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instincts

Survey Says…Engagement!

February 10, 2020 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

Survey Monkey

On my 8th anniversary of being full-time with Peak-Careers, February 3rd, I sent out a request to complete a short survey seeking insights to where people engage with Peak-Careers.

One of my 3 words to guide me in 2020 is “Strategic”, and I wanted to gather some information to help me be more strategic in my efforts.

Survey says “engagement”

A special “shout out” to the nearly 70 people who took the time to fill it out. Thank you so much.

The survey says I have strong engagement in these top 4 areas…and lessons learned in a few others.

  1. Many people do indeed read my weekly career emails that come out Tuesday mornings
    RESULTS: I will continue to send you career content each week.  (see below if you want to be added to the list).
  2. 55+% of the respondents follow me on LinkedIn and read my posts.
    RESULTS: I will make sure that I continue to share quality content to help you do your job and serve your students / clients / customers.
  3. 55% have watched at least one of my monthly career interviews! I am thrilled at this outcome.
    RESULTS: I love doing these interviews with other career practitioners and will definitely keep identifying experts and topics to interest you.
    REQUEST: Do you have topics or people you’d like to hear from in future interviews? Let me know and I’ll work at setting it up.
  4. 40% of the respondents have taken an online seminar
    RESULTS: I know that not everyone is interested in online learning, so I am actually very happy with this number and will continue to offer and develop more subject areas.

LESSONS LEARNED

Facebook Live has not been as popular. I will do one more FB Live and then reevaluate if I will continue them.

  • Tuesday March 3rd at 8:00 pm (Eastern)
  • I will talk about private practice
  • Tips on what has worked for me
  • Recommendations I have for anyone who wants to go into private practice.

Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram are also not where many of you are hanging out. I need to put more thought into whether I want to invest more into each of these to grow them or to “let some of them go”.

If you are interested in the graphic / chart results you can see them here.

Gratitude journal

Regardless, I am grateful for the many people who took time out of their day to give me feedback.

Knowing that so many people support me and find value in following me is wonderful to know.

Jim Peacock is the Principal at Peak-Careers Consulting and writes a weekly career news 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

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. 

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Filed Under: Career Tagged With: focus, instincts, reflection

INTERVIEW: Dr. Spencer “Skip” Niles talking about being your authentic self in career development

August 20, 2018 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

Dr. Spencer “Skip” Niles, President-Elect for National Career Development Association was at his summer camp here in Maine recently about 25 minutes from me. So I decided to interview him at his camp on Great Pond about his work on being authentic in career development and weaving hope into our work.

I was inspired to interview Skip after attending his series of three webinars called, Reclaim your soul: Making choices that honor your authentic self.
 
Watch this interview where we explore the importance of being authentic, using intuition in our practice, and the value of mindfulness for career coaches and practitioners.
Dr. Skip Niles and Jim Peacock

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. 

Peak Careers - Professional Development for Careers

Filed Under: Interviews Tagged With: finding meaning, finding purpose, instincts, mindfulness, purpose in life, trusting your instincts

Journaling: Taking ‘Fuzzy Thinking’ to Concrete Ideas in Career Development

May 8, 2017 by Jim Peacock Leave a Comment

As a career coach/counselor, do you ask  your clients to journal? I do occasionally because I believe the process of taking ideas out of their heads and putting them on paper can be a very powerful activity.

“A goal not written is only a wish.” I believe this is true in the career development process…write it down and think it through.

Personally I try to journal every day, first thing in the morning. I choose to free-style it and just write about what is important to me that day. It clarifies the ideas in my head and takes them from fuzzy thinking to something concrete. I also think it helps to journal on a regular schedule so it becomes part of your day.

[Read more…] about Journaling: Taking ‘Fuzzy Thinking’ to Concrete Ideas in Career Development

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: focus, instincts, intentional serendipity, journal, journaling, reflection, slowing down, trusting your hunches, trusting your instincts

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

“It’s Not What You Know….” cuts both ways.

January 16, 2013 by Jim Peacock 2 Comments

IMAG0758

Sometimes knowing a person can be a problem.  My mother-in-law has always stated “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  And I argued with her once (only once 🙂 that you also have to KNOW something AND be a good person as well. I KNOW some people and I can guarantee I would NEVER hire them!

As career counselors / advisors, we all know the power of networking and how important it is to find someone on the “inside” of a company, but that is only the first step.  I know a college student who reached out to Alumni with a clumsily written, grammatically incorrect email, that did not bode well for him. (or the college).  Or the typos on a resume / cover letter, or the lousy handshake, or even worse, bad breath.  Knowing someone is great and important, but you have less than 15 seconds in most cases to make that an advantage.

[Read more…] about “It’s Not What You Know….” cuts both ways.

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: first impressions, instincts, network, networking

Fight or flight in career decision making

December 18, 2012 by Jim Peacock 2 Comments

Trust Those Instincts

Every decision a CEO makes is based upon incomplete information, often less than 10% according to The Two Second Advantage book I recently finished.  Why would career decision making be any different? 

For 1000’s of years human have relied upon instincts to keep us safe, fed, and happy but somewhere in the past century we have come to believe that technology can solve all our problems.  I think Daniel Pink is right about the Whole New Mind and how right brain people are important to our future, but I believe.  Technology has solved so many problems, assessments allow us to quickly create a common language to explore, the Internet gives us access to information at our fingertips, but instincts is what made us who we are, and we need to encourage people to listen to those “little voices”.  Our society has given us false hope that everything can be solved simply with logic and technology.

When changing careers, each person must gather as much information as they can about a possible occupation, but how much can they really know?  Career advisors can encourage use of ONET and Occupational Outlook Handbook, but that is merely a snippet of information.  Informational interviews are great and we can get closer to understanding a job by asking “what a typical day is like” or a “typical week”.  But this still does not give us a complete picture.  How will my life style change?  What is the culture of the company like?  Will I fit in?  How do my work values mesh with the company of the position?  So much information is still missing.

Each person is a puzzle. To us and to themselves.  All the assessments in the world still will not give a person EVERYTHING they need to find an occupation.  All the research on occupations can’t fill in all the pieces of the puzzle.  At some point a person must rely upon those instincts, hunches, the gut feeling that has guided us for thousands of years.  You know it when you feel it.  When you meet someone and you “just like them” immediately.  Or you meet someone it it “just feels creepy” or uncomfortable.  Those are our instincts and we need to trust them.

Career decisions will always require factual information, logic, and common sense to help us decide, but what we really need is “expert intuition” to determine what we don’t know but do “feel”.  People will never have all the information they need to make a decision, but down deep, I believe they do know.  It is like Mark Savickas preaches that people will TELL you what they are thinking even before they can articulate themselves. It just comes out of their mouths as they talk to you. Decisions will come from within a person, something deep inside, something we just KNOW is right.

Trusting hunches and instincts, (with quality research) will help our clients in the decision making process and we need to encourage people to listen to those feelings and to be open to the surprises they bring.

Do you have any stories about trusting your hunches?

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. 

Filed Under: Career Tagged With: career decision making, instincts, intuition, trusting your instincts

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