career – Page 7 – Segal Coaching LLC

Stuck at the Office? 5 Quick Ways Holiday Downtime Can Benefit Your Career

If you can motivate yourself to do it, a few minutes invested now can yield significant benefits in the New Year. Think of it as a present to your future self.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you’ll be the one stuck at the office in late December while others are away on vacation. You may have even volunteered for it, hoping for a bit of quiet. But then sometimes it’s too quiet….

If there’s not a lot to do workwise – and you have already gotten yourself ahead on some tasks for 2016 – here are some thoughts on how to use that holiday office downtime (other than the trifecta of news trivia, Facebook and online shopping).

If you can motivate yourself to do it, a few minutes invested now can yield significant benefits in the New Year. Think of it as a present to your future self.

Ready for some ideas? Feel free to add your own.

1) Write yourself a 30/60/90 day plan for 2016. What do you want to accomplish in the first three months of the New Year and who needs to get on-board to make that happen?

2) Brainstorm for leadership opportunities within or outside of your organization, such as speaking engagements or writing.

3) Write down five words to describe your personal brand, and check your online presence to see if it matches what you have described.

4) Clean out some portion of your inbox. If it’s very full, don’t have the goal of emptying it all at once. Great an interim goal – say 250 emails – and try to make it into a game or find a helpful reward if you get it done.

Bonus: If you are even more motivated, get up from your desk and clean out some files you don’t need any more. N.B. This has the added benefit of getting your tush out of the chair and some blood flowing to your extremities.

5) Have lunch (or a short phone call) with an important networking contact. If the opportunity presents itself, ask him/her if there is anyone else he/she can introduce who can bring you closer to your 2016 goals.

All the best for the end of 2015!

Anne Marie Segal is a résumé writer and a career and leadership coach to attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. You can find her website here.

WRITING SERVICES include attorney and executive résumés, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, bios, websites and other career and business communications.

COACHING SERVICES include career coaching, networking support, interview preparation, LinkedIn training, personal branding, leadership and change management.

Originally published on LinkedInPulse.

Should You Really Start Something New in the New Year? (Hint: There’s Another, Sometimes Better, Option)

We are accustomed to think of the New Year as a time to start something new.

New Year, new thing. It makes sense.

But what if you took a step back and looked at the change of year not as a chance to do new things, but to bridge the old and the new? What if, instead of starting something new or resolving to make a change, you threw yourself into something you already do well, but you do it better in the New Year?

So here’s a short visualization exercise, since this only works if you are dealing with what’s truly personal to you. If you wish, write down five things you already do that are working. This can be for your business, career, personal life, health, etc.

Write down five important things. (It’s better to actually write than just think. Seeing words on the page makes them real.)

Five Things I’m Already Doing Well

Now, write down why these five things are working. What results are you getting from these actions? Are these results that you want to continue to see in the New Year?

Why These Five Things Are Working

Finally, which one(s) are most important to continue doing, so important that you should not only keep doing them, but also invest more time and dedication to them, to do them even better and get stronger, more lasting results?

Things to Ramp Up in the New Year (and How to Do It)

When we are young, it makes sense to continue to try something new every day, season or year. As adults, sometimes that is the right answer, if it breaks us out of bad habits. But many times, the more fruitful course is to build on what we already know or a change that we have already set into motion.

When we do something new, we expand our horizons. When we recommit, we invest in our strengths. Which one makes sense for you in the new year?

Anne Marie Segal is a career and leadership coach, author and resume writer..

Resume Writing? Sounds Easy. Until You Do It.

You may have a sneaking suspicion that you are not in the driver’s seat – the idea of working on your résumé generates fear, or the document is a sore spot in your career advancement or job search.

The value of working with a professional résumé writer is often not clear until after you have gone through the process and see the finished product. This short introduction serves as a preview and overview of the process.

I am often asked what I can offer to clients to improve their résumé, as a means to speed up and target their job search process. If you would like to know this as well, please READ ON!

This post is written with the skeptics in mind. God bless the skeptics. They keep the rest of us in check. So here it goes:

The value of working with a professional résumé writer is often not clear until after you have gone through the process and see the finished product. This short introduction serves as a preview and overview of the process.

You may have a sneaking suspicion that you are not in the driver’s seat – the idea of working on your résumé generates fear, or the document is a sore spot in your career advancement or job search.

You know that you are an amazing candidate if you could just get the right words on the page, but you aren’t sure how to do that or can’t seem to find (or prioritize) the time to get it right.

As I have said in the past, résumés are marketing documents. They are not a career retrospective of what you’ve done or an “obituary” of your work history, education and other professional information. Your résumé is a sales piece, and what you are selling is you. What can you bring to the role that puts you at the top of the pile?

Great résumés convey power. While a strong résumé won’t get you a job on its own, it will position you as a competitive candidate and, if there’s a potential match, serve as a compelling “appetizer” to get you to the main course – your next career move.

If you are uncomfortable selling yourself on paper, or if you need help putting into words what you know you can do, you have come to the right place.

What are the main benefits of working with Anne Marie Segal to write my résumé?

1) You will possess a solid marketing document that positions you for the roles you are targeting.

Through our work together, we create a solid marketing document that highlights your achievements, strengths and unique offer. With the new résumé in hand, you will be positioned to obtain a role that is a true “fit” for you (given your short-term and long-term goals) and leverage your value during hiring negotiations.

We achieve this by balancing the two main elements that every résumé needs:

BREVITY and

DIFFERENTIATION

Today’s résumés need to be clearly and tightly written, with keywords and summaries that attract the attention of someone within six to ten seconds. There are many more candidates going for each open position than in years past, so you will need to stand out quick to make an impression.

At the same time, brevity alone does not make a great résumé. You also need to differentiate yourself from every other “results-driven” candidate or “good communicator” on the block. You are unique. In your résumé, we don’t market something parroted from a book or the Internet, we market you.

2) You will no longer lose out on potential opportunities because you are unsure of how to present yourself.

The worst thing you can do when looking for a job, or any career advancement that requires a similar interview process, is to stagnate out of fear, worry or similar emotions. Inertia will not get you a job. It is not your friend, even if it feels as comfortable as an old pair of jeans. I work with candidates all the time to get them moving forward, both in coaching and in résumé writing.

3) You will recognize your value and learn how to communicate it to potential employers.

From the “résumé interview process” – during which we reconstruct your work and education highlights, keywords and other résumé elements from the ground up – you will gain key insights into the value you bring to the marketplace.

Have you ever sat down and wrote out your unique “return on investment” (ROI)? What ROI would a potential employer receive from its investment in you? When I work with candidates, we address this question head on, so you can present yourself with confidence and clarity on the value you bring to each open role. People don’t get hired because they are liked (although it helps). They get hired to solve problems. What problems do you solve?

After working together, the transformation of your résumé will be obvious. (If it’s not, we should talk.) The value of this key document will become even more evident when you begin to send it around and hear your network, recruiters, interviewers and others say:

“Ah, I get what you’re looking for.”

“What a great résumé.”

“I can really see the value you bring.”

“I have a role that I’d really like to recommend you for.”

“When can you start?”

Anne Marie Segal is a résumé writer and a career and leadership coach to attorneys, executives and entrepreneurs. You can find her website here. This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse.

WRITING SERVICES include attorney and executive résumés, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, bios, websites and other career and business communications.

COACHING SERVICES include career coaching, networking support, interview preparation, LinkedIn training, personal branding, leadership and change management.

The 80/20 Rule for Faster and Better Results

Whether it is how to network more effectively, advance in one’s career, or reach any other important goal, I often suggest the 80/20 Rule to clients and colleagues as a way to streamline processes, save time and achieve better results.

Originally created by Vilfredo Pareto in 1906 as a way to quantify the distribution of wealth in his native Italy, the Pareto Principle (or 80/20 Rule) has been applied to (and become better known for) its use in other areas capable of measurement, including time and business management, as a means to increase effectiveness in those areas.

Put simply, 80/20 means that 80% of the rewards in your life, however defined, generally come from 20% of your efforts. The key to utilizing the 80/20 Rule is to focus a greater proportion of your efforts on the 20% that is most fruitful rather than spreading your efforts across areas that do not correlate to results.

We don’t always intuitively know what are the most effective uses of our time, although we can often identify those that are time-sucks. If you are in a client-interfacing business, for example, this could be a client who pays bills late or complains about fees, saps your energy and is unlikely to give you additional work or a referral. If you tolerate this type of client (or worse yet, invite these clients into your life), you will consistently be disappointed and deprive yourself of the opportunity to shine in front of those clients who will grow you and your business. Yet often, because we fail to plan ahead, we get sucked into spending our best hours of the day (or even vacations), servicing those same clients that yield the slimmest results.

If you are in a client-interfacing business, for example, a time-suck might be a client who pays bills late or complains about fees, saps your energy and is unlikely to give you additional work or a referral. A client that, in other words, is a headline (not a footnote) in the 80% of your efforts that are the least rewarding.

With a mentor or coach, or by using metrics to approximate the return on your investment of time and energy, you can refine the 20% and your approach to leverage it for greater results.

As you can imagine or may already know, you can apply this same approach to many areas of your life, improving how you allocate time at a job, in your writing, with your spouse and children, etc. Focus on the activities, tasks and moments that create the most value, enthusiasm and joy. Delegate or eliminate those that create little value, enthusiasm or joy yet require great efforts. In some ways, the 80/20 Rule is a more refined variation of just saying no to things that don’t serve you and people who don’t enrich your personal and professional life.

80/20. Try it. You may be hooked for good.

Originally published as Get Results Faster with the 80/20 Rule on LinkedIn Pulse. Shutterstock image.

Five Key Questions to Ask When Creating a Personal Advisory Board

In a prior post, I explored why you should have your own personal advisory board to facilitate your professional growth. Regardless of your seniority, industry or role, here are five key questions to ask yourself as you assemble your board.

1) What do you most need right now? We all have our blind spots and skill gaps that evolve over time. Can you find someone to meet each of your current, most pressing needs? For example, you may have all the emotional intelligence in the world but not know how to run numbers. Or vice versa. If there is a gap between where you are and where you want (or need) to be, the advisors who can fill that gap should be front and center.

2) Can you call them in a crunch? Make sure the people you elect to your inner circle can be reached when you actually need them. This doesn’t mean that they all will pick up the phone at 3 a.m. when you call, but it does mean that they will make time out of their day or week to help you address a concern. It also means that they will make time for you to check in regularly, which you’ll need to keep the relationships fresh and assure your advisors are current on your professional goals and milestones.

3) What role can each advisor play? In addition to the needs and gaps to be met (mentioned above), consider what role each advisor would have in your professional development.

In many organizations, for example, you need a “sponsor” to help promote your career. Without one, you can toil away without growing into greater levels of responsibility and renumeration. A similar rule applies if you are looking to raise capital for a business, and even top level management need support of their board, close colleagues or fellow partners. If possible, choose someone who knows you well enough to credibly sing your praises, has the motivation to help you and has the “political capital” to make a case for you to the right audience.

You will also want a mentor within your firm, as well as someone at your own level in whom you can confide. Save the most thorny issues for advisors that you know you can trust without a doubt (hopefully this would apply to all, but sometimes extra care is required), possibly a mentor or other advisor outside of your firm.

Build your advisory board with individuals that offer different ways of supporting you professionally, and re-evaluate from time to time as your career progresses.

4) How does the team fit together? Imagine all of your advisors were seated at a single table. Do they round each other out? Have you missed anything?

For example, do you have someone who can be your cheerleader when you need to be motivated, someone who can see you clearly enough to give you realistic, targeted advice and another who knows how to get out of sticky situations? Do you have someone who knows your industry as well as you do (or better) and another who can give you an outside perspective? Think top-down to whether your advisory board has the right range, or if you have too many similar talents or a missing voice. You should also strive for some variety in gender, age and affiliation, or at least a group of people who do not all approach problem-solving in the same way that you do.

5) Will you be motivated and committed to help them in return? Every relationship is a two-way street. If you can’t offer something of real value to your advisor, it will be hard to count on that person’s commitment when you most need it. People are just too busy, with too many demands, to support someone who is a metaphorical dead end.

For a sponsor or mentor, this may mean that you support initiatives the person has spearheaded, mentor a younger colleague in the person’s group, act as a sounding board or simply deliver great work. For a colleague, it may mean that you support his or her professional or personal life in a way that’s helpful and meaningful to that individual. There are creative ways to show your support in return for someone who has helped you, especially if you truly focused on that person’s life and needs.

Make sure to choose advisors with whom you can authentically request and return support. The last thing someone wants is to think your interest is insincere or that it is an effort for you to show up on their behalf. Even a hired advisor (like an accountant or career coach) needs to be a good fit, with mutual trust and rapport, or there will not be enough goodwill generated in the relationship for you to draw out the support you are hoping to achieve.

Whenever possible, surround yourself with people whom you are more than happy to help succeed. If you choose well, the feeling will be mutual.

If you liked this post, you may also like Do You Need a Personal Board of Advisors?

Great Resumes Are Powerful Marketing Documents

Your resume is a marketing document that tells the story of where you have been and where you are going. How you tell that story is largely up to you, but in all cases it is more effective to set your career objectives first and write your resume to meet them.

While there are certain conventions for resumes in many fields, you have a lot of latitude to create a document that will entice employers to call you for an interview and, if you can ace that, make you an offer. As a critical piece of your overall job marketing package, the importance of a powerful resume cannot be overemphasized.

Below is a Slideshare file with my seven strategies to transform your resume into a powerful marketing document. (Click here for the original at slideshare.net.) Feel free to contact me if you are looking for career coaching through any of the stages of exploration, job search and transition, including how to make the most of your new role.

My Biggest Career Mistake: Sailing, Secretaries and Lime Green Pants

I believe in the power of mistakes.

No one likes to make mistakes, of course. But that is where the learning happens. Bigger mistake, greater opportunity to learn.

What may have been my biggest career mistake happened very early on, while I was still finishing my undergraduate degree. I had my very first internship and was ready to conquer the world. Good so far. I also thought I knew exactly how to do it. Ha!

I was a lowly intern, feeling on top of the world that I had gotten “in” at a place that I very much wanted to work. The secretary in the department was very good to me, trying to help me out so I could make my way. But I didn’t take the cue.

Not only did I not yet understand that secretaries rule the roost (if not the world), but I did not appreciate that someone could make choices very different than mine and still have a lot to teach me.

Here’s the thing. This secretary (we’ll call her Nancy) wore lime green capri pants, corduroys and other outfits to work that in my naivety had judged as “not fit for the professional world”. I call myself naive not because I was wrong to recognize that Nancy would not move up the corporate ladder if she didn’t emulate the look of those at the top: dark-colored suits. She wouldn’t. Rather, I assumed that moving up within the organization was and should be Nancy and everyone else’s goal, without realizing that she had her own plan. One that was more carefully formulated than my 19-year-old point of view would allow.

Nancy wanted a place to work during the day (while she pursued her own interests on the side) that was forgiving enough so she could wear want she wanted and be whom she pleased. She was expected to conform to certain norms and left blissfully free to ignore other ones. She made calculated decisions to achieve the results she wanted. She knew exactly how to get where she wanted to go, but it wasn’t anywhere that I could have imagined.

So when Nancy pulled me aside one day to tell me that I should “follow the lead” of the head of the group (we’ll call him Troy), who wanted to talk about basketball and sailing a good part of the time, I ignored her advice. I wanted to ask Troy about things that interested me, and at the time these were not at the top of my list. While others joked and called him Captain Troy, I smiled through gritted teeth and pushed on for the certain set of experiences that I had expected out of the internship.

After all, we were not on a yacht, we were in an office. I wanted to learn the ways of leadership and success, and they were not going to come from talking about sailing, I thought. At the time, I didn’t have a boat, or any family or friends with a boat. The one time I had taken an extended trip on a boat as a child, I had been seasick most of the week. I was bound to say something ill-informed, so wasn’t it better to steer the conversation back to what was comfortable to me?

I couldn’t look bad if I just avoided topics that were out of my league, right? Anyway, I reasoned, what did Nancy know, with her green pants and all? How could a chat about sailing be useful to me at all, other than to smile and humor my boss? Why would I encourage him to continue that conversation?

Turns out, Nancy knew a lot. In particular, she knew how to keep everyone happy while keeping herself happy. She kept these two goals in perfect balance, giving Troy and the group the support they needed while feeding her own needs. She intuitively understood that showing an interest in sailing was showing an interest in Troy. And that was the important part.

By contrast, I was being immature, overly serious and even selfish – holding on to the world as I knew it – by expecting to direct the line of conversation. And I was missing out on the chance to learn, bond, grow and have fun.

So, my biggest career mistake was actually a set of related mistakes:

Mistake #1: Discounting the message of an unexpected messenger.

Mistake #2: Closing myself off from new experiences.

Mistake #3: Making it all about me.

As I found out later, the green pants were a statement on Nancy’s part, a line in the sand that she was in a bridge job and had no pretense of “moving up” to a management position within that organization. She had her eyes on another prize – her own set of professional goals – but she also made sure to be so good at her job (orienting herself to the situation, as needed) that there was no way she would risk losing it over something as simple as wardrobe choices. In fact, as a highly creative person, she literally wore her authenticity on her sleeve. And she was respected for that by others in the group, including (in the months and years following my internship) by me.

I often think back to Nancy, the unexpected messenger, with whom I have lost touch in the over 20 years since I had that internship. I am indebted to her wisdom. I wonder if she has started her own company, maybe even a fashion line.

Nancy could have changed her style of dress any day. Changing my attitude took a lot longer.

From my biggest mistake, I learned my greatest lesson. It is not all about fitting in, it is also about being a fit.

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