Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

trusting your instincts

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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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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Fight or flight in career decision making

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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.

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