Revisiting Your Values can Clarify your Career Path

Some people know exactly what kind of work they want to do and can pursue it.  The rest of us don’t necessarily have that certainty.  The good news, according to Anita Houghton in her book, Finding Square Holes: Discover who you really are and find the perfect career, is that specific career choice is not as crucial as you think.  That is because the things that people find important about their work tend to be general rather than specific.  For example, you may value working with people, overcoming challenges, intellectual stimulation or being creative.  These things are general enough that they can be found in a variety of different jobs.  So if you are an ex-pat living in a new environment, don’t limit yourself to the label of your old job but be open to exploring different avenues where you could find or revisit the values that make you feel fulfilled.

The first step is to identify your values. Value clarification is an honest assessment of who you are, right now in your life.  Thomas Leonard, author of The Portable Coach and founder of Coach University and Coachville, does a good job of making the distinction between needs, wants and values. 

 He says a need is something you must have in order to be your best, such as time, space, money, love, information, food, exercise, or tools.  Usually, getting a need met causes you to feel satisfaction.

A want is something that you relate to by trying to acquire or experience it, such as a vacation, a promotion, a gourmet meal, sex, a good book, a new car.  Usually getting something you want makes you feel gratification.

A value is something that you naturally gravitate toward, prompted from within and not be needs or wants.  However, the same thing can be a need, a want or a value for different people or for the same person at the same time. So Leonard offers these guidelines to help draw the distinctions: If there is urgency, it is probably a need; if there is craving or desire, it’s probably a want; if there is a natural uncomplicated pull, it’s probably a value.

When a person is true to his or her self, that self can be defined by a clear list of values.  This helps you escape the should-have, could-have, ought- tos in life. It helps you make sure you are living your values and not the values of others. Sometimes the things we believe to be our values are actually the values of our parents, our mentors or teachers and not our own. Carl Jung once said that nothing affects the child more than the unlived dreams of the parent. When you honestly assess your values, the next step becomes clearer. Career coach Carole Pemberton offers some questions to help you do that http://www.carolepemberton.com/the-importance-of-creating-an-authentic-career-narrative/    

A simple way to identify your values is to think of peak experiences in your life, moments when you felt on top of the world and completely yourself.  They might be professional or personal, but by reflecting on what aspects of those experiences made you feel this way, you can identify your values.  As a career coach, when I hear a client sharing good work experiences from their past I can help them spot how their values emerged and were fulfilled.

Skill identification and value clarification go hand in hand and every positive experience will have both.   Richard Bolles, author of What Color is my Parachute? says,” When clients identify the skills they like the best and the values they seek most, they have a language for talking to themselves and others about what they are looking for in the world of work.” That is exactly what job seekers need in order to start developing their profile, elevator speech and interview stories.

Identifying your values is a perfect activity to do in the nice weather when you can get outside to a park or go on holiday to a beach and really think about these things.  You can create the space to spend some time and come up with a list. Once you have that list you can place the top six values on a wheel and then colour in to what percentage you are currently living that value.

The key point to keep in mind about values is that implementing them energizes everything concerned with it. For an individual, committing to and applying values releases fresh energies, which always attract success, achievement, and well-being. Likewise, when companies or other institutions adopt values, individuals working at the organization become energized, as do its customers, its products and services, and everyone and everything else associated with that organization.

Roy Disney once said, “It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” If you were in touch with your true values, how would that change your career path and even your life?

For a tool to help you clarify your values click here

http://www.keenerinspiration.com/keenerinspiration/pdfs/Values%20work.pdf

Need Mid-winter Motivation? Start thinking in Adjectives

February seems like a month that everyone needs a little motivation.  Christmas is gone, spring has yet to arrive and we find ourselves in the doldrums of winter.  I’d like to introduce you to someone with some inspiring ideas to give you a lift. Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder and Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that helps organizations do less Good Work and more Great Work. He is the author of Do More Great Work and Get Unstuck & Get Going, and the creator of The Alchemy of Great Work, The Great Work Movie, The 5.75 Questions You've Been Avoiding and The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun. Michael was a Rhodes Scholar and the 2006 Canadian Coach of the Year. He is Australian and now lives in Canada. He suggests you come up with 11 words for 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSSRCzkt1GA  This has been a really inspirational and focusing exercise for me and more motivational than making (and not keeping) New Year’s resolutions.  My eleven words are: Calm, Empower, Connect, Confident, Daring, Thoughtfully Slower, Focus, Listen, Determined, and Learn. What would your 11 words be?  Michael also has a free e-mail you can subscribe to called The Seven Questions for a Life of Fun, Inspiration & Action. If you are feeling stuck it is just the thing to get your wheels moving again.

On the theme of motivation and using descriptive words, author and coach Martha Beck had some good insights on how we should be setting our goals.  She talks about setting goals not by using nouns and verbs (i.e.  I want to start my own business and have it succeed ) but by using adjectives ( I want my business success to produce feelings of contentment, freedom, empowerment.)  What do you want as a result? Work to create imagined experiences rather than imagined situations. So for example, you may get a successful business but not the experience you were hoping for – instead you’re stressed and over-extended. By using adjectives, you focus all your efforts on the quality of the experience you want to create.  Yes, it does take more effort than standard goal setting but you’ll reap the rewards. Here’s a summary of the four step process:

¨  Step One – Pick a goal

¨  Step Two – Gaze into the future and create a fantasy about it

¨  Step Three – Generate three adjectives – list words that describe how you feel in the fantasy

¨  Step Four- Focus on anything that can be described with your adjectives – drop the fantasy and focus on those three words –in what aspect of your present life can you feel those and put your attention there.

Sound like a helpful approach? You can read the full article here http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Goal-Setting-Strategies-from-Life-Coach-Martha-Beck

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to do some career coaching at an event sponsored by The Guardian newspaper for people wanting to change industry or sector.  I met with several people who were looking to transition out of the public sector and into the private one, understandable in this current economic climate. The first step in this kind of a shift is self assessment.  Once you have a good understanding of what you bring to the table, you can then work on how best to market your skills and achievements to the private sector and be better prepared to craft a compelling CV.  Before your first private industry interview, think about how you want to be remembered ?  Come up with the three adjectives you'd like the interviewer to use when they decribe you to other people in the hiring process. Once you have these in the back of your mind you'll find they naturally seem to come through in your interview answers.  If you or someone you know is making this type of transition here is an article that may help http://careers.guardian.co.uk/careers-blog/sectors-industry-roles-public-sector  

To borrow Michael's phrase, I hope these ideas will create some fun, some inspiration and some action for you this month.

New Year – Resolve to shape up your network!

January is usually the time we think about getting into shape, but what shape is your network in? Everyone knows that networking is important especially when some statics say that up to 60% of jobs are unadvertised.  I was thinking back to all the different ways I have found work in the past twenty years and the most interesting and unusual opportunities have always come as a result of someone I know or a recommendation.  The key to effective networking is to make sure you keep your network up to date rather than ignore it until you really need it.  One coaching client I’ve been working with, who recently was made redundant, realised that he hadn’t really been keeping his network up to date.  It was then a matter of reconnecting with people he used to work with, friends, alumni from his university through LinkedIn and Face book and reaching out to new people in other areas of his life.  The result after four months was a job offer that came via a lead from someone he had worked with 12 years ago supported by a recommendation from an  employee who was a good friend of one of his good friends. Networking should be an ongoing activity not something you do just when you’re looking for a job opportunity.

So let me share with you some resources to help you consider your network and feel more comfortable going out there and expanding it.

I found Tai Goodwin’s list of the top ten people you should have as part of your network very interesting - http://www.grb.uk.com/top-ten-for-your-network.0.html  It gave me the opportunity to revisit my own network and ask myself if I have all ten of these types of people. (I’m a connector by the way if you need to add one of those to your network.). It’s also a chance to go through your contact database and make sure it is current.  As Jo Parfitt and Jacqui Tillyard say in their e-book, Grow your own Network, “It is just as important to weed out the ones that no longer serve you.”

The Networking Effect by Tony Newton and Judith Perle is a book for anyone who ever said, "But I don't really like/feel comfortable/know how to network." It's all there - how to open and close a conversation, build rapport with people, think of what you can give as well as what you want to get, how to grow and expand your network, and be memorable. It builds on concepts from NLP to communication and presentation skills to Dale Carnegie's principles. Whether you're a recent graduate just starting out or a seasoned professional needing to up your game, this book provides valuable tips and ideas as well as interesting stories to help you remember what to do. The most valuable chapter for me, personally, was the one on how to follow up with people after meeting them. The discount code tne001 will get buyers a pre-launch 25% discount off the £8.99 cover price at www.TheNetworkEffect.co.uk until at least the end of January.

Finally, here are my Top Networking Tips

•     Maintain your network – send thank yous and follow-up regularly with anything that might be of interest to the person

•     Contact people personally, do not attempt to revive your network with a mass email – networking is a personal contact sport

•     Even if you do not know contacts for someone right away, take their information, it is funny how quickly you come across useful information

•     At events, help others be comfortable, find out what they are looking for, connect them with people you have already met

•     Spend more time asking questions about your contact and listening rather than talking entirely about yourself. The primary objective of networking should be to gain an understanding of others’ concerns and problems.

•     It’s the quality not the quantity that counts

•     Have fun- people are interesting, enjoy finding out about them and your network will stay active.