Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

Career

Tech Free for the Day – The Power of Turning Off

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At the end of December I took a tech-free day to write, think, process how 2016 went, and explore my vision for 2017. The first part of this day was shoveling snow, truly a tech-free event, as we had about 14 inches of very wet snow. This delayed my mini-retreat by two hours but I did get my upper body workout in 🙂

As career coaches and practitioners, we can provide better services when we slow down and take time to think, prepare, create, and be mindful of each moment. We serve our clients best when we are in the moment with them. I strongly encourage you to consider a tech-free day. Mine typically starts at 8am and ends around 5pm.

The first thing I worked on was coming up with my 3 words to guide me in 2017, inspired by Chris Brogan who has done this for over 10 years. I then moved to my budget, online seminar offerings, business plan review, and finally to my short and long range “to do” list. One thing I decided on this retreat is that I want to do a tech-free day every month. Last year I had three tech-free days spread throughout the year, plus a 100 mile backpacking trip that was completely tech-free and cleansing. Each time I discovered a renewed sense of purpose. I need to do this more.

I find that life just keeps getting faster and ever more filled with technology creating a sense of being busy. You have to choose down-time daily to take control over this busyness and regain a more peaceful and thoughtful routine.  I’m thinking about this a lot as I will be speaking on March 2nd in Brunswick Maine for the first “To Live For” Evening of Stories and Music where I will talk about ‘Taking 10’ minutes daily to regain our lives. I also had a conference proposal accepted by National Career Development Association on a similar topic for the June annual conference. 

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Summary of my interview with Barry L. Davis, fellow prolific reader

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Here is the summary of my interview with Barry L. Davis on November 29, 2016

I met Barry Davis at the Mid-Atlantic Career Counseling Association Conference over 10 years ago. We immediately hit it off, mostly because we connected on my presentation on Using Happenstance Theory in practice. We both love chance events and “creating” luck and embrace “intentional serendipity” in our practices.

Barry is a prolific reader and introduced me to the idea of writing up short reviews of the books he reads and putting them on GoodReads.com (used to be Amazon Reading List). He is the reason I have a section for books on my website blog.

Below is a summary of the key points of our conversation.

Why is reading important to your career coaching work?

Barry started by quoting from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: “There’s nothing new under the sun” – Eccl. 1:9. That being said, there are always new perspectives to consider from those in our field as well as in other areas.

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Ahhhh…retirement. Hey WAIT A MINUTE!!!

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Image from Wikipedia

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”  Yogi Berra

“Retirement ain’t what it used to be.”  Jim Peacock

First off, ‘retirement’ is clearly not the correct word. I don’t think we have found the right word yet but they also didn’t know what to call young people in their teens in the early 1900’s until a psychologist studied them and came up with “teenager” sometime in the 1920’s.  *(Did you know that it was the automobile and the freedom it gave this age group that helped create “teenagers”? That and the fact that many people moved from rural farm life to a more urban manufacturing life).

What we are calling this retirement time period ranges from 3rd Age, The Third Quarter, Graduation, Commencement, Encore Career, The Bonus Years, and more. I prefer to call it “rebalancing” (Read my blog on rebalancing).  Why? Because I don’t see this as a time to end (retire), begin, or change –but more as a transition that requires rebalancing your values, interests, passions, time, and energy. But as the 76,000,000 Boomers wander into this new developmental stage, psychologists and sociologists will be studying the traits that make up this stage in our lives. We just need to wait until they figure us out 🙂  Listen to Jane Fonda talk about this new adult developmental stage. Yes, seriously, it’s Jane Fonda and it’s very good —TEDTalk.

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Interview with Dorian Mintzer, Life and Retirement Transition Coach

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November 2, 2016

This is a summary of my interview with Dorian Mintzer a Therapist, Life and Retirement Transition Coach, Relationship Coach, Executive Coach, Teacher, Author and Speaker. She works with individuals and couples and help them navigate pre-retirement and retirement transition issues. She also consults with Financial Planners and other professionals to help their clients and is an author of a number of books on retirement.

Dori has enrolled in a two of my online seminars, Working with Boomers & Transitions. It has been a pleasure to get to know her. She started a monthly webinar series interviewing various people who work with this population, called Revolutionize Your Retirement. I’ve listened to a number of them and they are always very interesting interviews. Learn more at her website.

TRENDS

I asked Dori what her thoughts are on TRENDS in career coaching boomers.  She talked about the changing world of work we live in today and how if Boomers want to work, they need to let go of what work was and really understand what the world of work is now. Work now often involves technology and Boomers may need to improve their tech skills along with realizing there are more service jobs than before.

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The Future of Work is Now and Why it Matters to Career Practitioners

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Work has changed…and continues to change. Career practitioners need to pay attention. There is much talk out there how millennials are forcing the change of work and I think they have been given too much credit. Many boomers like and want the changes too. (As do all the other generations). I believe our economy is changing and all generations are changing with it. This also means that companies need to be nimble in order to succeed and deal with these changes in our workforce.

It appears to me the U.S. economy is a bit like a teenager with the growing pains of changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. And then overlay the changes in technology and the dearth of work after the 2008 crash, and you have an economy trying to figure itself out. This creates a very dynamic place to work.

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Rich Feller interview on the HEROIC article and future of work. (9/22/16)

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*Note this is not an exact transcript of our conversation, more of a summary of the essence of what we talked about.

Rich and I agreed on so many things, I felt I could have talked with him for hours on this topic. Here are the key highlights of our conversation. Our conversation begins with his article on the HEROIC Career Model.

The HEROIC model starts with ‘H’ for Hope which is really where our work needs to start. It starts with having hope about the future. It builds upon the concept of psychological capital for people to look towards the future with hope. We as career practitioners need to help people build their psychological capital and look optimistically about managing their future.

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