Tag: career coach

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Keys to Job Interview Preparation

Avoid These Mistakes Preparing for Job Interviews

It’s easy to overprepare or underprepare for a job interview.  Here are 4 mistakes to avoid if you want to properly prepare with the least amount of stress.

Mistake 1.
Trying to prepare answers to all the questions you can imagine.

There are no end to questions.  Some are common–tell me about yourself.  Where do you see yourself in 5 years…  Others are not.  If you look on websites with helpful lists of questions, you are likely to find 20, 30, 50 or more questions–most pretty good.  But forget about that.  Instead, focus mostly on preparing a few, solid, relevant stories that can be used to answer lots of questions.  Just make sure there are stories for key categories of questions.

Mistake 2.
Not having questions to ask about the specific company

If you can’t name the company’s products or services and come up with a few questions about them or about the company, your apparent lack of interest will result in a very real lack of job offers.

Recently, a client of mine mentioned a few key points about a tech company’s key product.  The interviewer then proceeded to quiz her to see if she could answer questions about the product that a customer might ask.  She knew it all.  She got the job. It wasn’t a very hard thing to do.  All she had done was read through the company’s website.  Not too much to expect from a potential employee.

Mistake 3.
Thinking it’s all about you.

The opposite is true.  Yes, you want to come off as wonderful.  But wonderful means you are meeting the needs of the people in the company.  That’s right.  It’s all about THEM.  What do they need?  How can you benefit them more than the other zillion applicants?

This relates back to overcoming mistake number 2, knowing about the company so you can say how you will help solve some of its problems or challenges (backed up by proof using one of the stories you prepared as mentioned in how to overcome mistake number 1).

Mistake 4.
Thinking interviews are all about having the right answers

Your resume and cover letter probably had enough of the right answers in the sense of showing you possess the right requirements.  Now is the time to focus on making a strong, positive connection with your interviewers.  If you can answer all the questions intelligently but seem distant or disinterested, you won’t be hired.  You need to relate to the people as people. The  content, while very important, is still secondary to showing you are a person who people will want to be with and work with 40 hours a week.

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7 Things Career Changers Should Stop Telling Themselves (or Their Coaches)

7 things I hear Career Changers tell themselves and what they could be saying:

This week I saw a great bumper sticker: Don’t believe everything you think.  So true.  We tend to accept our thoughts the way we’d never accept the same ideas from someone else.  It led me to jot down 7 bad thoughts I hear from people considering a career change that all ring very loud alarm bells in my head…and after a coaching session, in the heads of my clients too!

1. I don’t know how

  • OK, you may not know how.  That’s why people invented the word and concept of LEARNING.
  • Better Thought — I need to find some way to do this and will start finding out by…(seaching Google, asking my network, talking to a librarian or someone already in the field…)

2. I don’t think anyone would hire me to do this (or would buy this or be my client).

  • Good line for giving up completely.  If you don’t want to give up about your career dream or goal or job search or…anything, stop recycling the past experience of no one being interested, check if YOU care, and then try this thought:
  • Better Thought — I just have to find the right people with the right needs/interests

3. Why try that?  I’m just not good at it.

  • As in number 1–there’s this thing called learning.   Also another cool concept called PRACTICE (check out the Outliers book on the side of this page.  It’s all about how practice and not talent makes the difference in success).  Finally, there’s the fact that you may not be the best judge of how good you are, so go find out if your thought is even true.
  • Better Thought — I haven’t been too great at that so far, but if it’s important for me to do, I can certainly learn how to do at least an OK job at it.

4. I screwed up. What an idiot I am!

  • Join the club.  Who hasn’t screwed up?  The bigger success the bigger the past screw ups in most cases.  Just don’t go from a screw up to judging your entire self or personality (idiot, fool, etc.)
  • Better Thought — How can I make sure I do that better so I don’t screw up next time?

5. I’d love to do….but

  • When clients say these magic words, I always have them put on the brakes.  I don’t even want to hear what the “but” is about until we confirm that they’d really love to do whatever they’re talking about (design buildings or teach skiing or open a floral shop or be an accountant, doesn’t matter what as long as it’s legal). If they really love doing it, then the better thing to say is
  • Better Thought — I’d love to do X, so I need to figure out some way to do it.  OK, so what would be a way to at least get started.

6. I’m too old to change careers

  • Really?  What does that mean?  Usually, I find it doesn’t mean the person can’t get on their toes any more to become a prima ballerina, but that they’re afraid of having to go to school or face younger bosses in a new field or face (illegal) age discrimination.  So those are real issues, but they don’t make you too old to change careers.  Many of my clients are in their 40s, 50s and older.   They can change.  In fact I changed midlife too.  So can you.
  • Better Thought — Because I’m really experienced, I know how to learn and can move quickly through a career change.

7. I’m too inexperienced to get the job/career I want

  • Now we’re on to a common variation of the I don’t know how to thought (number 1).  Again, there’s learning, practice and often lots of places to get that experience–classes, internships, volunteering (great one for many jobs), jobs that will train you.
  • Better Thought — I’m going to brainstorm 100 ways I can get the experience I need (or brainstorm how I can get the job I want without that experience).

We all run some form of thoughts through our head that help get us or hold us stuck, whether in careers we don’t want or in some other parts of our lives. No need to be too harsh on yourself for that (See no. 4. What an idiot…). But, as the bumper sticker says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

–Career changers, jobseekers–Be sure to sign up for free career and creativity ezine and get your career info bonus

© 2009 Leonard Lang. Feel free to reprint or pass on this article as long as you include the copyright notice and the link to http://choosingacareerblog.com

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Superbowl Career Ad–Emotional Truths, But Don’t Just React to the Negative

I confess I didn’t watch most of the Superbowl ads.  I did see the end of the game and all of the Boss of course.  But I did look later for the career ads just to keep up my career coaching cred in some weird way.

The careerbuilder ad made me laugh with its clever repetitions and images.  But with my coaching hat on, I also saw that it was containing some basic emotional truths about career or job change.  The ad showed a woman screaming in her car when she arrives at work, bosses showing no respect, people crying and punching toy koala bears.  Actually, doesn’t sound too funny when you just write it down.  But it’s through the humor that we can get to the tougher emotional truths sometime.

Most of us do wait until we feel incredibly angry, sad, frustrated, disgusted or dissed before doing anything about our jobs.  Studies show we are more likely to act in response to getting rid of pain that going for pleasure, getting rid of unhappiness than going for happiness.  That can keep us in so-so positions, which eventually will also drag us down emotionally.  It just takes longer, like water dripping until it finally makes a hole in the stone.

I Twittered about this today, how the ad showed some basic situations and feelings that revealed underlying emotional truths we need to notice and deal with.  A colleague, Shaun Jamison, replied that the problem is we often then jump from the frying pan to the fire.  I agree.  In trying to end our pain we might take rash action, having probably waited to

It’s not that the pain we’re feeling isn’t a good indicator about what to do.  It’s just incomplete.  What’s missing in part is our careful thinking about what else we can do, what jobs are better fits–but what’s also missing are the happy emotions.

The happy emotions of joy, peace, contentment, excitement can guide us to envisioning a job we’d really like.  In my coaching, I always start out finding out what really gets people energized, passionate, excited.  Doesn’t matter if it’s nonwork stuff.  First get to that connection with your energy and passion and desire, and we can then use our thinking to figure out how to apply those passions into a better career and job.

And yeh, it doesn’t hurt to be able to laugh at our problems sometimes too, as with the ad.

 

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Career Ideas–Understand Failure

One of the most famous stories about seeing failure in a new light is about Edison.  A reporter is said to have asked how he felt about having failed in thousands of experiments trying to make a lightbulb. Edison replied, I haven’t failed once. I found 9,999 ways to not make the lightbulb.

Einstein too had many failures, including a critique of Neils Bohr’s work which didn’t take into account Einstein’s own theory of relativity. As a career coach (with plenty of my own “failures” along the way, including how I chose my previous career), I often deal with clients who see their careers or their current career as a failure.  Sometimes it’s because they just got fired.  Sometimes it’s because they are stressed out in the wrong job.  Sometimes it’s because they don’t know where they are going in their lives and already middle aged. To deal with such perceptions of failure with my clients, I need to do 2 things.

First, isolate what the failure really is, and see if the person is not overgeneralizing much about a mistake, blowing it all out of proportion, and leading to bad decisions such as suddenly leaving a job. For instance, when they say they never do job interviews right, I want to know what they mean by right and wrong. Maybe they just mean that they tend to answer one question out of dozens during the interview in a way that hurt their chances, something that can happen in the best of interviews. Maybe they mean they offended someone by their view on how things should be done. We can review these answers and see if they were excellent answers that just didn’t match with the particular interview.  These answers do not mean the person is a failure at interviewing and needs to go hide his head. In fact, interviews are two way streets where you are evaluating the employer as they evaluate you. With a two way process, the answer that “failed” with the interviewer may be the one that helped you realize this wasn’t the place for you.

Second, even if the specific “failure” or mistake was real and significant, the next question is not–Are you ever going to get interviewing right, but What did you learn. It’s hard to learn new things if you don’t see something as needing improvement, and when we see failure it really focuses our attention. So failure is success, as Edison realized, in that it is a core component of succeeding and learning.  In coaching yourself, look at your failures to see if you are overgeneralizing (for instance, I didn’t finish the project on time again so I’m never going to succeed in this job). Narrow down to what the problem actually was and then go ahead and see what you can learn and do differently from then on. With all that in mind, check out this video from Honda about failure and how innovation and change depend on pushing things until they fail in order to really learn something new.

 

If you haven’t already signed up for my free biweekly ezine on careers and creativity, go on over here and you’ll also get bonus materials including keys to lifework, the 4 foundation questions for career success, and a way to decide if a coach is the right one for you.

Text © 2009 by, Leonard Lang.  Feel free to pass on this article as long as you include the copyright notice and the link to http://choosingacareerblog.com

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Career Coaching–It’s All About the Questions (mostly)

This week I spoke with a few people about coaching and how problems get solved in career coaching.  People asked how I work or what I would do as a coach if faced with this situation or that.  One wanted to know in detail about my processes.

It’s always great when people have these questions because it forces me to get clear again for myself as well as them about the process of coaching.  It’s also a great chance to overcome misconceptions people can so easily have about career coaching, if they’ve never experienced it.

The people I spoke with this week all got it that coaching isn’t therapy of any sort and knew that it was a tool to help people help themselves get out of ruts, get a vision, make a plan, do the plan.  What I did find myself talking about was how a lot of coaching isn’t me answering questions (though some of it is) but asking them.

After all it’s only by questions that the coach can even know what’s going on for the person in terms of their passions and interests and challengs and difficulties.  It’s also a way to help clients look at things from different perspectives.  My favorite is when someone says something like,

“I like construction except not full time so I’m thinking about some carpentry work which is pretty good.  Of course I’d love to have my own catering business, but that’s not going to happen so maybe what I need to do is…

And I just back them up and ask, “Why isn’t that going to happen?” In other words, I start uncovering the reasoning and feelings and assumptions that led to that resigned conclusion about something they’ve identified as a prime passion.  Usually, they have obstacles, but what they really love to do turns out to be very practical and possible.

Or sometimes it’s not–they aren’t going to play quarterback for the Packers at age 49 (unless their name is Favre and they keep making comebacks maybe), but I can ask more questions about what they love about catering, for instance, and find out that it’s about being involved with creating delightful things for people.  We can then go through questions and discussions to figure out what that might mean besides catering.

It’s really quite fun and engaging for the clients as well as for me of course.

Of course, there’s a lot more to coaching than questions.  It may include examples and models, can include advice, and in my case certainly includes many kinds of creative problem solving processes and activities.

But it’s imposible to do coaching without the question, and the bottom line question people are really asking me when they ask about coaching is this:

 

Can this really help me truly solve my career challenge?  Or is this likely to lead me to my ideal lifework or career?

To answer yes, the coach has to have a very pragmatic orientation, even when talking first about career dreams, as I like to do.   But it’s not possible for the coach to answer yes unless the client also says yes–meaning they have to be willing to commit to solving their problems, and to take the time to do the homework (I give lots of homework so clients move quickly on their own as much as possible). and be open to new ideas for their careers or job searches.

Check out a related career coaching post–I’m Smart, Competent–Why Would I Need  a Career Life Coach?

 

 

 

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Keeping Difficult New Year’s Career Resolutions

Here’s a common career question I get as a career coach and an answer I wrote a couple of years ago at that start of the new year that has helped my clients and ezine readers get clearer about what they need to do.

 

CAREER QUESTION:  I tend to pick difficult New Year’s resolutions (begin a new career, double the size of my business, make lots more money, meet a romantic partner, lose a zillion pounds) and wind up just dreading them and feeling as if I have failed.  Do you have a creative way to overcome this stuck point, other than just abandoning these kinds of goals?    

ANSWER:   What’s your deeper goal?  If your resolution was to lose weight, is your deeper goal to be healthier?  Then find many ways to meet that goal, not just the one way represented by your specific resolution.   In other words, give yourself many paths for success in getting what you really want, and with the small successes you will feel encouraged to continue as well with the more difficult original resolution.

The idea here is to meet your deeper, underlying desires and needs and not get stuck with something you feel overwhelmed by, as if that’s the only path to fulfilling your desire.  Get more ways to move forward.  With even small successes, you’ll have motivational fuel to get beyond the stuck point of your original, difficult resolution as well. 

Say you want to lose weight.  Ask yourself why?  Maybe it’s to become healthier.  Then find other ways of becoming healthier that may have nothing to do with weight, such as by taking a vacation (reducing stress, improving health) or meditating.  Or by eating healthier, even if you eat the same number of calories and aren’t on a reducing diet.  Don’t drop the specific weight loss goal if you feel it’s important.  Find ways to make that happen too, but add other small (and large) ways to succeed with your deeper desire.   

Or say your resolution is to switch careers.  Ask why you want to switch careers.  Maybe to do something you are more passionate about.  Then think of new ways to enjoy your favorite passions more hours of the week.  If you can’t incorporate, for instance, your passion for the outdoors and hiking into your work, maybe you can take a walk in a park during lunch or before or after work.  If one passion is making fabulous meals, then do that and maybe even get paid, such as catering your friend’s 40th birthday party.  Continue to look for a better career that you might feel passionate about that includes the outdoors and hiking or includes cooking, but with the idea that this is now just one way to meet your larger goal of feeling more passion in your daily life. 

© 2006–2009 Leonard Lang

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I’m Smart, Competent–Why Would I Need a Career Life Coach?

Here’s a very fast 3 question quiz to help answer that question:

Being smart and competent will certainly help you during coaching, but it doesn’t tell you whether or not you need a career life coach.  That boils down to 3 questions:

1. Are you eager to go to work, usually feeling passionate and fulfilled in your job and career?

  • If you answered no, go on to number 2. 

2. Do you know what new career/job you would like instead?

  • If no, think about coaching.  If yes, that’s great, and now go on to 3.

3. Are you making progress toward you ideal career as fast and effectively as you’d like?

  • If no, think about coaching.

If you answered yes on 1 OR 2 AND yes on 3, you probably don’t need coaching.

© 2005–2008 by Leonard Lang

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Creative Ideas to Avoid Layoffs and Find Career Niches

The New York Times reports that companies are recognizing the value of retaining good, proven employees even during the recession.  Instead of relying solely on layoffs, some are trying other approaches that cut down on labor costs while making sure that employees can hold onto their jobs.  This also means that the company doesn’t lose reliable workers who know their business.

It’s not from any warm and fuzzy feelings that organizations are doing this but because companies today measure the productivity and value of their employees more carefully (or think they do), and recognize that they can’t afford to lose good workers. 

“A growing number of employers, hoping to avoid or limit layoffs, are introducing four-day workweeks, unpaid vacations and voluntary or enforced furloughs, along with wage freezes, pension cuts and flexible work schedules. These employers are still cutting labor costs, but hanging onto the labor,” reports the NY Times article. 

If you are a manager who’s been asked to trim costs, please consider these more creative options.

And if you are out of work, but understand these kinds of issues, there’s a BIG opportunity for you to succeed if you can carve out a niche as a workforce saver who can still save money. 

In other words, as I tell my coaching clients who want to just hunker down during a recession and avoid working on their real career dreams—with any big changes in the economy (good or bad), comes big opportunities for anyone who knows how to keep organizations succeeding in the new circumstances. 

So if you are creative and alert to the idea of opportunity, this recession, as awful as it’s proving for many people, does also provide new niches to pursue if those match your passions and skills.

 

 

 

 

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Which Career Is Best–Career Ideas for Artistic Student

I wasn’t happy with the other answers I saw to a career question on Yahoo this week, so I answered it. It was from someone apparently just starting to look for a career, someone with lots of artistic interests who didn’t want to be focused just on making money. Since it is the most foundational of all career questions, I thought I’d share my answer, slightly expanded, with anyone coming to this blog too.

Q: How do you know what career is best for you?

As a career coach (in Minnesota but working nationally), I often work with clients who are doing great financially but are just miserable in their careers. They light up when they start following their passions instead. So I can say that beyond the cliché, it’s generally true that following your passions WILL make you a lot happier than following only the money.

So what to do? For now, why not pursue all or many of the artistic passions you mention by taking classes if you are about to go to college (or are in college)? Now is your chance to experiment and learn about these arts and about yourself.

Keep your eyes open–notice what specific things you really love to do, not just dance, for ex., but what kind of dance you like and what role. Choreographer or performer? Part of a group, couple dancing, soloist?

Notice where you are willing to be persistent and not mind “failures” vs things you only like when they are going well. That will clarify which are more likely for day–to-day work and which are more appropriate for your hobbies. I think keeping a log about what you like is great too as you’ll start noticing patterns that will help you decide on a major.

Get help from others while in college or taking classes instead of being a passive student. Talk to teachers, other students, and people in these arts for a living (informational interviews) to see what careers look like from the inside. That way it will be easier for you to decide.

In other words, do follow your passions, noticing what really suits you and isn’t just this month’s whim.

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Getting Ahead–Are MBA’s Worth It?

As a career coach, I help clients figure out their career vision and dream career(s).   I often wind up reminding them that potential income is only part of that vision, and not the first factor to consider unless you don’t care how you actually will spend thousands of hours of your life.  That’s not to discount the money, if you will, but to make sure you don’t get misled by that factor alone.

But those of you who have a career all set may be considering how to move ahead or simply how to earn more money.  Many in management figure an MBA is the next step.  But is it?  In terms of raw dollars spent in obtaining it vs. dollars earned because of it, will it help or hinder you?  The Wall Street Journal just took a look at this question to see what your ROI (return on investment) would be from ponying up for an MBA at 27 US schools.   

They found out first, that it will cost you anywhere from $40,000 to $136,000 to complete your program.  No small piece of change no matter which school you chose.  The WSJ question is, whether the return after 5 years more than equals the cost.  This is not about quality of the degree, but quantity of the return.

It turns out that the best ROI was at Texas A&M (243%) and the worst at NYU (only 56%).  You can find the complete table here and the article discussing it here.

 

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Can You Help Your Career Success with Affirmations? You Decide.

This is one of those career ideas I have been at times for and at times against (or at least not actively in favor of) over the years. But recent research seems to indicate that if done properly (as below with music and images), affirmations can be a positive aid, setting off a string of positive networks in your brain.  It’s less about the meaning of the words and more about the emotional triggers–just like political or commercial ads, only for your benefit.

So here’s a YouTube video with some career success affirmations that may help you even if just a little to get in a state of mind to help you with anything from choosing a career more meaningfully to just feeling more confident. It’s only a minute and a half.  So give it a try if this interests you or you love affirmations.   BTW–I have no connection with laserdirect in case anyone is wondering.

Success Affirmations for Career Change by laserdirect

 


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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.