Photo by Dominic Alves

True Happiness

It’s February again, and for people up north that can be a time of grey doldrums.  For those of us lucky enough to live in the south, it’s actually the beginning of spring.  In my front garden the daffodils are springing up, bright yellow spots of sun on the still dormant soil.  My mother used to plant daffodils all down the hills of the ravine behind our house, so that come spring she would see them dancing toward the stream.  One of the wonders of daffodils is that they spread underground, so that year after year, more and more daffodils emerge.

What has this got to do with career paths?  For me, it’s about happiness, and the way the bright yellow flowers spread.  I’ve written before about how happiness can make you more productive at work, and this is actually emerging now as a field of study.  Martin Seligman’s work was the beginning of serious scholarly inquiry into what actually makes us happy, and gave birth to the new field of positive psychology.  I’m a big fan of Seligman and some of his followers because the emphasis is on normal people (rather than pathological people) and how we can be happy.

“Why bother being happy?” Seligman asks in one of his most famous books, Authentic Happiness (2002). He answers this question by recognizing the role that positive emotions have to play in our lives.  Negative emotions (sadness, fear, anger) are signals of external threat causing us to constrict both our hearts and our heads and move into survival modes.  But positive emotions are expansive: when we feel happy, delighted, loving, kind, or grateful, our minds are more creative, unrestrained, open to new ideas and new experiences.  Seligman illustrates this with several experiments that show when good feelings are induced prior to asking subjects to complete a difficult task, those people invariably solve the problems more quickly and creatively than those that have been pushed towards negative emotions first.  Amazing.

Seligman also believes in “learned optimism” as an approach to being happier. Simply put, learning to be more optimistic about yourself and your future helps create hope, confidence and resilience.  In terms of work productivity, happier people get more done, get better evaluations from their supervisors, and earn higher pay.  In one experiment, trying to figure out whether happiness or productivity comes first, adults and children who were put in a good mood before attempting laboratory tasks or word problems selected higher goals for themselves and persisted longer in performing the tasks.  Happier people showed greater evidence of self-control and coping abilities when something bad happened. Finally, happy people are more “other-centered” and connected socially than unhappy people given them more resources to draw on in times of trouble.

Some people, notably Sonya Lyubomirsky, have asked, “Is there a natural set point for happiness for any individual human being that does not actually vary much?  Or is there a way to increase a happiness set point?”  In a paper titled “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change” (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade, 2005), the authors propose that “a person’s chronic happiness level is governed by three major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness (50%), happiness-relevant circumstantial factors (10%), and happiness-relevant activities and practices (40%).”  They conclude that the first two cannot be changed much, but that the third category can be used to create “the best opportunities for sustainable increasing happiness.”   In other words, adopting new behaviors can actually increase your level of happiness.

So what exactly does it mean to engage in “happiness-relevant activities and practices?  Boiling a series of academic experiments back down to the essence, these are the simple answers:

1. Set a goal, and make it yours (own it);
2. Make it fun-if it becomes a burdensome habit, stop;
3. Keep a balance between challenge and ease;
4. Always remember the big picture (why this is important to you).

Martin Seligman asserts that happiness lies “at the intersection between pleasure and meaning” so whether at work or at home, the goal overall should be to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable, whether this is writing an article, designing a building, or playing with children.  Except in extreme circumstantial instances (recent car wreck victims for instance) our level of happiness is often determined by what we focus on.

So, back to the daffodils:  in helping yourself become sustainably happier, you will no doubt be contributing to the spread of the happiness in others, just like those bulbs.  You can contribute to the wellbeing of people around whether you are at work, at home, at school or at a place of worship. That is a meaningful life goal to me. As an added perk, you will likely become more productive, too.

People learn through the stories we tell about life, whether we are discussing someone’s success in school, a tragedy in their personal life, the moralizing of fables and sermons, the truth embedded in every myth ever told. You will most likely not remember an academic abstract of an article, but you will understand the point through the examples that are used.  The exact details don’t actually matter as much as the arc of the storyline, and the lessons we take away from it.

Consider my own life:  For years, I defined myself in terms of my ability to put my husband through his PhD.  When he died in an auto accident after teaching only two semesters as an assistant professor, I redefined my life in terms of taking care of my two children who were 8 and 10 at the time of his death.  The problem with this story line was that once they were both fledging the household, I could no longer find my purpose.  I truly suffered through the dark night of the soul, before discovering that my new purpose had to do with symbiotically helping other people achieve their dreams while pursuing my own dream of a private coaching practice.

Change your story and change your life. 

I am old enough now to have known many people that have suffered serious tragedies in their lives: children who died young of cancer; parents that suffer dementia; bankruptcy due to a generally failing economy and not from mismanagement of funds; the inability to find work in a beloved field and choosing underemployment over unemployment.  So many stories of sorrow.

There are also the lovely stories of triumph:  desperation leading to radical changes that work out in unexpectedly delightful ways.  Losing all material possessions and deciding to sign on as a cook on a cruise liner to see the world; a child’s death leading to the foundation of a charity to help those with similar situations; realizing that diet is a lifestyle change, not an on again/off again affair, finally leading to sustainable weight loss; marriages on the brink of dissolution salvaged through better communication as a result of tragedy.  Tragedy may shape your story, but it does not have to define it.

Even small changes in the story matter.

For instance, Dorothy [the names are fictionalized for privacy], a client of mine struggling to finish a PhD, consistently told herself that she wasn’t as smart as her classmates.  That she was studying in a non-native language in a culture foreign to her did not enter into the equation.   This led her to question every sentence that she wrote.

I asked her if there was anyone else in the world that knew her topic like she did, and what did they know about it?  She could come up with one name only, someone who had been studying her topic for over 30 years.  “What does that tell you about your knowledge of the topic?”  The words spilled out of her, fairly tripping over tongue on the way out of her mouth.  She was an expert on the topic.  She acknowledged it.  And, lo and behold, the dissertation went from chaotic and amorphous to polished and solid.

What you tell yourself about you matters.

What is the story you are telling yourself now about the life you are leading? You can use the intention (not resolution!) of redefining yourself, and telling a new story about your path, as the direction you want to take in 2012.   Ask yourself:

• What is the story of my life?
• Are there patterns I repeat over and over again?
• Am I attached to these patterns? If so, how?
• How do I want to define my life?
• How would I be different if I defined myself differently?
• What do I see as the meaning or purpose embodied by life?
• How do I want to be remembered?

Start today. Because the story you tell about your life is your life.

STEAM Ahead into 2012

I was recently privileged to attend a very small conference in my hometown put on by American Conference of Academic Deans and Phi Beta Kappa.  There were only about 150 attendees, making it possible to really speak with a lot of people in depth about their ideas and research.  The conference was titled, “Are the humanities now a luxury?” which most of us attending found ourselves translating to “Are the humanities dead?” I find this a fascinating question as I have some pretty strong opinions about keeping the humanities alive.

Lately, in education circles, STEM—the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—has been gathering steam, from the publication by the AAUW of their recent report on the still lagging participation of women in science that must be addressed at the El-Hi level to improve at the college level, and the $250 million public-private initiative announce by President Obama to recruit and train more STEM teachers.  In addition to that, the US Department of Education also announced that it would provide “bonus points” in the Race to the Top Fund for applications that stress STEM instruction.

While I am not opposed to the roughly $700 million the Federal Government spends on SYEM education through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other federal government entities I fundamentally embrace the idea that the arts have a role in science as well.  So for me it was a wonderful revelation to hear that some folks are discussing the replacement of the acronym STEM with, you guessed it, STEAM to incorporate the word Arts into this discussion of the appropriate direction for education to take.

Although I have not been able to discover who coined the new acronym, I heartily applaud its use. “Art may be a necessary condition for constructing the new consciousness from which future science gets its structural realities to match nature, in which case it is more important than we generally admit,” wrote Robert Mueller in The Science of Art all the way back in 1967.  Some of my personal favorite poets incorporate scientific discovery into their work, such as Al Zolynas, The New Physics; Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges; and Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female.  Read their interpretations of scientific discovery, and I promise you will be changed.

The there is the recent death from stroke of Lynn Margulis (1938-2011). She was originally considered a cranky woman with a ridiculous idea, that the eukaryotic cell (the more complex cell with a nucleus and other parts, organelles) is not something that evolved on its own, but the result of a simpler (prokaryotic) cell incorporating other such cells. She had 15 rejections before her seminal paper was finally accepted in 1967, scientist being more conservative than one might suppose.  15 years after that, her ideas were validated once it was possible to show through DNA molecular analysis that the DNA of the organelles is virtually the same as the DNA of free-standing prokaryotes. She was one of the original proponents of “the Gaia hypothesis,” that the Earth taken as a whole is a living organism, still a contentious idea. She was lambasted by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, and others in the scientific community. Yet the idea has grown in popularity, and there are scientists and well as the general public embracing the idea.

In the discipline of anthropology, there is a new exhibit of  Ethnographic Terminalia, a curatorial collective of six anthropologists who mount one exhibition per year, timed to coincide with the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Montreal, Canada.     Curators Kate Hennessy, Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology, says it is all about creating a dialogue:  it seems, is the current running through it all – what makes every piece selected a work of art and of anthropology between what is seen in the gallery and what is done in the field, in typical anthropological self-reflexivity.  One example: an exhibit titled “Making Sense: Lab as Gallery as Field,” where two young men tried to figure out what they should be doing with a computer, petri dishes, some homespun gadgetry and circuitry work, and what turned out to be a spectrometer.

Closer to home is a project by Bill Manaris, professor of computer science at the College of Charleston, with the design of the Monterey Mirror, allowing musicians to interact with computers, akin to Apple’s Garage Band.  The project is specifically designed to merge “Computer Science and the Arts,” and the college launched a new program by the same name this past fall that already has 30 students enrolled.  You can here Bill discussing this project and listen to the music by clicking here or on the special feature link.

All and all, I consider these developments not only beneficial to the humanities as a discipline, but actually favorable to the development of all the academic disciplines.  It’s time we rediscovered the role of imagination and Imagineers (to borrow from Disney) in the road to the production of knowledge.

Sunset by J. Steel Hutchinson

The Dark Side of Dreaming

It’s officially November, and the time for introspection is beginning with the celebration of Halloween, Samhain, the Day of the Dead or All Souls Day, depending on your cultural heritage.  The days get shorter, darker, and colder and I want to curl up in a blanket on the coach reading a good novel rather than thinking about work and what it means.  Meanwhile, my elder daughter wrestles with being employed on a project-to-project basis without benefits, and my younger daughter struggles to figure out if the $100,000 investment she anticipates as the full cost of graduate school is really worth it.

Which brings me to Steve Jobs.  We have heard a lot about him since his death on October 5^th of pancreatic cancer, so much of it a celebration of his life and the impact his products have made on the world.  The now-famous commencement speech delivered at Stanford on June 12, 2005 has been quoted over and over as an exemplar par excellance of why it is important to find what you love to do and do it.

Here are his exact words, after his very public firing from Apple at the age of 30:

“I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

While I do not want to deny the accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary, from the invention of the iMac to his reinvention of himself through the acquisition of Pixar, then his ultimately heroic return to Apple and the introduction of such extraordinary products as the iPhone and the iPad, I have to say that this philosophy has a serious downside.  I have known far to many people, in and outside of academia, who pursued what they loved believing the money would follow, only to become disillusioned and frustrated.  No one would choose an academic career today based on money: you have to do it for love.  Architects and artists may absolutely love what they do, but that doesn’t mean they have the talent to land in the big leagues.  What do you do when you are faced with school debt of over $100,000, wanting to have a family and own a home, but have an income of only $30,000 (the average entry level salary for a new architect)?

It’s just that not everyone can be a Steve Jobs.  Remember, although he was adopted, his intelligence in a community that was filled with intelligent engineers in Palo Alto, CA where he grew up, was off the charts.  And he himself was a little off the charts:  He exhibited odd and eccentric behavior, at various points in his life refusing to wear shoes, put a license plate on his car, going on strange diets of only fruits—whence the name Apple—or only vegetables, or refusing to bathe.   In fact, before he and Steve Wozniak partnered up, he was put on the night shift while working for Atari, because he smelled so bad that other employees did not want to work with him.

He wasn’t the nicest person either: Jobs had a daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (born 1978), from his relationship with Bay Area painter Chrisann Brennan, long before his second marriage to Laurene Powell in 1991. For two years, Chrisann raised their daughter on welfare while Jobs denied paternity by claiming he was sterile; he didn’t acknowledge or even speak to his first child until she was practically an adult.

At work, he was a perfectionist and prone to yelling at people.  One of his colleagues once said,  “He would have made an excellent king of France,” an allusion to his arrogance and management style.  He had a very public war of words with Michael Dell of Dell Computers. He did not initially believe in philanthropy of any kind, but was eventually persuaded to participate in Product Red to eliminate AIDS in Africa.

So take Steve Jobs’ advice with a grain of salt.  You will need to earn a living. Young people with limited work experience may not actually know what kinds of jobs they would actually like.  Or they may pursue what they like in school, only to find it unsatisfactory as a career.   Or, for many of my clients, they work for years in an academic career they thought they would love, only to find it too stressful or too unrewarding to continue.

Here’s what Will Wilkinson, blogger at Big Think, has to say about it:

“As an undergrad I was an art major. Frankly, few of my fellow art majors were talented enough to make a living at it, even after four (or more!) years of training. Sure they loved art, but in the immortal words of Tina Turner, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’

‘Find what you love and never settle for less’ is an excellent recipe for frustration and poverty. ‘Reconcile yourself to the limits of your talent and temperament and find the most satisfactory compromise between what you love to do and what you need to do feed your children’ is rather less stirring, but it’s much better advice.”

The truth is that most people would rather have a happy, relatively balanced life than one where they obsess 24/7 about their next product to the exclusion of everything else.  I am not suggesting you do not follow your passion, but rather that you match it to the marketplace in a way that fits your own values.  You ma find that providing for your children is your highest calling, and that is perfectly OK. So, while you are dreaming of the wonderful life you will have once you finish that degree, get that first academic job, or discover that you actually want to explore an alternative career path, pay some attention to the dark side of “doing what you love.”

Who wants to fail at anything?  I know I don’t, and I also know I’ve failed at plenty.  But who ever played Für Elise the first time they tackled the piano?  Or balanced perfectly on a bike the first time they set out to ride on two wheels?  Or moving into the grown-up world of science experiments, what is a hypothesis except a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation?  You may not be able to prove it, and would you classify that as a failure?  Thomas Edison would not.  His allegedly answered the question, “After 1000 attempts, why don’t you give up on the incandescent light bulb?” with “I have not failed 1,000 times.  I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.”

The Education Issue of the New York Times published September 14, 2011 ran a huge article by Paul Tough, “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” in which he followed two school leaders in New York City.  One is the head of a prestigious private school and the other is the superintendent of a consortium of charter schools serving low-income children. After reading Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman, the psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement, both Dominic Randolph and David Levin met with Seligman for a “freewheeling” discussion of education, psychology, and schooling.  Guess what they figured out?  Failure builds character!

Well, not all the time.  Failure builds character when the person experiencing it sees failure as an opportunity for learning.  In an interview with Parade magazine published September 25, 2011, actor George Clooney is asked by the author, “What have you learned from your failures?” and answers, “It’s hard getting thumped…but the only thing you can do is say, ‘Here’s what I won’t do next time.’ ” Learning through experience is far more valuable than learning through planning, and as George Clooney adds, you have to have both skill and confidence in your ability while at the same time being willing to fail.  What is the takeaway lesson here?  The ability to persist in the face of failure, to bounce back to try again, is what will ultimately lead to success and simultaneously build a person of good character.

It’s a lesson that is taught quite explicitly in George Leonard’s book, Mastery (1992).

Leonard, an aikido master, understood that mastery is not a quick fix: it is a life-long process. It is not a goal to be achieved but as an acceptance, and even enjoyment, of the process of learning and growing in a skill.  His five keys to success are:

1. Instruction — On the road to mastery, the pupil needs an instructor.
2. Practice — Without repetition, the instruction is wasted.
3. Surrender — Be willing to fail to become better.
4. Intentionality — Maintain a clear vision of where you are trying to go.
5. Edge — Continue to challenge and press the limits of your abilities.

Here’s a simple trick that anyone can use to help you move from failure to success: change your self-talk.  Instead of saying, “I’m a failure.  Nothing I do ever turns out right,” say “I am learning a new skill, I am committed to learning how to [fill in the blank]. You stop complaining and take responsibility for your actions, which actually helps you take action and keep you from being stuck in the same place day after day, year after year. The side benefit: you will feel better about yourself.  In the end, there is no substitute for “deep knowledge” about whatever you are trying to master, from athletic to intellectual skills.

It’s that time of year again with students and professors returning to school.  Since many of my clients are in the academic arena, and I have a daughter seriously considering a return to graduate school, I am attuned to this particular season. With the return to school comes a return to writing assignments, and with it the question always arises, “Why bother to write?”

For me, the simplest answer is, “Because it clarifies thinking.”  Whether you are writing in a journal of your own to sort out the emotions of the past 24 hours, or you are writing an analytical paper on the lives of mollusks, the very act of writing something down begins to tell you what is really going on in your brain about the topic. It can be an incredible journey of discovery.

For teachers, there is an interesting piece of research that suggests that even ungraded, brief writing assignment facilitate learning (Drabrick, Weisberg, Paul, and Bubier, 2007): “Just 5 minutes of writing on a particular topic per week (45 minutes per semester) produced significantly higher scores on test items than did the same amount of time spent on thinking.”

For students, the answer may be as boringly pragmatic as “getting a better grade on a test or paper.” To get a degree requires fulfilling certain requirements, and to graduate with a bachelor’s degree does imply having some knowledge of the written word for prospective employers or graduate school admission committees.

So I reiterate, “Why write?” Here are 8, and more, reasons to write:

1.  Writing is a form of activism. You write to persuade other people to change.  This can mean changing their perspective or persuading them to take action. Think of the success of the book and movie, The Help, itself a story about how the act of writing changes the people who both wrote it and read it.

2.  Writing can help generate new ideas and synthesize large amounts of information. Written notes while you are reading can help with this, too.

3.  You learn to organize your ideas in a coherent pattern, finding the flaws in the reasoning or the gaps in expression.  Alternatively, you may discover unexpected relationships that clarify or illuminate original discoveries.

4.  Writing over time on the same topic can help you see how your own thoughts have evolved on a particular topic.  You may discover there was a side to the topic that you had not previously considered that actually makes sense.  Or you may discover that although there is another side, your own reasoning takes you to a particular conclusion.

5.  Sometimes a simple list of pros and cons can help with making decisions of any sort.

6.  The act of writing helps aid memory and the retention of both the information and the sources of that information.

7. Writing allows you to speak asynchronously to an audience that is actually interested in your particular point of view.  It may be that once you have graduated from college you never write anything longer than a one-page memo about business to your boss, but it will still be a useful skill.  If you stay in academia, you will have to get better and better at expressing yourself and your own unique perspective as you pursue higher degrees like a master’s or a doctorate.

8.  Last but not least, write because it’s fun.  It’s exciting to see a creation take form and emerge from intellectual engagement with an idea. It becomes a thing of substance, something concrete. Writer Neil Gaiman says, “The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page…and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience.”

As Seth Godin reminds us, writing “gives ideas substance and allows them to travel” both literally across the world and into the minds and hearts of other people. Now, instead of asking, “Why write?” ask instead, “What do I want to write about?  Why do I want to write about it? Who am I trying to reach and what do I want them to do?”  Challenge yourself, stay engaged in the process, and the reason for writing will make itself clear to you.

Photo by Eorde Williams

Three Techniques for Building Your Confidence

Why is it that so many of us doubt our own abilities?  Believe you me, I have been there myself: it wasn’t until I was nearly finished with graduate school coursework that I started speaking up in class.  Until you own your excellence, you will continue to doubt yourself and perhaps stop yourself from taking on new challenges that you most certainly could accomplish. If you are always afraid of saying something stupid or doing something stupid you may not even be willing to try new things.

Confidence is something that can be learned. Becoming more confident can make you more successful.  Success breeds success, adding to your sense of confidence.  This creates a powerful inextricably linked cycle of success, confidence, success.

Confidence comes from real, solid achievements, which no one can take from you.  This is not the same as self-esteem, which may be built on nothing more solid than nice words said about you.   Solid achievements are built upon a “can do” mindset.  In other words, start saying to yourself each time a new opportunity arises, “I can do this,” and let go of any negative thoughts about failing.  Envision success instead.

One way to get in a positive mindset is to look back on your life and identify past achievements.  It doesn’t have to be job related:  Did you successfully raise children? Volunteer to chair a committee at school or at church? Buy a house on a shoestring? Learn to play an instrument for fun? Come up with a solution to a scheduling problem? Join an adult soccer team? Every one of these things is an accomplishment. Your achievements don’t have to be ‘life-altering.’  Even small achievements are still achievements.

1) So, get yourself a notebook, and create an “Achievement Log.”   You can do this today.  Start your log by identifying at least ten things you have accomplished in your life so far.  Here are some more suggestions: Think about the tests you have passed, the times where you did something that made a difference in someone else’s life, or any tasks or projects you completed.  Once you get started you might find it hard to stop at ten!

Put your Achievements Log somewhere you can look at it often.  Commit to looking at your list of achievements each week, reminding yourself of the success you have already experienced.  Sit up straight while reading and your posture will send your brain success messages, too. The log can be a reminder of what you are capable of and what is yet to come.  You can celebrate what you accomplished in the past week and grow your list of successes by adding new ones.  Tip: if you are feeling down, re-reading the log can be a great way to lift your spirits.

2) As you create your log, think as well about the personal strengths you have exhibited in your accomplishments.   If it’s difficult for you to look at yourself objectively and recognize your strengths, try placing yourself in the shoes of a friend or family member.  What strengths would these people see in you?  What would they consider your talents to be?  As you identify your strengths, make sure you take the time to really acknowledge them. Is it easy for you to be organized while people around you remain scattered?  This is a natural strength.  Enjoy a few minutes of being proud and reflecting on your talents.

3) Next, think about the things that are really important to you, and what you want to achieve in every area your life: Work, personal life, social life, health and fitness, and anything else that is important to you. Make sure you add some deadlines to keep yourself on track. Setting and achieving goals is a key part of building and sustaining confidence.

When you have set your goals, fear, doubt and uncertainty may rear their ugly heads.  At this stage, you need to manage your mind.  Learn to recognize any negative self-talk and replace it with confidence building talk, such as “I have already achieved much, and I can do more.”  “I can use my knowledge to help myself, my colleagues and my family.” Make a clear and unequivocal promise in your mind that you are absolutely committed to achieving your goals, and that it is in your power to do so.

Building your confidence is a process. I am still building my own on a daily basis.  Applying these principles will help your sense of confidence to grow, and therefore your success.

7 steps to finding your dream job 

Photo by Joe Drivas

“Summertime, and the livin’ is easy,” goes the old Gershwin tune.  Well, maybe not so easy in this economy, but one thing that’s still free is dreaming.  So, how about changing those lyrics to: “Summertime, and the dreamin’ is easy.”  Dreaming is the first step in finding your dream job.  What would you do even if no one paid you to do it? Don’t worry about how you will get that job, just start thinking about it.

In a 20-year period, 60% of those people who had changed to a different career reported greater well-being (Jepsen& Choudhuri, 2001) and happiness.

You will spend 1/3 of your life at work and you deserve to feel fulfilled by it.  Joel Garfinckle, author of Love Your Work, says no one should waste their days “working at a job that doesn’t match your deepest talents and gifts.”  Imagine waking up each day excited about your job instead of dreading it.  Halle Stanford, who developed the Bear in the Big Blue House children’s television series, says his work sometimes feels more like a hobby than a job.  If you are feeling more burnt out than energized by your work, then it’s probably time to start thinking about either a new career, or a way to grow the job you have into the dream job you actually want.

The next step, then, is getting in touch with your strengths.  What is it that you do best? What do you do effortlessly that others struggle to do?  Everyone has unique gifts, some ability that no one else can offer the world in quite the same way.  Look at whatever you are doing, and note the times and places when you know you are performing at your highest level.  We are happiest and most successful when we work at jobs that match our abilities yet are hard enough to provide some challenge.

Third, recognize what you really want. A dream job allows you to live your most deeply held values daily. Do you want to be part of preserving wild places? Or would you rather make equipment to ease a hospital patient’s pain? Is flex-time important because you are raising children? What is it that truly gives you the most satisfaction, fulfillment, or enjoyment? Follow your wants rather than your shoulds.

Learn to listen to that inner voice in order to be who you are meant to be and not who others think you should be.

Fourth, know how you want your job to fit with the rest of your life. If you want to be a real estate agent, do you realize a lot of work has to be done weekends and evenings? What about being a chef?  You may love to cook now, but will you still love it when you are working the holidays other folks have off?

Fifth, take some small actions. Browse the web and investigate the jobs that attract you.  Take note of the ones that repel you. Buy a book about a career path that has interested you.  Do actuaries really like to play with numbers as much as you do?  Sign up for a class on statistics if that relates to your dream job.  Maybe you are already a chef in a good restaurant.  Perhaps your dream job is becoming a restaurateur.  You have a good resource already available without putting a lot of energy into research if you know the owner. Ask what it takes to be successful.

Sixth, organize to prioritize. Once you have listed your own strengths, assessed your values, determined your life-style preferences, and have some information about the work that looks most interesting to you, it’s time to start rank ordering them.  You should have a list of what makes a job ideal for you personally, so decide which aspect is most important to you.  Do you need daily variety and challenge more than money?  Do you need your values and your work to connect in the world in a concrete way?  How much of your dream job will actually let you do what you most love, most of the time?  If the answer is only 10%, then it’s probably not your dream job.  Pick 2-3 elements that must be included for your dream job.  Toss out those dream jobs you have explored that do not meet these criteria.

Finally, recognize that it’s scary to think about change. No matter who you are, or what you are doing, the first thing that comes up is resistance. Reinventing yourself doesn’t happen overnight.  It may take a year or more. But if you let yourself relax into the dream of what is possible, instead of holding yourself to only those choices that make pragmatic sense, you may discover a path you did not expect has opened right in front of you.  And that the job you were once dreaming can become your very own.

Photo By Curt Fonger

8 tips to handle interruptions

Interruptions are part of our every day life, at work and at home. Some people have work that is defined by interruption: think of the legal assistant who is constantly on call to a lawyer for research, or an academic assistant who must be prepared to meet with the department chair at a moment’s notice to deal with the latest emergency.  If you are one of these, never fear!  Some of these tips to deal with interruptions can still help you out.

Interruptions fall into two categories: Major and minor. Major interruptions can be anything from time out to prepare taxes, have a baby, move your office, schedule surgery, or prepare a major (but unanticipated) report.  Minor interruptions, are those small daily work stoppages, small items that can add up to major frustration. These include too many emails to answer, requests for unscheduled meetings, or unannounced visitors.  Here’s a list of things you can do to help yourself:

1.  Be prepared: get organized (at least a little). Put a system into place for knowing what you need to do, and when you need to do it.  A system helps you pick up where you left off more easily when you get interrupted by that telephone call or that co-worker that has to talk “right now” or that “high-priority” email from your boss. How you choose to organize is up to you: perhaps you use a 1-31 tickler file, or an electronic calendar that reminds you of your next task.  Just remember that if you are relying on a system to remind you of what you need to do next, you must actually use the system for it to work!

2.  List your resources:  What is the nature of the interruption?  Is it a recurring project or report deadline that is within your control?  Or are you moving your office to a new location, so many elements are unknown?

• Make a list of the resources you need to get your task finished.

• How much time or money do you have or need?

• Are there pre-existing resources or support systems that can help? (For instance, moving companies have prepared inventory forms you can fill out; tax preparers have lists of things to include in your annual filing.)

3.  Come up with a plan: Begin by listing the tasks to be done, and prioritize them.  Decide what is an emergency to be done “immediately” and what can wait. List deadlines for non-emergencies, and give yourself a personal deadline. Have someone else hold you accountable for it. Consider the consequences of putting something off.  If this is a major interruption, make some notes after it is over in case you have to do this again.

4.  Understand the process of change: According to William Bridges, there are three phases of change – letting go, transition, and starting anew. The transition phase is the hardest because it is that “in between” place where you have left behind the old and are uncertain about what the new will be.  This is where you may feel vulnerable, anxious and in a state of flux.  Just knowing this can help with processing major interruptions.

5.  Just do it: As the old Nike commercial suggests, beginning the process will help you, too.  Vacations or having children are normal and delightful interruptions, but you may need a plan for “re-entry.” Decide what you will do, and when you will do it. Make sure your plan is realistic, especially if you know you will have time constraints.

6.  Reward yourself at every step: Rewards should be something you really like to do, whether it’s a coffee break or going to a movie. If they take a chunk of time, you will need to plan your reward time, too.  But as you check off the major items to get through a major interruption, allow yourself to enjoy your success. Use your visualization skills to see your best possible outcome.

7.  Figure out the causes of your interruptions, and stop them in their tracks when possible. Try turning off your telephone (of whatever sort!) for a portion of each day; ditto for email. This does not mean ignoring it completely, just giving yourself some uninterrupted blocks of time.  If your interruptions come from people needing information from you, try to determine if there is a way to provide that information in advance, or let them know where they can get the information for themselves. Notice if people invite themselves into to your office to talk, and try standing up when you are ready for them to leave.

8.  Practice the two-minute rule: The OHIO rule, or “Only Handle It Once,” doesn’t actually work. It’s better to know what to do with it your incoming items, because papers, emails, telephone calls and personal requests are happening all day long. Answer the easy ones right away and get rid of them.  This unclutters your brain for more important tasks.  Best of all, if you are interrupted, know when to say, “No, I can’t work on that right now,” because it will take more than two minutes.

You will get more productive quickly by practicing these techniques for both major and minor interruptions.  Some statistics suggest you will regain control over at least 20% of your work-day this way, and then you can take less work home.

How to Raise Your Visibility for Career Advancement

Technically, employers are not supposed to know about your personal life, but these days, we are in the ethernet, warts and all. There are plenty of horror stories out there about embarrassing Facebook pictures, personal blogs telling about drinking to excess at parties, or people who flamed someone else in a Linked In group dialogue.   And just like a jury told to “please disregard that statement,” once a person knows the information, it is not going to leave their head.

Here are a couple of examples of brand builders: 1) Jason Alba (jasonalba.com), CEO of JibberJobber.com and author of I’m on LinkedIn – Now What???; and 2) Allison Doyle (linkedin.com/in/alisondoyle) and her blog (alisondoyle.typepad.com). Follow their advice, and you will have built an on-line presence that will advance your career in no time at all.  Alison Doyle highly recommends including a photo on all your profiles, plus creating a video CVs viahttp://visualcv.com. There are pluses and minuses to providing the visual information, and for many people, the process is awfully intimidating.

In the meantime, here are some basic steps to take to build that on-line presence:

1)   Make sure your email is professional. Instead of jediwarrior@domain.com consider just using your name at your internet provider, like this: FirstnameLastname@domain.com.

2)   Use your real name in setting up profiles. Linked In will do this for you automatically when you set up your account for instance, I am:http://www.linkedin.com/pub/hillary-hutchinson/7/b6/b45

3)   Create your public profile in the standard places. Linked In, Facebook, Twitter are the current “standards.” Then, make sure you post it in sites that are specific to your industry or school where there are places to post it.  If you are looking for a job or other career opportunities, note it there, too.  (If you do not want your present employer to know you are looking for lateral advancement, this might not be advisable.)

4)   Link your various profiles. Add a Linked In or Twitter link to your Facebook account, so people can find out more about you.

5)   Participate in group discussions that interest you. Be careful: this can be a time sink.  Just pick a few, and get known as an expert or a go to resource person.  The beauty of today’s social media is that interests are more easily shared across geographic boundaries.  You can get to know someone across the ocean as easily as your hometown.

6)   Consider creating a personal website. WordPress has made this process extraordinarily easy for even the most technophobic amongst us.

7)   Consider starting your own blog. If you are a writer, this is a great place to shine; if you are an artist of any type, it’s a great way to provide visuals showcasing your talents.

Go forth in confidence that branding is not a dirty word, and create an online presence that advances your career.  Keep in mind that authenticity and consistency are the keys.  Let people know who you really are, and advance your career.

***May be reproduced in full or in part with proper attribution to***
(my name-Hillary Hutchinson, Title-Career Coach and Change Strategist, www.TransitioningYourLife.com