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career counseling

Less is Best

February 24, 2015 by Jim Peacock 6 Comments

Less is best in most cases. We live with a tsunami of information and all we often need is a beach and an umbrella. Malcolm Gladwell in Blink says, “We live in a world saturated with information….The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.”20130704_112354

So how do we take this enormous amount of information and turn this into understanding? One way to do this is to embrace the “less is best” motto and it will leave you with the clues to understanding. Malcolm Gladwell speaks to this in his book and I talk about “trusting your instincts”. (See 3rd bullet point in this blog).

When working with college students on their resume, I say that every word on this needs to count. To have a purpose. You do not need to tell me that 207-555-5555 is a “cell phone” or JimPeacock @Peak-Careers.com is an “email”, I know what it is. Use bullet phrases, not sentences in your experience area because I am skimming this document, not reading it. Make this resume shorter, meaningful, and cleaner, so I can understand you.

[Read more…] about Less is Best

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: Blink, career coaching, career counseling, finding meaning, focus, less is best, purpose in life, quality time, reflection, trust your instincts

Creativity, Card Sorts & The Conversation

January 28, 2014 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

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Creativity is one of the reasons I enjoy using a variety of “card-sorts” in career coaching with Boomers & with Colby College students.  There are no answers printed out from a software program,  no one way of using the cards, only the conversation it generates.  I LOVE it!

If you have not used card sorts in your practice, I suggest you explore using them.  If you use them now, keep up the good work!

I recently met with a first year college student who was all confused about choosing an occupation.  She was so “hung up” on choosing a specific job that she practically stumbled all over herself, “I thought about being a lawyer because my mom is one, then going into medicine, then being an architect…I even went to a month long architect camp, and I’ve thought about sociology.”  I have a magnetic dart board in my office with various occupations on it and I asked, “Do you want to choose a career by throwing the dart?”  She actually said yes and was literally ready to choose by throwing a dart!  She hit Land Use Planning and immediately wanted to know about that job.  

[Read more…] about Creativity, Card Sorts & The Conversation

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: card sorts, career advising, career coaching, career counseling, happenstance, informal assessment, motivated skills, trust instincts

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