Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

Book Reviews

Career Judo. The Martial Art of the Mindful Career. By John Long with Erin Newman

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I really like this book which uses Judo as a way to describe the career process. Judo uses control, wisdom, and patience. Your career development requires this as well.

John lays out the various steps required to find your next job with concrete examples of what you should do. Not only that, he describes why you should do it. He starts with helping you discover what makes you unique and moves to how to capture that in all forms of communication from your resume, cover letter, to your online professional presence, all the way through the interview.

Tying Judo quotes throughout the chapters to make his point, is done mindfully and powerfully. In one of the final chapters that speaks to staying positive (with great tips on how to do that), I found this quote,

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The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing by Rich Brooks

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As a solo-preneur who provides so much content online, I really need to “get my head around” this digital marketing world. Jessie, my virtual assistant and I attended the Agents of Change conference in Portland Maine this year and received this book in our registration packet.

If you are a small business owner…get this book. Besides highlighting many paragraphs, I have 17 pages in this book with a bent corner which tells me I HAVE to go back and institute something into my business. Most books, I’d be lucky to have 2 or 3.

This book is chock-a-block full of good advice / tips on how to build your business using Rich’s B.A.R.E. model of:

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Bear Town by Fredrik Backman

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Wow, this was recommended to me because it is a “hockey” story but I found out quickly it was MUCH more than a hockey story.

Chapter 1: “Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

This is the story of how we got there.”

Yep, there is a hockey team and a town in Scandinavia somewhere that is crazy about hockey but the stories of the different people’s lives is so powerful. Backman does a wonderful job at getting us inside so many different people’s heads and the personal struggles they have. And then weaves them all together in a gut wrenching story. Troubling for sure.

This is a book that I had trouble putting down. Well written. Tense. Really got to know the characters. And really felt for them and their struggles.

Oh yeah. It took the entire book to find out who pulled the trigger.

Goal Achievement Through Treasure Mapping by Barbara Laporte, M.A.

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I attended the Minnesota Career Development Association in the spring of 2017 (I was fortunate to do a pre-conference for them). One of the sessions I attended was with Barbara Laporte on Treasure Mapping as a way to reach goals. It was an intriguing session that supports my thinking on “asking the universe” for answers, staying positive, and creating luck in our lives.

I just finished reading her short, easy to read, practical book on treasure mapping. Barbara breaks the process down, talks about possible struggles or barriers, and has great summary at the end of each chapter along with a “reflections” exercise to help you create your treasure map.

Treasure mapping is a great way to visually show your goal using pictures, images, and phrases. In her session at MN-CDA, she had a bunch of magazine pictures cut out along with various words cut out that we glue-sticked onto color paper. It was fun! It also helped me get my ‘head around’ one of my long term goals…to deliver career workshops in New Zealand. I traveled through New Zealand after graduate school for about 6 months. Primarily I was backpacking but I also interviewed Student Union Directors and Student Government leaders and wrote an article comparing them to Student Services in the US.

She gives a number of stories of successful treasure maps (besides her own) that are really amazing to hear.

Since reading the book, I have created another treasure map for another goal…but I’m not telling you what that is. Maybe I will when it happens.

Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a monthly newsletter 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.

Sign up here to receive my  TOP 10 TIPS WHEN WORKING WITH AN UNDECIDED PERSON.  You can also receive the career practitioners newsletter which includes a variety of career topics, industry news, interesting events, and more. 

Too Young To Be Old. Nancy Schlossberg

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Too Young To Be Old: Love, Learn, Work, and Play as You Age. By Nancy Schlossberg, a friend to the career counseling world who is now in her 80’s and still writing, thinking, and sharing her thoughts on transitions. Much of this book is her personal journey in her 3rd Age and 100’s of interviews with others going through this new developmental stage of life.

She addresses the biases of age and gives suggestions on how to deal with our own perceptions of age bias as well as what we might do to address it when we hear it. Understanding all the various transitions people go through is a big part of this book, from the transition of leaving F.T. work, to moving, changing relationships, and more.

The key point of any transition is how your roles, relationships, routines, and assumptions about yourself change. Using her 4 S’s of breaking down the transition to identify weaknesses and strengths is covered throughout her book. 

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Vital Signs: Discovering and Sustaining Your Passion for Life. Gregg Levoy

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Maine Career Development Association brought Gregg in for our conference May 2017 and he was our best speaker in years, maybe of all ~12 years we have been chartered. I was fortunate to pick him up at the airport and a few of us went out to dinner with him.

Vital Signs is a reflection of much of his current thinking. This is deep. Very thoughtful. Even historical. And at times a reflection of Gregg’s own pursuit of passion in life. The biggest difference in this book from Callings is that Callings was about work and this one is more about life. (Again, Gregg is a Boomer and going thru this thinking himself right now).

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