Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

failure

Four Things You Can Do To Keep Your Clients Out of Their “Panic Zone”

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“Get out of your comfort zone.” We’ve all heard this but some people think that there is only one zone beyond “comfort” and they call it “panic” or “freakout”.  Bryan Murphy who recently took a seminar from me explains to his students that there are actually three zones to think about.119_0073

Comfort zone, where no learning takes place. People are complacent here and often go through the motions that they are doing something.

Freakout or panic zone, again, where no learning takes place. When you freakout, you shut down, not much good is going to happen here.

But what lies in between is the key. In between comfort and panic is a zone that Bryan calls the stretch zone. This is where learning can happen. [Read more…] about Four Things You Can Do To Keep Your Clients Out of Their “Panic Zone”

No Regrets. Only Lessons to be Learned.

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Regrets are wasted energy.

I had a person in one of my online seminars post that she was an oncology nurse early on in her career and was often the last person people spoke to before dying. Many of them shared their regrets with her about:

  • Not taking risks in their lives
  • Not doing jobs they wanted to do
Mt. Whitney
Perspective often helps how you view things
  • Not doing the education they wanted
  • Long-held grudges

    • She had to leave nursing because this was such a depressing part of the job. But what she learned was to live a life of no regrets.

    Don’t look at your career development ever as a regret. You can’t change the past… only the future. And it’s how you deal and react to past events that are important. Most of us make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the time. Remember that when you look back on your career development.  Don’t ponder or wonder “what if…” Let it go and move forward.

    The key to regretting something is to look at it and ask yourself, “What did I learn from it?”  I really have no regrets about past decisions and mistakes because I learned something from all of them. I learned that a bachelors degree in Forestry still helps me appreciate the outdoors and to understand ecology in a different way. It was not a waste of five years…and I love the outdoors…as a hobby. So there are no regrets. What I learned by being involved on campus during that time in a variety of student activities was that my true passion was working with people and creativity. That was a good lesson.

    [Read more…] about No Regrets. Only Lessons to be Learned.

    Why we all need to “fail forward”.

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    Failing forward is an entrepreneurial philosophy embracing and learning from failure.  Thomas Edison, Wayne Gretzky, Albert Einstein, and Jim Peacock have all had many great failures.  The key is to “fail forward”…. learn from your mistakes and don’t be afraid to try something new again.

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    In a recent Inc. magazine, they wrote about a “Failure Church” where one company encouraged its employees to proclaim their failures out loud. Some failures were small, some big, and after the person announced their failure all the attendees applaud wildly! Pretty bizarre but they all said it feels good to get the failure off their chest and feels even BETTER when their fellow employees applaud.

    It actually encourages employees to try new things.  Failure Church is a support group with failures that, too often,  we brush under the carpet like the gambler who only tells people when they win.  Other cultures encourage students and people to work hard and to keep trying even when you don’t understand something.  This process is filled with failures. But with hard work, perseverance, and some risk taking, failures often lead to successes.  It is really what you LEARN from the experience that counts.

    “The key is to fail forward…. learn from your mistakes and don’t be afraid to try something new again” 

    This fear of failure can pervade our work life by not trying something new and our personal life by living a stodgy boring life because you don’t try anything new.  Happenstance Learning Theory tells us we can discover opportunities by taking action and “creating luck” which I like to call “intentional serendipity”.  A person taking my Facilitating Career Development (FCD) class recently posted how her friends dad was told he’d never work in the animation field and was let go by Disney to open a small startup called Pixar.  He encouraged his daughter and her friends to always “fail forward”, take risks, learn from them, and keep going forward.

    Take action and use “intentional serendipity”, take some risks, and be open to what you discover. College students declare majors and then discover they “don’t want to do that”, which can be perceived by family and friends as a “failure”.  We need to encourage students to embrace change and to try new things such as info interviews, involvement in activities, volunteer, internships, etc.. and fail forward.

    Life is not a dress rehearsal.... you need to “go for it” when you want to improve your business, better yourself, or help your clients/students learn.  Embrace failure, but “fail forward” learn from it, improve on it, and keep taking action. Wake up and love what you do taking chances and enjoying the serendipity that life brings us.

    What risks will you take?
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    If you like this topic of discovering opportunities through failure and embracing intentional serendipity, you might want to check out this 5 week, discussion-based, online seminar for career practitioners.
    Career Advising Using Happenstance.

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    Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a weekly email for career practitioners. Peak-Careers offers discussion-based online seminars for career practitioners focused on meeting continuing education needs for CCSP, GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

    He is the author of A Field Guide for Career Practitioners: Helping Your Clients Create Their Next Move and The Adventure of Finding Me in New Zealand. In 2020 he received the Kenneth C. Hoyt Award from the National Career Development Association and the Mid-Atlantic Career Counseling Association’s Professional Contribution’s Award.

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    Failure Makes Me Happy

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    Crazy Peacock

    Failure #1.   My very creative son who has been drawing since he could hold a crayon. And at 4 years old on an Etch-A-Sketch created a multi-sail pirate ship that was jaw dropping, and in college majored in Advertising, and who took every new career assessment I wanted to try out and always came up “creative”, has taken a job as an analyst working with medical electronic records.  Hardly creative.  I blew that one!  Out of the 1000 occupational titles this would have been 985 just above anthropology, aerospace scientist, and electrician for him.  Nope, would never have guessed it as a career counselor or a father.

    You know what?    I failed as a career counselor.  Never saw it coming.  But happenstance in life takes many forms and the end result, at the end of the day, career counselors should be happy if our clients, students, or sons are happy with their occupation.  He is happy.  If he is happy, I am happy.

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