is a wonderful resource. It is no substitute for the internal work you must do to succeed in finding your best or ideal or true career(s). That’s all about understanding yourself, your passions, your values and your skills. Other articles on this blog talk about those elements. This article I just wanted to make sure everyone reading this blog would have access to bottom line information you need to help make realistic career plans.

 

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Home Runs or Singles–Succeeding with Your Career Ideas

Yankee baseball legend Mickey Mantle stood third on the all time home run list when he retired, having hit 536 pre-steroid era home runs as the key player on a frequent World Series winning team. Unfortunately, he also had a prodigious number of strikeouts (15th on the all time list now and first when he retired).

After he ended his baseball career, he claimed every time at bat he was looking to hit a home run. Although I’d take this with a grain of salt, his big hit “strategy” worked quite well overall, in spite of the big whiff failures.

Outside baseball, we also hear about the same big hit strategy all the time. In fact, it was in the news recently in the field of medicine and bioengineering.

Doris Taylor, Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota and her team stripped cells from a rat heart and replaced them with baby rat stem cells, getting them to grow into a “bioartificial” heart. The potential for “growing” parts of damaged organs or even entire organs customized to the individual is enormous. Other researchers are hitting themselves in the head (or so they’ve reported) for not thinking of the relatively simple idea that was used.

In a radio interview, Taylor noted that from the start she was going for a home run. She said that she didn’t want to wait 20 years to accurately understand step by step all the science underlying the procedure to know if it would work and why it might work or not. She wanted bold ideas to try out and then see what happened.

So should we all be inspired in our lives by this home run approach? Should we try out bold ideas and watch the results? Does this idea apply to our careers and problems? Or is it just something to read about after the fact for the lucky few who succeed?

I’d suggest the question is not whether to have a home run strategy or not, but when to use one. If a single is all that’s needed, if in your career all you want is a raise in pay or respect from your boss, go for that—not for a new career or job. That may seem obvious, but it’s not. I’ve had people in my classes come in for new career ideas and new dreams when their old ones were just fine. They had already hit a home run in determining and educating themselves for their career. They only needed a single right now to make their particular job better or to land a better job, but their frustration had confused them about the best strategy—about which of the 4 foundation questions (see http://beardavenue.com/store.html) they needed to answer.

You can also be confused if you have been told or learned that trying for what you really want is naïve—if you’ve learned that all you should ever do is go for singles. That’s an even more common problem I see in coaching clients and class participants. One time to use the home run metaphor and strategy is when you are first determining your main career idea—going for the biggest and most satisfying career, one you really would love to have.  Your authentic or true career. If you don’t, you will be putting a lot of energy into better-than-nothing (BTN) careers and jobs—careers that have some value but not enough to fully engage and challenge you or feel meaningful and satisfying enough.

If you are thinking about strategies for achieving that authentic career vision, you may want to at least include home run plans along with more careful ones. That means including options that involve more risk and more unknowns along with more cautious and known step-by-step processes. (Certainly the heart researchers were moving meticulously in their experiment once they decided on the big experimental concept). If you can do a mix of these single and home run approaches, you will truly be an all-around career “hitter.”


Let me leave the final words to home run hitter who was named greatest athlete of all time in 1999 by Sporting News and athlete of the century by the AP that same year.

“How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can . . . I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.” Babe Ruth

© 2008 Leonard Lang. All rights reserved

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Career Confidence and Your Highlight Reel of Success

Whenever taking on a new major project, such as choosing a career, it is best to be optimistic and confident. Sure, there are times when confidence can become arrogance and blindness, but if you know your project or career ideas are valuable, then confidence counts.

It’s also common among successful people. A recent Business Week article by Marshall Goldsmith illustrated this: “I once asked three business partners to estimate their individual contribution to the partnership’s profits. Not surprisingly, the sum of their answers amounted to more than 150%”

The author indicated that this was a good thing, as it fits into the profile of successful people. Having surveyed more than 80,000 people in his business programs, he found that “80% to 85% rank themselves in the top 20% of their peer group, and about 70% rank themselves in the top 10%. The numbers get even more ridiculous among professionals with higher perceived social status, such as physicians, pilots, and investment bankers.”

What does this mean for choosing a career and career planning? I’d say that if you are already super- confident like this, you might want a reality check with people you trust. But for most of us who are likely to have doubts in anything big and new we might be trying–such as trying out new career ideas–we need to recall our past successes and realize we ARE building on them even if we are applying those lessons to a new field.

Goldsmith, for instance, recommends reviewing our “highlight reel” of successes and thinking how that applies to what we’re doing.

Now if you dislike your current career, you might think you have no highlight reel to use in deciding what new career you want. But have you succeeded in making other big decisions–what college you went to, what city or neighborhood you live in, who you married, whether or not to have kids? You may not always feel great about everything you’ve chosen, but you certainly have successes you can review.

From them, you may well realize how you made a great decision and apply some of those processes to new projects or new career ideas. You may realize that the key was simply to get information and then see how you felt about it, and then decided. Or you may say that there is no model to follow, but you can still say–I’ve succeeded in these tough times and decisions before so I simply recognize I can do it again.

So upload that highlight reel on your own inner YouTube channel and be ready to view it when you are feeling a bit uncertain about your ability to find that great career which will benefit you and those around you.

Leonard Lang