Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

trusting your hunches

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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The Career Development Puzzle

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Career decision making is like a 1000 piece puzzle with a number of pieces missing and only a vague picture on the box to work from. Each person thinks they have a complete puzzle to put together, but our job as a career counselor / coach / advisor is to help our clients find as many of the outside pieces as possible to give them the framework and some direction.

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Too many people think career decision making is a linear process, but each person takes the puzzle pieces he / she can find and fits them together to begin to make a picture of themselves. As career practitioners we may use assessments to help fit pieces together, we may use open ended questions, we may use work or family history, but ultimately what we are doing is helping the clients / students find pieces that fit together.

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Blink. The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. By Malcolm Gladwell

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I tore through this book. I could not wait to find time daily to read.

Blink

Blink resonates with me so much because I am constantly talking to people about “trusting your instincts” and not trying to over analyze things or collect more data, and more data, to make a decision. Blink has the research to support my thinking. Thank you Malcolm.

I devoured the first half of the book and then read the rest. The first half focused on the power of knowing in the first 2 seconds and that it is not a gift given to a fortunate few people but is naturally in all of us.

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Changing Perspectives Using Intentional Serendipity

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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.

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Intentional Serendipity Can Be Surprising

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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.

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