Archive for November, 2010

Clients often come to me looking for the perfect career and are looking for an exact blueprint that will send them in the right direction immediately. I definitely have tools to get you started on your search, but the most important thing you can do is to start looking at the beliefs you have about your circumstances. It can be difficult to look at ourselves with this kind of honesty, but you find some surprising things about what may be affecting your search for the “perfect job”. I recently found an article about how our past can affect our future careers. Even if it was not your exact experience, it may help you get clear on some things that may be standing in your way.

The study focused on women and the affects their social environment has on whether they will pursue their dreams of being an entrepreneur. The study conducted by Zhen Zhang, Assistant professor in the W.P. Carey School of Business at ASU, “surveyed about 1,400 female pairs of fraternal and identical twins, asking them various questions about their childhoods and work history to help find out whether genetic influences on entrepreneurship are fixed or whether they can be weakened or strengthened by the social environment”. ** The study showed that girls, who were exposed to physical or emotional trauma such as parental divorce or domestic abuse, significantly weaken the genetic influences on girls becoming entrepreneurs.

According to Zhang: “Even though DNA is fixed, it needs human behavior to manifest itself,” Zhang said. “It’s the same thing for someone genetically inclined to be a scientist or an artist – they still need to be nurtured through social and environmental factors. Girls who have a supportive environment during adolescence will be more likely to reach their full genetic potential as entrepreneurs, while those affected by negative, stressful events can have their natural genetic disposition weakened.”**

Before you start looking at your past as a demon that prevented you from truly living out your potential, it’s important to realize that you do have control over the outcome. What Zhang recommends for changing the impact of trauma is exposure to “environmental factors such as peer support, mentor programs, positive internships, and other activities where kids learn about financial independence and being a business owner can help mediate that. In the end, if girls get enough social and environmental support, their chances of becoming entrepreneurs can remain the same.”**

Even if you aren’t interested in being an entrepreneur, changing your circle of influence may give you access to career options that are more aligned with who you are. On a practical note: you could start attending networking meetings or other events that are in fields you may be interested in pursuing. This would put you in environments where you could learn and be encouraged by others.

On an interpersonal note, the most important thing you can do to start succeeding and pursuing your passion, is to give yourself encouragement. Give yourself permission to try new things and let go of the thoughts that are holding you back. Being successful is having the confidence to take a risk. Confidence is really a matter of telling yourself that you are good enough and worthy as you are right now. Confidence does not mean you are perfect and have it all together. It means you are willingly to take a risk because you know you can handle any outcome that arises. How can you build self-confidence?

Here are some ways to get started:
• Create new self-talk. Note how many times you criticize yourself through out the day. Give yourself messages that are positive and affirm your unique talents.
• When you find yourself fixated on the improbability of a risk being successful ask yourself: is it true?
• If you feel uncertain, create a plan B. Sometimes knowing how you will handle a potential outcome will give you the confidence you need to take the first steps.

The trap that many of us fall into is thinking that our limited beliefs about our circumstances and ourselves are an undeniable reality. In essence, we can only become what we think. Start examining and changing the limited beliefs you have and you will see your confidence and opportunities grow.

** From Physorg.com article, August 5, 2010

If you’re like many of my clients you’ve probably found yourself in career situations where you are trying to control things that are entirely out of your control. You find yourself trying to do things in just the right way and are overly concerned with how your work compares with others. At times, you perceive a feeling of impending doom if just the slightest thing goes wrong with a project. Talk about pressure! It is in that moment that you have reached a level of control that is actually sabotaging your success, not adding to it.

There are three main reasons why control doesn’t work:

1) It consumes way too much time. When you are being hyper-vigilant in every aspect of a project you are essentially wasting precious time that could be used in developing other aspects: such as creating a stronger concept or idea. When you spend a lot of time trying to perfect something to a degree that is far beyond what is necessary, you are fixating on external factors. This constant focus on external factors may actually cause you to make more mistakes because you are fatigued by worry about things out of your control.

2) It drains your energy. When you think and re-think every action in an effort to control a potentially bad outcome, it drains your energy and focus. Trying to control external factors puts you in a place of defense, not in a place of power. By owning your identity and natural strengths you can navigate how to approach situation with more confidence and less fear.

3) It thwarts your goals. The undeniable truth is that you can’t control things that are not “controllable”. When you waste time focusing on things that are completely out of your control, it makes it difficult to achieve your goals because it takes your focus off of the things that you can improve upon.

I received an e-mail that contains some great advice about how to “control the controllables” Here is an excerpt from a woman named Erin who wrote me to share some wonderful advice from her basketball coach and mentor Dyrick:

“In university, I played basketball for the women’s team. I had, in my opinion, the greatest coach/mentor who taught me everything I needed to know to reach my goals in life. What started as team philosophies, ended up applying to all aspects of my life. Amongst many of his inspiring quotes, one line that has really helped me believe that I ultimately determine my fate in life was, “control the controllables.” When he first said it, it was before we won our Championship game – the first of many times he’s made me feel like a champion. He said, “If you want to win this game, you have to focus on each individual task, one at a time, eventually these seized opportunities will add up… and at the buzzer, you’ll be champions. How are you going to do that? “Control the controllables.” He said, “You can not control the ref’s calls, so don’t dwell on them. You cannot control that your opponent may be bigger and better than you, so don’t think about it. You cannot control the fans screaming things at you, so don’t listen to it. But what you can control is “you.” “Control each shot you make, each defensive move you take on your opponent, each box out, each loose ball, and if you succeed at winning each one of these, you will win this game”.

And she did. This advice led her team to become Champions. Try to focus on the “controllables” in your own life and see how this new focus creates a difference in your career.

When I began my training as a Career Coach, my coaching mentor told us that the key in finding your ideal career is to look back at your childhood. What did you love to do? What filled you with joy? It’s a question that I’ve attempted to answer and one that I asked my clients often. However, it is has was never easy for my clients, or myself, to answer. It’s not that there weren’t things we loved to do as children, it’s just that over the years it has become increasingly difficult to recall them. Years of work related stress and conformity have melted those memories into tiny drips. When you thought about it, it probably sounded like this: dancing, writing, playing, sports… so what do I do with that?

I had fallen into this small drip thinking, and therefore found the exercise of looking back into my childhood kind of dry and ineffective. Until one day I realized that you had to re-experience it, not just think about it. It works best when you actually hold it in your hands. It happened to me in quite a peculiar way. An old box that had been sitting in my parent’s basement, then my garage for years, suddenly re-surfaced. There was oil leaking in the corner of our garage and my husband began clearing out everything that was around it. In that corner, sat an oil-stained box with my poetry from high school and my journal from college. It also contained my music books and my most treasured stories. Reading, touching, and spending time with these items made me realize just how far I had stepped away from who I was. It was like meeting an old friend again, but feeling it like it was the first time you met. It became crystal clear which parts of my life were working and which one weren’t. Where I had strayed too far away and what direction I now needed to go.

Take some time to spend with the younger you. Recover a past journal or piece of artwork. Play with who you were and it will reveal tons about who you want to be. It doesn’t mean you will drop your goal of becoming an investment banker and paint all day. It is simply a way to open yourself up to every part of you. It may actually show you why being an investment banker is the best path for you and who you were meant to be. It may remind you of unused talents that could help you in your job search or career. Give yourself time to explore, see excites you, and allow the ideas to form. In his book “A Whole New Mind” Daniel Pink discusses how people who learn to use their right brain ideas will be the most successful in the new economy. He discusses the notion of “play” as a way to stimulate your mind. We all have right brain capabilities; it’s a matter of tapping into them and then letting your left-brain do all the logistical work.  If you follow your natural instincts and relax into finding your ideal job; you’ll notice that your career path will start to lay itself out before you.