Ian Christie’s Bold Career Blog

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Hmm. It has been too long. And you might be thinking that we have disappeared here at BoldCareer. That would be understandable. But not true. The fact is, things are busy. Very busy. But mostly around serving clients and delivering on commitments. I haven’t been great at prioritizing time here on the blog or for the newsletter. Let’s see if we can do something about that.

Just back from a trip to Singapore and Danang, Vietnam to deliver a few days of career development workshops. Loved it. Great trip.

The overall impression I formed was that the region was on the move, and North America better watch out.

Even in Vietnam, the service was excellent. Universities can’t keep up with demand. And the economy is doing well.

Singapore, and stops in Seoul and Narita rounded out my impression of friendly, efficient, and effective customer service. It was a pleasure to experience.

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When you are in the right business / job, one of the benefits of taking a real break, as I did during the Christmas to New Years stretch is that your brain starts to work in new and fresh ways. Your creativity is sparked. You see new solutions to old problems and opportunities where they didn’t seem to exist back in November.

This has certainly been the case with me over the years, and this holiday was no exception.

Keyword = Buzzing.

Lots of great ideas, and new points of view. So, here’s to a prosperous, healthy, and peaceful New Year, and from my perspective, one where you find ways to do the kind of work you want to do and were meant to do.

Cheers.

I am having one of those weeks. A pile of small challenges amidst the regular load and pace of professional and family life. Nothing major. A dropped and destroyed cell phone. Bad traffic. An overload of kid’s homework projects. Small things really.

So, on this day before American Thanksgiving Day, I woke up being mindful of everything I have to be grateful for. I am grateful to have your attention. I am grateful for the privilege of advising you and thousands of others by doing things I love to do - coaching, consulting, writing and speaking. And I am grateful for the role my clients let me play in making significant changes in their careers.

• What are you grateful for in your professional life?
• What is going well?
• Do you get paid to use your natural talents and abilities?
• Do you get to work with great people?
• What kind of impact are you making?
• Do you get paid to work in a field that you find deeply interesting and engaging?
• Are you learning and developing?
• If your job isn’t going as well as you’d like, can you reframe it as an opportunity to learn something about yourself - where you fit best, for example - and be grateful for that opportunity?
• If you are in the midst of job search and feeling down about your progress, can you be grateful for the opportunity to develop your work search skills, or to meet new people, or to have the opportunity to search for and find a job that really fits?
• Recognize your ability to rise to and take on the challenges in at work.

It is important to give thanks, but there is more to it. The *skill of gratitude* is a key element in your happiness. And what I have seen countless times over the years, is that career success often comes from an ability to appreciate the good and the bad, to learn from it, and then to lever those experiences to make changes and play a bigger game. When you can derive meaning from your experiences, then you can do something about them. This is a much more empowering position to adopt than the opposite.

I invite you to use the comments feature here to share your own stories. What are you grateful for? And if you are faced with a challenging situation in your professional life and are having trouble being grateful, tell us that. I and other readers would love to hear from you.

And as a way of showing my gratitude, I am offer all mailing list subscribers 10% of any service purchases between today and midnight, Tuesday, November 27th. If are not subscribed as of right now and want to take advantage of this offer, please use the sign-up box at the top of this page, and we will send you the discount code.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you celebrating this weekend. Safe travels.

If you visited in the first half of yesterday, you may have been greeted by an error page. Our apologies for that. There are a few intermitent bugs that we are trying to nail down in our process to make this blog and site a better user experience.

On the site renovation front:

• We have a new header. That little fish represents the bold career hero – swimming in his own direction. Hope you like it.
• And, finally, we have migrated this blog into the navigation of BoldCareer, so there is one seamless navigation throughout the site.

Thanks.

Delighted to see that the Bootstrapper blog put this blog on their Bootstrapper » Top 100 HR Bloggers list.

I had the great pleasure of delivering the keynote and a workshop to the 2007 European Management Assistants (EUMA) conference in Belgium last month. I spoke to the conference theme of creating career opportunity and used the workshop to deliver a practical planning approach for attracting and creating more career opportunity.

I was immensely impressed by the enthusiasm, openness and professionalism of the organizers and attendees and truly enjoyed Belgian hospitality.

Location: Brussels, Belgium
Audience: European Management Assistants (EUMA)
Tools: iWork Keynote

An all too common reaction to jobs that don’t engage. Once in a while, very normal. But I hope you don’t feel this way all the time.

One of the neat and necessary things that happens before we engage with a client for job search, career change, and general career coaching is a preliminary conversation. Whether email, phone, or in-person, it is a chance to establish mutual fit.

With that in mind, we have a new and improved online form to facilitate that conversation. The form is the place to go when you have had a look at the career services section of the site, or have downloaded the brochure, and are then interested in exploring the fit with our professional career services or getting your specific questions answered prior to purchasing.

Using the form, you can confidentially share your situation, resume, goals and questions with us. We can then mutually establish if there is a fit in working together.

You can find it on the site, but here it is as well. Interested in working together? Let’s start a conversation…

Read the rest of this entry »

Next time a significant career-related decision comes up, pause and give some careful thought to your decision-making criteria.

When I am interviewed by the media and the topic comes up, I share what is in my opinion one of the largest problems or mistakes in career management.

When it comes to making decisions about job offers and other career opportunities, saying “yes” when you should say “no” ranks right up there as a key factor in career management problems.

Saying “yes”, when you should say “no” is a major cause of career derailment, frustration, shattered self-confidence, unemployment, or even worse, just plain misery in terms of how you spend your Monday - Friday working hours.

• Your Yes vs No analysis applies when:
• You decide which opportunities to spend your time on
• Job content and task orientation turn out to be focused on areas that aren’t interesting or configured to allow you to be successful in this job
• You gather information about the organizational environment in which you will be working. Lack of fit here can really lead to problems for you
• After interviews or gathering information, you sum up how well you can work with your potential new boss. Trust your gut. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t

Most importantly, feeling that you have the freedom to say No means that you have created a situation where you know you are going to have choice and don’t have to settle on the first thing that comes along.

If you can’t be successful (in broad terms) in the role you are being considered for, don’t say yes.

Technorati Tags: career change, career coach, executive search, job search