Tag: career

Career Coaching for Military-to-Civilian Transitions: Thank You Veterans

military dog tag thank you on wood

Veterans Day, Friday, November 11, 2016  – FREE CAREER COACHING FOR VETERANS

In honor of Veterans Day and the sacrifices military members make for our country and security every day, Segal Coaching will offer free career coaching for U.S. active or retired military members – and their spouses – who wish to seek out roles in the private sector following their military service and/or position their military career with an eye to such future roles.

Coaching will be available in 30-minute sessions between 11:30 am and 2:30 pm EST on Friday, November 11, 2016, and is on a first-come, first-served basis. Appointments should be set up in advance and will be by phone or Skype, so veterans living in any jurisdiction are eligible. 

This is an amazing opportunity for veterans to gain access to a top career coach to help them troubleshoot and guide their transition.

Please contact Segal Coaching for details through this form or by email at asegalATsegalcoaching.com.

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach and resume writer to attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs, including current and former members of the military and their spouses. She volunteers with American Corporate Partners, a veteran mentoring program, and was elected “Mentor of the Month” for September 2016.

Election Day 2016: Bring Your Excitement, Not Your Venom

Election Day 2014 - Republicans and Democrats in the campaign
Adobe Stock/Elio Gutzemberg.

On this Election Day 2016, most of us have clients, vendors, suppliers, employees, supervisors, colleagues, family and/or friends on both sides of the aisle, Democrat and Republican. And some independents, too.

Professional development tip:

If someone’s giving you a hard time about the election today or acting over the top, there’s a simple response:

Bring your excitement, not your venom.

(In some cases, you may need to say it more than once.)

Be a leader for the greater cause. Tomorrow, we are all one nation again.

 

Where and How Do You Find Wonder and Inspiration? A Photo Essay

As I enjoyed a beautiful day outside in perfect weather yesterday, I started reflecting on the times I am most creative and what inspires me: when time slows down and I am able to think expansively. It’s a goal of mine to have more of those moments in the coming year.

Seljalandfoss waterfall at sunset in HDR, Iceland

Creativity – where and how do you find it?

As I enjoyed a beautiful day outside in perfect weather yesterday, I started reflecting on the times I am most creative and what inspires me: when time slows down, I wonder at the beauty of the world and am able to think expansively. It’s a goal of mine to increase the frequency and intensity of these moments in the coming year.

Is creativity a top value for you?

Does you need to consistently refuel your creativity to do your best work?

Where do you find that you are most creative?

Do you need to step out of your regular life to achieve it?

Where and how can you increase your opportunities to find wonder in the world?

Does exposure to the creativity of others fuel your own?

Can you generate more to fuel yourself and others?

How can increased creativity drive positive change in your life and career?

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Top image: Seljalandfoss waterfall at sunset in HDR, Iceland (Shutterstock).

Text and bottom images (taken in Tampa, FL; Norwalk, CT; New York, NY; and Cruising Altitude, Somewhere, USA; respectively) copyright 2016 Anne Marie Segal.
All rights reserved.

Breaking Out of a Suffocating Job Search

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Halloween friendly ghost costumes aside, let’s talk about facing some very real fears.

Prospective clients sometimes ask if I can help them break out of a suffocating job search. They tell me that “everything they try” is not working.

Nothing is working.

I can’t think. I can’t breathe.

How can I move forward?

When we talk a bit more, I often hear the following:

  1. They have not settled on a target audience for their job search (or even a small set of audiences) but are sending out applications all over the place.
  2. They are not tailoring their applications to specific opportunities.
  3. They are relying mainly on sending their resumes into the “black hole” of online applications rather than leveraging networking contacts who may have or know about opportunities.
  4. They are relying on work experience rather than seeking out additional outlets to grow their skills.

These and other limits on their job search have been holding them in their tracks. 

The problem with such limits is two-fold. First, while you can get lucky and get a “hit” on a great job – if you are a convincing candidate during the interview process – it rarely works to have a scattershot approach to your job search. Second, it wears you out, so you feel suffocated by the job search rather than energized by it.

Here is the better approach:

  1. Get very clear on your long-term and short-term goals. Figure out which audiences you are targeting, so you can refine your pitch and make each application count.
  2. Tailor your cover letter and resume to the field and type of role, with specific tweaks that relate to the specific job to which you are applying.
  3. Build and work your network. Keep online applications to a minimum, e.g., 10% of your overall job search. Get out there and create a pipeline of contacts through calls and face-to-face meetings, including informational interviews.
  4. Find coursework, individualized study or volunteer opportunities, or look for ways to grow or supplement your current job, to increase your relevant skills and get you closer to your end goals. 

No one wants to hire a candidate who is visibly floundering or suffocating from an ineffective job search, and it often shows when you are stretched thin.

Break out of the cycle and make the best use of your precious time invested in your search. Not only will you have more interest from employers – which can raise your confidence level and fuel your energy – but you will perform better in the vetting process to achieve greater career-search success.

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, author and resume writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. Her book on job interviews, Master the Interview, includes a chapter devoted to building one’s job search network.

Image above from Shutterstock.

 

 

 

Four Quick Tips for Controlling the Time Demon on Halloween (or Any Other Day of the Year)

If you live in the U.S., it’s almost Halloween. That means time for fun, if you can get the work done.

Here are four quick tips to making your day more productive, so you can get on with the festivities.

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If you live in the U.S., it’s almost Halloween. 

For working parents, this can present a particular time crunch. You may want to run out to Trick o’ Treat or watch a costume parade with your children. So while the rest of the world (or most of it) is going at a regular pace, you need to get your work out the door in half the time.

Four Quick Tips to Getting It Done

Here are four quick tips to making your day more productive, so you can get on with the festivities.

PRIORITIZE

DELEGATE

TAKE BREAKS

BE ORGANIZED

  1. Prioritize. Only do what really matters, and the parts that matter, based on what results can be achieved before November 1. (Coming back to the rest when you have more time, and prioritizing again.)
  2. Delegate ruthlessly. If there is a better person to complete a task than you, and you can be confident it will be done right, take the time to pass it on. 
  3. Take breaks. Even if you are racing at breakneck speed to get stuff done, you will be more productive if you break up the tasks with a walk or change of scene every hour or so. 
  4. Be organized. Just as chefs set out all of their ingredients and utensils before starting to cook (called “mise en place”), you will achieve a greater result in less time if you can mitigate distractions and sustain concentration while completing a task.

Copyright 2016 Anne Marie Segal. All rights reserved.

Image above from Adobe Images.

 

How Can You Be Pro-Active in a Reactive Job?

If you spend all day putting out so-called fires at your job – in a very reactive environment – how can you possibly plan or address your career pro-actively?

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A client recently asked:

If you spend all day putting out so-called fires at your job – in a very reactive environment – how can you possibly plan or address your career pro-actively?

Preliminaries:

First, let’s define some terms:

  1. Pro-active: creating a situation or causing something to happen
  2. Reactive: responding to a situation (rather than creating or controlling it)
  3. Fire alarm: a colloquial way to describe a frantic and urgent situation or deadline in a corporate environment, often one that is a “false alarm” created by lack of planning rather than a true emergency

As Randy Pauch said, in the last few months of his life, “time is the only commodity that matters.” We need to manage our time just as we manage our money, and in fact the time management piece is even more important. In addition, as you may realize already, most leadership roles are only achieved by individuals who have learned to address matters pro-actively, yet most environments today are full of fire alarms that require us to react rather than plan our time.

Answer:

Here are some ways to manage your time, even in a pro-active environment:

  1. Stop the bleeding, then take care of the patient. Sometimes an emergency has pieces that need to be addressed immediately and other parts that can wait. Can you schedule your day so that you can still get the important things done while addressing what is urgent? Are there portions you can delegate?
  2. Block your calendar, and then block it again. In order to plan, you need to block out uninterrupted time on your calendar. If an emergency (real or otherwise) creeps up on you, the first thing to do is to move the blocked time on your calendar a few days out, so it stays scheduled and is not forgotten.
  3. Break things into small steps. While you may not be able to plan the next few months and what you would like to achieve, you can start to plan individual pieces of it. If you only have 10 minutes, you can empower yourself to do one thing that really matters.
  4. “Do the right things, rather than ‘doing things right.'” I owe this quote to Randy Pausch and the lecture I link above. As he said, “You don’t need to clean the underside of the bannister.” In other words, put your efforts where they pack a punch. For more about that generally, see my posts on the 80/20 rule and high profile/high need tasks.
  5. Know and remember the goal(s). Ask why. Start by asking yourself, and then (if appropriate) politely and directly ask the person who created the task. What are the intended benefits of the work you are doing? Don’t just do something because you are told to do it; think about what results you are individually and collectively trying to achieve. This will save you time if you can find more efficient ways to get to a solution – and avoid unnecessary iterations – rather than just following steps assigned (which may not have been well thought out in the first place). It will also keep you focused on the point in #4 above.
  6. Stop wasting time during your day. Be more organized and match your workload to meet your peak energy levels. Also, eliminate distractions. I’ll talk about all of this more in a future post.

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, author and resume writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. Her first book, Master the Interview, is available on Amazon.com. 

Image above from Adobe Images.

 

Working On (vs. In) Your Career

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Working On Your Career vs. In Your Career – What is the Difference?

If you have ever spent time in an entrepreneurial role, you have likely heard the phrase “working on your business” (versus “working in your business”). Working on your business means investing time in activities that will build the business over the long term,  such as marketing, streamlining of activities and professional development. While these activities may serve your immediate clients, they also are critical to assure that your business is headed in the direction that you determine will best position you for growth. In fact, a crucial part of working on your business is figuring out where the future growth lies, aside from how to achieve it.

Employees at companies, as well as new graduates, often do not have the lens of working on their careers as well as in them. In fact, a large part of my work with my own clients is helping them understand the importance of also lifting their heads up, rather than always keeping their heads down. To rise to the higher-level (and more interesting) roles, you need to lift your head above the fray of everyday life and activities to see the bigger picture. We know this intuitively, but we are often too busy to stop and do it.

In addition, it is only the fortunate few who are encouraged to think beyond the box. In a minority of workplaces (and sometimes only for a minority of employees in them), leadership is expected and part of one’s contributions is to develop that presence and state of mind, which can only be achieved when there is time and space to work on developing that goal rather than letting the days go by consumed by urgent deadlines and ill-defined projects whose benefits have not been fully vetted.

Instead, we are often taught in school and tacitly (or openly) encouraged in jobs to keep plugging along, rather than being strategic about where to place our efforts. We move from academia where assignments are determined by a professor or instructor to the workplace where tasks are doled out by bosses or leadership teams.

Due to this constant source of new projects from above, it is not hard to understand why many people go through their careers expecting the decisions to be made for them, rather than seeking out leadership and decision-making opportunities themselves. I often call this “gotta make the donuts” after a commercial by Dunkin’ Donuts in which an beleaguered store employee kept running back to the store every few hours so that his customers (you and me) could have fresh donuts to eat. How different are many of us in our jobs, running from task to task, so harried and hurried that we almost forget why we are doing what we are doing?

Beautiful young woman working in her office.

A large part of my work with clients is helping them lift their heads up, rather than always keeping them down.

In yesterday’s post, I shared that there are 10 weeks until year end. I encourage you to spend a meaningful amount of uninterrupted time – and at least one or two hours – this week or next thinking about how you will spend them.

In the rush of holiday parties and vacations, it is tempting to go on autopilot, with the chief goal of just getting there, making it to year end, rather than actually achieving something meaningful in the time until the calendar turns over to the next January 1. You may have a rush of New Year’s resolutions, but don’t let this time be lost time. There’s a lot you can achieve even before January 1. Here are some ideas:

  • Set up 3-4 networking events or activities in the months of November and December
  • Write an article on a current topic in your field
  • Line up a public speaking event or, better yet, give one
  • Finish ONE project that has been nagging you all year
  • Start ONE project that you can (and will) complete by year end
  • Take the first step in a project that can complete by mid-year
  • Attend a conference that is meaningful to your future
  • Learn a new skill that you need now or to grow in the future
  • Update your resume
  • Find a new mentor or sponsor who can help propel your career
  • Strengthen an existing relationship by a few acts of giving and kindness
  • Help mentor a younger person in whom you see great potential

When working on your career, it is not enough to just do something. Choose the best idea based on what will bring the most benefits to your career. If you don’t know what that would be, you have just identified your greatest area of need – figuring out what will benefit you based on where you want to take your career next (and, possibly, determine where exactly that is). Can you do that, or make significant progress toward that goal, by year end? Yes, but only if you work on it!

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, author and resume writer for attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. Her book on job interviews, Master the Interview, is available on Amazon.com. Her website is at www.annemariesegal.com.

Images above from Adobe Images.