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happenstance

Why we all need to “fail forward”.

December 21, 2013 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

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.

Sign up to receive my TOP 10 TIPS WHEN WORKING WITH AN UNDECIDED PERSON. You will also receive the career practitioner’s weekly email on a variety of career topics, industry news, interesting events, and more. (Sign up)

 

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: advising, career, career advising, career coaching, fail forward, failure, happenstance, intentional serendipity, serendipity

6 Ways Finding a Job is Like Fishing

August 11, 2013 by Jim Peacock 3 Comments

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.

[Read more…] about 6 Ways Finding a Job is Like Fishing

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: career coaching, chance events, creativity, happenstance, initiative, job advice, job search, serendipity

Changing Perspectives Using Intentional Serendipity

May 15, 2013 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more…] about Changing Perspectives Using Intentional Serendipity

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: happenstance, instincts, intentional serendipity, reframe the situation, serendipity, trusting your hunches, trusting your instincts, unplanned events

Intentional Serendipity Can Be Surprising

May 1, 2013 by Jim Peacock 1 Comment

Image 6

I met a person the other day and we ended up talking about how people discover jobs by accident.  His face lit up, “that’s exactly what happened to me!  In high school, I was thinking about engineering or joining the military and then I discovered machine tool.” 30 years later he was the CEO of a large machine tool company and now is a consultant in that field.

While on my honeymoon, I met the Director of a high school technical center.  I had no idea what a Vocational – Technical school was, but four months later,  I was working for him and my life was transformed forever with an understanding and appreciation of all kinds of occupations.

We all have stories about chance events that changed the course of our careers.  Then why is it that students and other clients continue to come in and ask to take “one of those assessments that tells me what to do”. The longer I am in this business, the less assessments I use.

[Read more…] about Intentional Serendipity Can Be Surprising

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: chance, curiosity, happenstance, intentional serendipity, serendipity, trusting your hunches, trusting your instincts

You, my friend, are a victim of disorganized thinking.

February 12, 2013 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

images

We, as career practitioners, all have the ability to be “…the great and all powerful wizard”  every day.   We must never underestimate the power of our words.   Here are 10 quotes from the classic movie The Wizard of Oz and how they translate for career practitioners.

1. Wizard of Oz to Cowardly Lion: You, my friend, are a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate impression that just because you run away you have no courage; you’re confusing courage with wisdom. 

When we meet with students or clients they often bring to us a preconceived picture of their career path and one of the greatest conversations we can have is helping them reframe their thinking from seeing barriers to visualizing opportunities.

[Read more…] about You, my friend, are a victim of disorganized thinking.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: happenstance, networking, power of words, reframing clients situations, strengths based, transitions

Failure Makes Me Happy

January 2, 2013 by Jim Peacock 6 Comments

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.

[Read more…] about Failure Makes Me Happy

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: failure, failures, happenstance, learning from failure, unexpected opportunities

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