Career Opportunities with Douglas E. Welch

Commit to noticing and remembering more of each days progress from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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Ask anyone you know and I am sure you will hear the same thing, “What day is it? How did it get to be 2011 already? The year is moving so fast!” It seems a simple truth that the older you get the faster the days, months and years seem to pass. We go to sleep in one month and wake up in another, not really recalling what happened in between. This year, though, I am going to try and pay more attention to the passing of time and the things I accomplish along the way. Call it mindfullness. Call it paying attention. Call it “Getting Things Done.” No matter what you call it, let’s commit to noticing and remembering more of each days progress.

Looking at the calendar I see that this is the 14th day and 2nd week of the new year. Both weeks have been very busy for me, but looking back over my calendar (a shared Google Calendar, in my case) I see that I had 11 client calls and 2 user group meetings and 1 night of archery practice with my son. We usually think of calendars as forward-looking devices, but they can be just as useful as a tool to remind us of everything we have accomplished. I even have a service that adds my Twitter messages to my calendar so I can see what I was talking about last week or last month.

Read this entire article – Commit to noticing and remembering more of each days progress from the Career Opportunities Podcast

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

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Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Don’t make resolutions, make action items from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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I am writing on New Year’s Eve here in Los Angeles as celebrations of the New Year have already started in other, distant parts of the globe. We will be attending a party tonight to bring in 2011 ourselves, as will many others. One big topic of discussion at all these celebrations will be New Year’s Resolutions. The beginning of the calendar year is always a good time to reflect on the past year and plan for the next, but I want you to think about this new year in a new way. This New Year, instead of making resolutions, make action items. Instead of trying to make things happen, make them happen. To quote Yoda from the Star Wars movies, “Do, or do not. There is no try!”

The trouble with resolutions is they are a waffling way to approach change. There is already an assumed “try” in them and I think this is what allows us to abandon them so easily. There is also a bit too much thought and too little action involved in resolutions. We think and think on what we want to accomplish, but unless we take some direct action towards our goals they will always remain dreams.

Read this entire article – Asking a lot of myself…and you, too from the Career Opportunities Podcast 

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

Click for more information and pricing 

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Asking a lot of myself…and you, too from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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After a busy few months, things have slowed down a bit here for the holidays. This has given me more time to reflect on the year and think about what I want to accomplish in 2011. After a bit of this thinking, I find that the watchword for the New Year is going to be “demanding.” It will be a demanding year, but that demand will not be entirely external. The fact is, I am going to be demanding a lot more of myself, too. Even more importantly, I am going to be a bit more demanding of you…at least as much as I can be at a distance.

Read this entire article – Asking a lot of myself…and you, too from the Career Opportunities Podcast 

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

Click for more information and pricing 

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Accepting Thanks and Communicating More Clearly from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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The Thanksgiving holiday here in the US always leads to people giving a tremendous outpouring of thanks for everything from years of service or marriage to something as simple as holding the door at the grocery store. While it is always worthwhile to be reminded of those things for which we are thankful, there is another side to the conversation. We need to think more deeply about the act of accepting thanks and how that simple act can also lead us into more effective communication.

First, when someone thanks you, what do you do? Do you say “No problem?” It is a very common response, but I don’t think it really communicates a proper reflection of thanks. No problem seems, to me, more of an acknowledgement that something has been said instead of accepting the thanks that were offered. “No problem” is similar to saying “It was nothing.” The fact is, your kindness was more than nothing and accepting thanks shows that you understand the transaction that just occurred. You didn’t have to go out of your way to hold the door, pickup the dropped item or help with something else. You went above and beyond the call of duty and someone appreciated that fact. Take the thanks that were offered and acknowledge that you heard the thanks. Make the communication complete. It leads to a better experience for everyone.

Read this entire article – Accepting Thanks and Communicating More Clearly from the Career Opportunities Podcast

 

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

Click for more information and pricing 

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

 

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Sometimes you just do the best that you can from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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Sometimes you just do the best that you can. Most of us want to do more with our life, our work, heck, even our day, but sometimes you just can’t get it done. I am having one of those times right now. Everyone in the family seems busier than usual and it is leading to days where our only thought is sinking in to a comfy chair at night and turning off our minds. My wife has an amazingly busy scheduled teaching at 4 different colleges, my 7th Grade son is deep in his studies as well as flag football, chess and a host of other programs and I am taking on more of my “Stay at home Dad” role again as well as balancing that with my consulting and writing work. We all seem to be running in a hundred different directions at once.

Read this entire article – Sometimes you just do the best that you can from the Career Opportunities Podcast 

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

Click for more information and pricing 

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Little Boxes – and they all look just the same from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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When you are writing your resume or interviewing for a job, do you fall into a common trap? Despite all your unique insight and experience, do you end up looking and sounding like everyone else? Do you we end up looking like the “little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same?” For decades we have been taught to sit down, shut up, and act like everyone else. We have been taught to wear the same clothes, watch the same television shows, read the same books and have the same opinions. Even a cursory look at the world today will show you that this is no longer true. The world is an amazingly diverse place. Yet, when we go job hunting, we revert to methods from the 1950’s and beyond. We endeavour to be the “company man” who keeps his head down and makes it through our career relatively unscathed. 

Read this entire article – Little Boxes – and they all look just the same from the Career Opportunities Podcast

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

Click for more information and pricing 

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 

** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Pursuing your work as art, but also making money from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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I just finished reading Seth Godin’s latest books, Linchpin, and there is much to recommend there. He clearly describes and analyzes the dramatic shifts in the work world where being “good enough” simply isn’t enough anymore, especially when such work can easily be outsourced to thousands of others all over the world. If you want to have a successful career, you need to treat your work as art, and yourself as an artist, regardless of what you do.

While the book rings true to my own experience in almost every way, it also fails to address one of the deepest burning issues I live with every day — how to make money pursuing your art. There are the typical assurances that doing your best work will attract money, which I believe, but it doesn’t address the day-to-day realities of putting cash into our pockets so we can buy groceries and pay the rent. I can’t fault Godin with being unable to answer this question. It is indeed one of those problems that seems to defy solution. That said, reading the book got me thinking (which I believe is the clearest sign of a good book) and I have developed a few ideas of my own.

 

Read this entire article – Pursuing your work as art, but also making money from the Career Opportunities Podcast

 

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

Click for more information and pricing 

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 

 

** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

What are you saying, and thinking, about your work and career? from the Career Opportunities Podcast

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Want to know what people all over the world think about their work and career? Visit http://search.twitter.com and enter work, career, job, or any other phrase you want. Then hit enter and watch the world zeitgeist pour into your browser. Never before have you been able to put your finger on the pulse of the world in such a detailed way.

Of course, you can use this same method to divine what you think about your work and career, too. Much like an old-fashioned paper journal (which I still carry around, by the way) your social media stream captures your feelings, your thoughts, your disappointments every time you post a note to your friends or the world. This information can be a goldmine when it comes time to for the “hard thinking” I often mention in columns. Reviewing your social media streams can give you a clear indication of how you are doing in your career and whether you might need to make some major changes.

Read this entire article – What are you saying, and thinking, about your work and career?

One-To-One Career Consulting

Now available exclusively to Career Opportunities readers and Listeners.

Click for more information and pricing 

Build the Career You Deserve with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs 

** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Using the Career Compass to Find Your Work and Career with Douglas E. Welch 

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//

Douglas E. Welch (http://douglasewelch.com) presents to the class Career Development – Theories and Techniques at Pepperdine Graduate School of Education & Psychology taught by fellow CareerCamp Co-Chair, Danielle Gruen

The two biggest challenges are deciding what you want to do as a career and then building the career you deserve once you decide.

I discuss the Career Compass method of discovering your career wants, needs and desires and then using various social media tools to show people “What you do and how well you do it”

Transcript:

 I know it can seem — just to close — it can seem a little daunting because I walk the line between introverted and extroverted. Depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the day of the month, I go either way and I often get questions from people, “Well, What about the introverts amongst us?” and what I tell them is this, “It doesn’t cut you out. In fact, it can, you can still utilize these tools often if you are still a relatively introverted person because these give you that distance. You can say something in a blog post or in a Facebook that you might not say face-to-face to someone because the conflict is too close to you, but by giving yourself some distance, you can actually bring out some of those ideas. This comes from the fact, my wife and I taught an online course on podcasting and writing and one of the things she noticed immediately form her face-to-face classes to this online class was the amount of discussion that took place. People are verbose online. They will talk and talk and talk and talk. They may be the quietest person sitting in corner of a classroom, but put them online, where they’ve got that distance, conversation flows and so that sort of brought this home to me that you can use these tools even if you are little bit introverted, because you will have some distance between you and that physical person there that might intimidate you.

But that’s pretty much all I have today. I hope that you guys a can face these two challenges of both figuring out what you to do and also then using the tools that we have to tell people what you do and how well you do it so that you can bring that opportunity to you.

Links for items mentioned in this talk:

* Video: Career Compass: Finding Your Career North from CareerCampSCV 2012

* Audio: Career Compass: Finding Your Career North from CareerCampSCV 2012

* Career Compass Kindle Book

* Video Archives: Career Prescriptions at Tuesdays with Transitioners

* Video: CareerCamp: New Unconference Methods for Helping People Build the Career They Deserve with Douglas E. Welch

Help Support Career Opportunities!

Using the Career Compass to Find Your Work and Career with Douglas E. Welch 

 

Read the book

//

Douglas E. Welch (http://douglasewelch.com) presents to the class Career Development – Theories and Techniques at Pepperdine Graduate School of Education & Psychology taught by fellow CareerCamp Co-Chair, Danielle Gruen

The two biggest challenges are deciding what you want to do as a career and then building the career you deserve once you decide.

I discuss the Career Compass method of discovering your career wants, needs and desires and then using various social media tools to show people “What you do and how well you do it”

Transcript:

 I know it can seem — just to close — it can seem a little daunting because I walk the line between introverted and extroverted. Depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the day of the month, I go either way and I often get questions from people, “Well, What about the introverts amongst us?” and what I tell them is this, “It doesn’t cut you out. In fact, it can, you can still utilize these tools often if you are still a relatively introverted person because these give you that distance. You can say something in a blog post or in a Facebook that you might not say face-to-face to someone because the conflict is too close to you, but by giving yourself some distance, you can actually bring out some of those ideas. This comes from the fact, my wife and I taught an online course on podcasting and writing and one of the things she noticed immediately form her face-to-face classes to this online class was the amount of discussion that took place. People are verbose online. They will talk and talk and talk and talk. They may be the quietest person sitting in corner of a classroom, but put them online, where they’ve got that distance, conversation flows and so that sort of brought this home to me that you can use these tools even if you are little bit introverted, because you will have some distance between you and that physical person there that might intimidate you.

But that’s pretty much all I have today. I hope that you guys a can face these two challenges of both figuring out what you to do and also then using the tools that we have to tell people what you do and how well you do it so that you can bring that opportunity to you.

Links for items mentioned in this talk:

* Video: Career Compass: Finding Your Career North from CareerCampSCV 2012

* Audio: Career Compass: Finding Your Career North from CareerCampSCV 2012

* Career Compass Kindle Book

* Video Archives: Career Prescriptions at Tuesdays with Transitioners

* Video: CareerCamp: New Unconference Methods for Helping People Build the Career They Deserve with Douglas E. Welch

Help Support Career Opportunities!

* Buy Douglas’photography products available from http://DouglasEWelch.com/buy