Dear Liz, I am someone who doesn’t mind job interviews. I like to meet new people and I enjoy the conversation, as long as it is a real conversation and not a series of rapid-fire questions. I can’t stand it when interviewers ask insulting questions that no adult should have to answer. I had a disappointing job interview about a month ago. The interviewer was a young HR person. At first I thought she was on the ball. She was pleasant for the first twenty minutes.

We did it. We survived the angriest three presidential debates in the angriest presidential campaign since Jefferson versus Adams in 1800. I’ve been reflecting on what we can learn as public speakers from the debates, and even at this brief remove there is already one clear lesson: preparation counts. Basically, as we heard throughout the last couple of months, Donald Trump didn’t prepare, and Hillary Clinton did.

I got fired several times in a row, early in my career. I was on a subsistence budget anyway, so getting fired really put me in a financial bind. Each time I got fired, I had to hustle to get a new job. I didn’t have time to mope about having been fired. I had to react fast just in order to pay the rent! It didn’t hit me at the time that the managers who terminated me had each done me a great favor. Why did I get fired? Obviously there was a mismatch between me and those jobs.

Shutterstock There are some words that carry both just and unjust connotations. “Judgment” is one of them. In our legal system, we have judges who we hope will uphold the law in a compassionate and fair manner. However, most of us don’t like to appear before a judge, even when they are highly qualified. And we for sure don’t like to be judged by othersor treat people in a way that makes them feel judged.

Lisa Messenger (Image courtesy of Collective Hub) “Be a trailblazer, break the rules, disrupt, take a different road and do it fearlessly,” says Lisa Messenger, the Sydney-based entrepreneur, author and speaker, in herbest-selling book Daring and Disruptive: Unleashing The Entrepreneur, which is newly available inthe U.S. this month.

Shutterstock Millennials and job hopping: two words that are beginning to form a natural association in a lot of people’s minds. Data from LinkedIn supports it, so it’s no wonder. Even though we’ve written about the benefit of job hopping, ahem, career building, we know hiring managers make assumptions when they’re sitting across from a person who’s moved around a lot.

Welcome to “Negotiate This,” where we’re telling true stories of how collaborativenegotiation canexpandwhatispossible. We ask women entrepreneurs and leaders to share their stories of how creativity and collaborationled to successful deals. In these true stories, names have been changed so that storiescan be openly shared that include practical details of the negotiation.

It’s been said that the United States presidency is one of the most difficult jobs in the world. That may be true. But what have those that have assumed that role done in other parts of their careers? What other positions have they tackled outside of politics? Recently, CareerCast.com, a jobs and career information site, put together a list of jobs that presidents have held prior to and sometimes after holding the position of Commander and Chief.

Dear Liz, I need your advice on a situation I am facing at work. I work for “Jim” who is the Manager of Technical Communication. I write and edit software manuals and online help scripts among other things. I like my job. I have one big problem, though. My co-worker “Jenny” thinks she’s my boss, and she isn’t. She is a technical writer like me. She’s been in the company for two years and I’ve been here for one year.

You did everything you were told to do. You went to college, graduated with a “useful” degree, but then you started working in a field that didn’t appreciate you, your youth, or your creativity. Two years ago, that was me. I did what I was told to do. That is, until I felt a shift. It was the feeling that you get when you know that you are supposed to be doing more, supposed to be more, and serve a greater purpose.