Tag: career success

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The big MO and Succeeding with Your Career Ideas and Goals

There are lots of things to say about how to succeed with any long-term goals—whether starting a business, choosing careers, changing careers, changing your department’s culture, becoming a lawyer, earning a degree, or even becoming a better skier or dancer. But one thing is particularly vital, relatively easy, and certainly important to keep in mind.

The advice is:

Keep up the momentum. The big MO. Simple really.

That means take steps regularly. Any positive steps.

I’ve seen it with coaching clients, class participants, and yeh, myself too lots of times. Once you start feeling stuck, you tend to keep getting more stuck, feeling more and more overwhelmed and discouraged. It becomes harder and harder to get moving again.

With apologies to Newton and his laws of motion—it’s true that objects (or people) at rest tend to stay at rest.

Fortunately, the opposite is true too: Objects (or people) in motion tend to stay in motion.

My coaching clients make their greatest progress in finding new career ideas or making great plans when they simply complete small steps each week and are held accountable for them. They stay motivated, see at least a little progress all the time, and over time realize they are getting to their career goals.

Even very small steps qualify to keep you moving ahead like meeting with a career Success Partner for 15 minutes for a check in. Or brainstorming with someone about new ways to approach your project. Or reading something inspiring that gets you moving. Or….well, it really can be almost anything as long as it moves you along.

You’ll know if it’s working because you feel relief and energized again.

Even more important, these very small steps can accomplish very big things. Even big, challenging goals must be broken down into smaller ones anyhow. Don’t get overwhelmed by how many steps there are. Just do one of them and keep on moving ahead. Focus on that, and enjoy what you are doing now.

Don’t know what the next step should be? Just follow Lang’s First Principle of Action: You may not know THE next step you must take, but you can (almost) always come up with A next step that will move you forward—physically, emotionally, financially, etc. Each time you move ahead, any remaining stuck point can be seen from a new perspective.

Make sure you don’t wait for some wide open period of time to really move ahead.

Keep on moving and you will keep feeling energized and motivated and open to opportunities that will come your way.

© 2007-2009 by Leonard Lang

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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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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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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