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6 Ways Finding a Job is Like Fishing

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Having just returned from a great fishing trip to Canada with my 87-year-old dad, 3 brothers, and my cousin, I could not help but make the connection between finding work and fishing.

#1. Fisherman says:  When I get to a new lake I try to find the best place to find fish.  It might be a bay with weed beds, logs, a drop-off, or other structure for fish to hide in, but I will know it when I see it.

Job Advice: If you have found success in one industry or type of work and you enjoyed it, that is a GREAT place to start looking.  You are familiar with the language and skills required and you probably know people who can help you.

Pike I caught in Canada on a fly rod

#2.  Fisherman says:  I’ve found the place, now I need to pick a lure.  I always use a Mepps spinner for pike and I love the red & white colors, so that is what I’ll start with.

 Job Advice: Initiative. It is not bad to start with what you are most comfortable with but what worked on one lake (or job search) may not work on your next one.   If you are comfortable looking for jobs on the internet, go ahead and start there for ideas.  The key is to BEGIN now and try something, anything, just DO something.

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What have YOU done to get out of your comfort zone lately?

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Mt. Whitney

20 pictures, 20 seconds to convey a message with each picture, PechaKechu is what it is called.  I performed my 1st PK in July 2013, but I don’t think it will be my last.  I showed 10 pictures from my travels in New Zealand 30 years ago 10 pictures from a 200-mile backpacking trip I took last summer.  I talked about how peaceful and simple time can be in the mountains and how difficult it is to embrace “slowing down” in my daily life. (Based on my blog from last winter, Nation on speed.)

I’ve done plenty of speeches in front of crowds and conference presentations, but this format requires a real sense of simplicity and an eye to entertainment as well.  You have to really cut out the extra, keep it simple, say less, let the pictures speak, AND have a message you are passionate about.  The rehearsal night was the night when everything changed.

And not just for me.

Each of us presenters took the courage to try this presentation style and each of us received great feedback from each other that was positive and compassionate.  We all knew what it takes to get up and bare your soul in a VERY different format that puts you out of your comfort zone no matter who you are.

A young lady named Amelia introduced herself to the group as a college student from Ohio who summers in Maine.  She spoke about body language and how 70+% of communication is conveyed in body language.  She had too many pictures about faces and not enough about all the other types of body language.  She was not keeping up with her slides as well.  She was not the only one who struggled with the timing as well.

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Book Review: The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

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LuckFactorDr. Richard Wiseman has some very interesting research showing how some people are luckier than others and why.

It may be hard to believe you can PROVE luck and that some people have more luck than others, but he does it. He then proceeds to discuss four principles that are key to creating luck.

Principle One: Maximize Your Chance Opportunities.  Lucky people create, notice, and act upon the chance opportunities in life

Principle Two: Listen to Your Lucky Hunches.  Lucky people make successful decisions by using their intuition and gut feelings.

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Is a life transition getting in the way of career decisions?

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Career Advising requires understanding how transitions affect our clients

Sometimes when we find one of our clients or students stumbling along in their own career development and/or having difficulty following through on action plans you have developed with them, it may be related to a transition they are going through.

Nancy Schlossberg developed her Transition Theory for career counselors and can be quite helpful in understanding how people move through a transition.  In her book, Going To Plan B, she explains the impact of a ‘non-event’ (something we WANT to happen but does not) and how a non-event can be as powerful as an “event.”

Understanding the impact of a transition and how it affects our roles, relationships, routines, and assumptions is valuable information for career counselors/advisors.

Schlossberg’s 4 S’s are great ways to think about the various components of a transition.

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Mt. St. Helens – a year after it erupted

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A special “shout out” to the Wagar Middle School in Carleton Michigan learning about Mt. St. Helens.

I had just moved to Seattle in January of 1980 and that summer Mt. St. Helens was in the news all the time.  It was becoming active and the geologists were predicting it could blow anytime.   I lived in Seattle about 90 north of the mountain.  On a clear day I could see it from my apartment window..

Image 3

I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains roughly 110-120  miles north of St. Helens when it blew up.  It sounded like sonic booms when a plane breaks the sound barrier.  Because we were camping we did not understand that it was the mountain erupting until we met hikers coming up the trail later that day.

One interesting tidbit was that people in Seattle did NOT hear the explosions like we did.  Turns out the sound literally BOUNCED up into the atmosphere  then back down to earth, then back up again, so there were places that heard the explosions and others that did not. They even heard it in British Columbia Canada!

The day after the 1st BIG explosion there were smaller ones that I could see from my apartment.  Sorry I can’t find that picture 🙁 but I vividly remember watching the ash shoot up into the sky from the mountain and could see the wind from the west (ocean side) push the ash towards the east.

This first picture is from Interstate – 5 from the WEST, looking EAST.

The next year I had joined 2 friends to hike the entire Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) from the Oregon border to the Canadien border.  This trail walks right through the Cascade mountain ranged and up until the week before we left in late June, the section near Mt. St. Helens was closed off to hiking due to the devastation and ash.  Then it opened up and we were the first people to walk on the PCT and we spent about 4 or 5 days walking through ash.

Here is a picture of Mt. St. Helens from the EAST looking WEST.  You can see the snow has mostly melted off compared to the above picture.

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This final picture is taken of me in my hiking boots walking on the trail which is covered in ash.  There were no birds in this entire section of the trail, no animals, no sound except for some wind thru the trees.  It was very strange.  The ash got into our boots, sleeping bags, tents, everything.  When you get the ash I sent you, you can feel how fine it is.

There are 2 different feelings to the ash.  Put your finger in and you can feel that it is like the smoothest talcum powder you’ve ever felt.  There are also little tiny pieces of rock in it as well that you can often feel.

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Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my pictures and a little of my story of how it was for me the year Mt. St. Helens erupted and also the year after when I walked through it.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Jim Peacock

Changing Perspectives Using Intentional Serendipity

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Changing Perspective

In my first blog on this topic I spoke about:

[1] helping people embrace chance events in their lives
[2] taking action, and
[3] encouraging curiosity.

Let’s talk about what else you can do as a career advisor to assist people in “intentionally” creating “serendipitous” events to create opportunity by changing their perspective of the situation.

4]    One “gift” we have as career advisors is the ability to reframe events in peoples’ lives in such a way to make it look like an opportunity. (See my article, Advisors Are The Wizard of Oz  http://bit.ly/12nmpIA ).  People bring us their view of unplanned events or surprises in their lives that, all too often, are viewed as obstacles.  Our job is to help reframe the event and to encourage them to look at it as a career opportunity.

Getting laid off from a job, changing their major because “it didn’t work out”, or being rejected again, are events out of their control in most cases.  The old school answer “things happen for a reason” is close but not exactly what people need to hear.

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