Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

intentional serendipity

“Turn over a lot of rocks” to find your next job. In other words, persistence.

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Turn over a lot of rocks

This is a follow up to a LinkedIn article I wrote recently that spoke to the fact that you need to “turn over a lot of rocks” to find that next job. In other words, be persistent. I gave 7 tips on how to do that in the article. If you are on LinkedIn, check it out here.

Today I want to talk about what that means a little bit more and I have 3 suggestions for making that happen. Mostly through my philosophy of embracing ‘intentional serendipity’.

So watch this short video and learn how you can
‘turn over a lot of rocks’ to find your next job.

 

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. He is also the recipient of the 2020 Kenneth C. Hoyt Award from the National Career Development Association and the Mid-Atlantic Career Counseling Association’s Professional Contribution’s Award in 2020.

Sign up here 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. 

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How to help your clients / students create luck. (Yes you can create luck!)

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So… Can you create luck?

create luck

In Gregg Levoy’s book Callings, he devotes a chapter to synchronicity, another way to create luck in your search for your new career path. Synchronicity is a coincidence…a meaningful coincidence that can inform us, primarily through intuition.

Chemist Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Yes, you can create luck and Dr Richard Wiseman proves it in his book, The Luck Factor. (Read my book review here). Two things you need are to be open to opportunities (Pasteur’s quote above) and trust your instincts (Levoy’s chapter).

In order to create luck, I talk to my clients about embracing “intentional serendipity” taking  action and then being open to discovering something by accident. In order to do this, you have to trust your intuition and instincts.

Our instincts have gotten us to this point in humankind after 10,000 years of trying to survive. Computers and assessments are not the only way to move forward in your career search. Trusting your hunches, those instincts that help us navigate our daily lives are useful in career searching. When you create luck, through action, then you have to trust your hunches on what that action might tell you.

So how do I help my clients create luck?

First thing I do is help them determine what their “value” is in the workplace. What makes them unique? What skills, interests, passions, character traits can help organizations to solve problems. Then I have them take action…even a small action step can create results.

My “go to” action recommendations are:

1. Informational interviews: These are not just an interview to learn about a specific occupation, but an interview to discover what else is out there. I encourage my clients to interview a person about an occupation but to ask questions like: What other jobs have you thought about doing that are similar to this? If you were to do it all over again, would you do something different? Who else in your company needs these skill sets to be successful? So they are not just looking at that specific job, but any and all other jobs that person can think of. Create luck by trusting your instincts to discover what else is out there.

2 Volunteer in an area that is related to what you are exploring. When you get there, do a good job, ask lots of questions, and seek to learn what other people do for work and get their ideas on how to your skill sets might be useful. Ask if they could introduce you to someone doing work that interests you.

3. Part time job / internships. (see above advice in #2 Volunteer)

4. Research online in sites like ONET, LinkedIn, and any other site, letting your curiosity take you anywhere that looks interesting to create luck and discover something new. I like to have my clients / students play what I call a “related occupation” game. Go to ONET or Occupational Outlook Handbook and search for an occupation of interest. Click on it, and then immediately click on the “related occupations” link without reading anything else first. What do you see there that looks interesting? Just let serendipity take its course.

What are the themes? What types of jobs did you find? What do they have in common?

Trust your instincts and go where ever you want to go. Let that serendipity help you create luck in finding a potential new job.

5. Read — just about anything from blogs, newspapers, magazines, LinkedIn posts — and pay attention to what grabs your attention. Is it “heart-felt stories?”  Science?  Psychology?

Case in point. A client I was working with has a 20 year background in paralegal work and had moved recently to central Maine. I sensed she was not really interested in continuing to work in the legal world and we discussed a number of options. One piece of advice I gave was to follow your instincts and do something you love to do. She was offered three jobs, two in the legal field and one was an entry level position at the Humane Society as a ‘cat tech’. She took that one because she was “excited about it”. After a very short period of time, she was offered the Program Director position.

So, was this luck? I say yes and she created it.

She created it by trusting her instincts, trying a job that she was excited about, and she was open to opportunities that were presented to her.

What stories do you have that “created luck?”

Check out my Facebook Live:
What is ‘intentional serendipity’?
Wednesday February 28 6:30pm (Eastern)
 

*Read more about intentional serendipity, luck, and happenstance here.

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. 

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. By Angela Duckworth

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“To be gritty is to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To be gritty is to hold fast to an interesting and purposeful goal. To be gritty is to invest, day after week after year, in challenging practice. To be gritty is to fall down seven times, and rise eight.”

Grit looks at what makes successful people, raw talent or passion and perseverance. Angela has tons of research that looks at this question and has created a Grit Scale to determine how much “grit” a person has. It appears that perseverance is the key factor in determining success. She found that people who graduated with a 2 year college degree scored slightly higher than people with a 4 year degree. What? Turns out that the drop out rate at 2 year colleges is much higher so that people who actually DO graduate must have more grit.

It is a book filled with quotes like “Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another.” and “years of hard work are often mistaken for innate talent, and that passion is as necessary as perseverance to work-class excellence.”

Other key factors are that each person must have a parent, teacher, or other adult who believes in their potential and tells them and supports them.

I love her story about Warren Buffet’s 3 step process of focusing on a smaller number of important goals in order to be successful. First, you write down 25 career goals. Second, you circle the top five highest-priority goals. Third, you look at all the rest of the goals and avoid them at all costs because they distract you and eat away at your time / energy. Wow… focusing your efforts is a key piece to this ‘grit’ thing I guess.

The ‘paragons of grit’ all have 4 things in common. An interest in the topic, long periods of practice, with a purpose that what you do matters. I feel like this is why I love the career field so much. It clearly has all four of these to keep me going and learning. The fourth one is hope. Hope is defined in all of the three above. It is what keeps you going even when things are difficult.

Another of the key ingredients is that action is required. If you know me, you’ll know that I speak to this all the time in my “intentional serendipity” philosophy. You must take action in order to learn. Turns out you need to take action in order to develop your interests as well.

This book has been a thoughtful journey as I work with clients who are looking for passion in a job. I don’t think passion comes first as much as it comes from hard work.

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 GCDF and BCC certified professionals as well as workshops for career practitioners and individual career coaching.

Sign up for our monthly newsletter at www.Peak-Careers.com 

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

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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.

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Fail Fast, Fail Often. Babineaux & Krumboltz

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FailFast

Fail Fast, Fail Often. How Losing Can Help You WIN. By Ryan Babineaux, Ph.D., and John Krumboltz, Ph.D.

I saw John Krumboltz speak at Maine Career Development in June (2015) and he and a colleague of his had just come out with this book. As a believer in “all things serendipitous” and that failing is key to trying new things, I NEEDED to have this book.

In order to move forward, we need to take action.

When you take action, occasionally you fail.

Your only other choice is NOT to take action and NOT to move forward.

This is how all animals, (yes human animals), learn.

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Undecided? Or open to opportunities? 5 things you can do to be “open to opportunities.”

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Here are some points I try to keep in mind when working with undecided individuals.

Are you really “undecided” about your career choices or are you “open to opportunities?” If you are not sure what you want to do, the first step is to change your mindset. I truly believe most people are NOT undecided.

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It does not take me long to determine if a person is more “people focused” or more “math / science / structure” focused and all I need to do is ask them if they’d like to do something that is the OPPOSITE of their personality and they say “eeewww…that’s gross” (as Jimmy Fallon says).

Well if you know what you do NOT want to do, then down deep, you must know what you DO want to do. You just need to find the right words to get your head around it and change your thinking.

1. Think skills first, not occupations or job titles. The world we live in today is very different than 20 years ago. Employers are looking for a variety of skill sets to increase their production or productivity. If you focus on your skills and can articulate them to a potential employer, you will clearly have their attention and you might be surprised at the variety of jobs that require those skills.

Think about past accomplishments that you are most proud of. What skills were you using when you did it? We naturally gravitate to doing things we are good at and then we do them over again because it feels good. Pay attention to this and trust your hunches (see #3 below). Look for broad skill trends as well as specific skills (i.e. I am very good at explaining things to groups of people in a helping relationship).

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