Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

serendipity

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. 

From Chaos to Creativity and Careers. William H. Stone

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From Chaos

Chaos. Serendipity. Happenstance. Luck. This IS how people find work throughout their career development. I am a huge fan of the Happenstance Learning Theory and my personal philosophy is what I call “intentional serendipity”. You need to be “intentional” and take action and the open t opportunities that you create. Chaos theory has many crossovers.

I love that this book not only explains how chaos is normal in our lives and how you can use it to create your opportunities, but also weaves in specific activities throughout to help formulate your thinking and take action in your career development.

If you have been wondering why you have not been able to find a new job, or feel that your life is out of control and you can’t figure out how to rein it in, or you would just like a practical, up-to-date overview of how to find work that fits you, start reading this book.

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 

Four Things You Can Do To Keep Your Clients Out of Their “Panic Zone”

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“Get out of your comfort zone.” We’ve all heard this but some people think that there is only one zone beyond “comfort” and they call it “panic” or “freakout”.  Bryan Murphy who recently took a seminar from me explains to his students that there are actually three zones to think about.119_0073

Comfort zone, where no learning takes place. People are complacent here and often go through the motions that they are doing something.

Freakout or panic zone, again, where no learning takes place. When you freakout, you shut down, not much good is going to happen here.

But what lies in between is the key. In between comfort and panic is a zone that Bryan calls the stretch zone. This is where learning can happen. [Read more…] about Four Things You Can Do To Keep Your Clients Out of Their “Panic Zone”

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.

[Read more…] about Fail Fast, Fail Often. Babineaux & Krumboltz

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).

[Read more…] about Undecided? Or open to opportunities? 5 things you can do to be “open to opportunities.”

Why we all need to “fail forward”.

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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.

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