The Bamboo Project Blog

Managing Your Career When You Have More than One

One of the hardest questions for me to answer is "what do you do for a living?" Unlike most people I know, I don't have one, simple bite-sized nugget to describe what I do.  Depending on who you are, I might tell you that I do one or more of the following: 

• Help people work through career transitions and develop their career/professional development plans. 

• Work with government agencies and nonprofit organizations to help them develop programs and services that support unemployed and disadvantaged workers, such as people with disabilities. 

• Provide training and technical assistance on how to use social media for job search and to support workforce development programs. 

• Develop and facilitate leadership academies and training sessions.

• Facilitate communities of practice.

• Educate on reflective practices. 

You can see the connections between some of these "jobs", but some you can't see. As a self-employed professional, the work I do is largely based on the skills I've developed and places in the market where I've seen a need. At any given time, I'm doing work in several of these areas. 

Marci Alboher wrote a few years ago about One Person/Multiple Careers, referring to a phenomenon she called the "slash career"--people pursuing multiple careers simultaneously. Marci was a woman ahead of her time, as I believe increasingly many of us will be pursuing this kind of career path. While some of us may become hyper-specialists, others (like me) are building a multi-pronged career where we pursue multiple opportunities at the same time. 

For the most part, I think this is a positive. I diversify my funding streams this way and a "slash career"  keeps me fresh and exposes me to different people and different ways of viewing the world. This career path also keeps me from getting bored. 

But there are downsides too, like what to put on business cards and my LinkedIn profile?  How to build an "online brand" that doesn't confuse people? How to divide up my time and ongoing professional development so that I'm building skills that will help me in all these different areas? 

What is most challenging is helping other people to understand what I do when so many of us still have fixed in our heads the idea of a single career path or "job." People want to hear one single thing, like "I'm a nurse" or "I'm a career coach" or "I build bridges." It's hard for them to accept that you can be doing several different things at once. 

Many of us are going to have to figure this out though, because in a world of diminishing full-time "jobs," more of us are going to be pursuing the "slash career." It's going to be the key to our career growth and survival.  And honestly, it's a return to how things used to be--think Benjamin Franklin as your career role model. 

One book that helped me think through this a few years ago was The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One. Another was Refuse to Choose: Use All of Your Interests, Passions and Hobbies to to Create the Life and Career of Your Dreams. (A side note--why do all non-fiction book titles seem to require a colon? It's a trend that disturbs me.) 

At any rate, I'd love to hear from those of you who may be pursuing the Renaissance Man/Woman approach. How do you manage your different paths? How do you continue to grow and learn professionally, especially if your skill sets aren't particularly related? What do you love about your path? What do you struggle with? What do you think of the slash career as a professional strategy? 

Is Your Fear Sapping Your Passion?

This morning I'm re-reading Steven Pressfield's Do the Work. It's become a go-to-book when I need to remind myself how to start creative projects and move through the massive resistance I face whenever I want to bring something to life. 

Lately, I've been sifting through various options for where I want to go next, noticing that I've lost some of the passion that had fed what felt like awesome ideas only a few months ago. And then I read this: 

You may think that you've lost your passion, or that you can't identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true. 

Fear saps passion. (my emphasis)

When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustable well of passion. 

This is true. This is what happens. I will feel inside me a great excitement about a potential path and then, just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, the fear will rise inside of me.

If my creative project is a potential money-making venture, then most certainly the fear that it will NOT make money comes up first. This is followed by a whole host of other fears--that I will fail or look stupid, that others will react poorly or that it's not really a great idea after all. Also endless permutations of these basic fears. You know the drill.  It is the work of my "rational" mind (which I think is really just my nay-sayer mind) that can quickly overwhelm the initial thrill of knowing that I've hit on something important. 

Pressfield reminds me, though, that this fear is just part of Resistance (with a capital "R"). And that Resistance is an inevitable part of the creative process, an external force that rises up to meet us when we try to bring something great into the world. He says:

We can navigate Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or purpose that we must follow before all others. 

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. (my emphasis) 

The passion-sapping fear I feel is just a tool from the Resistance toolbox, a trick of the mind meant to dissaude me from pursuing those things that are most important for me to go after. 

Increasingly I realize that we all know in our hearts what we really want to do. But then Resistance sets in and saps the passion that would helps us move through to what we want. It uses its Jedi mind tricks of fear and distraction to keep us from creating what we know we want to create. 

This morning I'm working with my fears, using the List of 100 technique. Just recogizing the impact of fear on passion and getting those fears down on paper is doing wonders to restore me. 

How do your fears sap your passion? What happens if you work with your fears? That may be the best way to get the passion to return. 

Moving from "Or" to "And"

I've noticed that for many of us, careers are binary things--we do this job OR that one. I can work for someone else OR I can work for myself. 

Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, this either/or thinking made a lot of sense in a more stable world with relatively limited options. For good or ill, that world has changed though. There is little place for binary thinking. We need to move from careers based on "Or" thinking to careers that embrace "And" thinking. 

Try looking at some of the career decisions and issues you have before you. How might they be transformed by removing the word "or" and replacing it with "and"? 

Become Your Own "Job Creator"

Earlier this week I referenced an excellent article by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, Find a Job Using Disruptive Innovation. Their first piece of advice was to ask more and different questions. Their second suggestion was to start looking at the real jobs that need to be done, not at the jobs you once did: 

 . . . when people become aware of a "job" that they need to get done, they search for a product or service to "hire" for getting the job done effectively. Disruptive innovators grasp the "jobs-to-be-done" better than anyone else because they spend hours, days, and sometimes months watching people use products and services to fully understand the jobs that people are "hiring" products and services to do. Sometimes the jobs are surprising (like Christensen discovered when watching adults frequently "hire" a milkshake to do the job of not getting bored during a long commute). Often these observations pay off with ideas for new products and services better-suited for the job that needs to be done.

The same same approach can benefit you as a "job creator." Ask yourself what jobs-to-be-done do you care most about. Which ones are you most competent at? Or, which ones are the companies your targeting in your job search willing to hire you to do?

Set aside time to systematically create richer, deeper insights about jobs-to-be-done. Spend a half day a week just watching, taking notes, and if appropriate, videotaping or photographing people using different products and services that are interesting to you (or with the products of targeted companies in your job search). As you watch, constantly ask, "what's surprising or unexpected?" to help you discover new features, products, or services that might do the jobs even better, distinguishing you from other job candidates.

While sometimes it makes sense for you to consider your career moves in the context of what's currently available, increasingly I think that we need to take more of a "job creation" approach--looking for the intersection between problems and needs and our own skills, talents and passions. It may be that we are creating freelance opportunities for ourselves or we may be looking at creating new positions within companies or organizations.  Either way, we are thinking about how we can create our own work, rather than just doing the work that is presented to us. 

Here are some resources that can help you get started on being your own job creator:

• Future-Proofing Your Career
• Three Ways to Create Your Own Job
• Can't Find a Dream Job? Create Your Own
• 5 Steps to Creating Your Own Job
• When Jobs are Scarce, Create Your Own
• 8 Steps to Getting What You Want Without Formal Credentials

Quit Looking for Answers. Start Managing Your Career with Better Questions

One thing I've noticed in my 15+ years of helping people figure out what they want to be when they grow up is how uncomfortable we are with questions. Despite the fact that the questions we ask inevitably shape the results and opportunities we find, we are so focused on answers, we don't pay attention to asking the right questions. Nor do we pay attention to how our questions can help us frame new opportunities. 

I'm a big believer in managing your career with questions. I think it is by grappling with our questions that we come to true insight and clarity about our journey. But we need to get better at asking powerful questions and make questioning a regular career habit. 

What is a Powerful Question?

The Art of Powerful Questions says that a powerful question:

• Generates curiosity in the listener.
• Stimulates reflective conversation.
• Is thought-provoking.
• Surfaces underlying assumptions.
• Invites creativity and new possibilities.
• Generates energy and forward movement.
• Channels attention and focuses inquiry.
• Touches a deep meaning
• Evokes more questions. 

For me, I know when I've hit on the "right" question when I feel an urgency to explore and answer it OR when I feel huge resistance about dealing with it. Often that resistance is a sign that I REALLY need to deal with that particular question!

If the question feels "dead"--if I get a "been there, done that" response to the question, then I know I haven't found a question that's really powerful for me. I need to keep exploring and tinkering until I get it right. 

Some Resources for Exploring Questions and Your Career

If you're looking for some help in getting started with using questions for career management and exploration, check out some of these resources: 

• The Art of Powerful Questions--written for the World Cafe community, this is an excellent guide to developing your own powerful questions. Hint: ask more "why," "how" and "what" questions.

• The Question Log--keep track of your questions and look for trends and themes. 

• The Power of the Positive Question--use positive questions to create more of what you want. 

• Working with the Questions--use different types of questions to explore various aspects of your career. 

• Questions to Compose Your Working Identity--explore your career as a form of identity.

• 12 Professional Development Questions--although developed for companies, these questions also apply to individuals. 

• If You Do Not Work on Important Questions, You Will Not Do Important Work--break free from the tyranny of the small question. 

• The Reflective Practice Series--a whole host of questions and ideas for creatively exploring questions for learning and professional development. 

Another techniqe to try is what Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregerson, in their recent Harvard Business Review article Find a Job Using Disruptive Innovation , call "questionstorming": 

Take four minutes a day to write down nothing but questions about your job search. Doing this consistently for thirty days will take you down new paths as your questions change and your patterns of action follow. For example, an executive in his mid-thirties and in a career transition began by asking "How can I make a bucket of money?" Over time, that question changed to "What will make me happy for the long term?" Which then changed to "How do I create something for the long term?" As a result, he's moved into different kinds of job interviews, landing one with a big multinational company that otherwise would never have happened had he not changed his question.

Questionstorming can be combined with the Question Log to give you some really powerful insights. 

Finally, many of the people I work with have had great success in using visuals to explore their career questions. It's the idea behind my Career Clarity Image sessions, where you can work with up 3 big questions--which usually leads to more and deeper questions. And ultimately some clarity. 

Questioning is a Fundamental Career Management Skill

I'm increasingly finding that developing your skills in the art of the question is one of the best investments in your career you can make. Not only do powerful questions help you gain clarity about your own career, the ability to ask and use powerful questions in other facets of your professional life is a cornerstone for success.  Focusing on answers is easy in the age of Google. It's the questions that really make the difference. 

Your Career is a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder

. . . look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they're going to give you. Do real work. Take a sales quota, a line role, an ops job. Don't plan too much, and don't expect a direct climb. If I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed my career.

                                   -- Sheryl Sandberg

As we leave May and enter June, it's that time of year when graduation speakers give us their best advice. (My favorite graduation speech of all time is Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford talk, by the way.) 

This year, it was Sheryl Sandberg's speech at Harvard Business School that caught my eye with her recommendation to treat your career like a jungle gym, not a ladder. That is, to forget the upward climb to the corner office and embrace a more networked career where you are likely to move down a step, then across, then up and then across again. The focus is not on job titles and "building your resume,"  but on developing skills and engaging in experiences that you can take with you across industries and occupational titles. 

 As we go from the 20-year career to a 4-year career, this is advice I think we need to take to heart--especially those of us who remember a time when people had 20-year careers. We live in a hyper-connected, fast-paced world where it's virtually impossible to predict your career trajectory with any assurance. Some of the jobs with the fastest growth didn't even exist 10 years ago, so "planning" for a career becomes even more difficult to do. 

The best we can do to stay on top of things is to be flexible and to focus on developing skills that transfer into different jobs and industries.  As we climb that jungle gym of our work, we need to look for opportunities to re-package our skills and experiences in ways that bring us meaning and engagement, as well as solve problems for our potential employers. 

Career ladders are dead for most of us. We are dealing with jungle gym careers. But at least jungle gyms are more fun.