The Bamboo Project Blog

Career Resilience Success Story: An Interview with Sheri Ponzi

One of the things I decided to do as I began exploring the concept of career resilience was to begin collecting stories from people about how they've applied the 4 patterns of reslience (Clarifying, Connecting, Creating and Coping) to their own work lives.

To that end, I put out a call on my social networks for volunteers who were willing to share their stories and one of the first people I heard back from was Sheri Ponzi, an artist, teacher and guide running several online programs.  

As part of my plan to continue stretching myself, we decided to get together for a Google Hangout interview to talk about Sheri's career path and her experiences in developing resilience through the "4 C's." Although there were some audio issues (for which I apologize) Sheri's story is really instructive for those of us looking to develop our own career resilience.

For me, there were a few key takeways from the discussion:

• Sheri's "career crisis" came about in part because she had stopped paying attention to the 4 patterns and they basically caught up with her. This to me is more evidence that we need to work with these patterns on a regular basis. 

• Sheri has made particularly strong use of the Connecting pattern, both as a way for her to develop her own personal resilience, but also as a career/business strategy. Her online courses bring together several instructors, each of whom contribute their own particular assets to the projects. Sheri is making it win/win for everyone.  This idea of looking at how to build relationships and collaborate with others as being key to resilience is something I talked about in my recent post on limiting beliefs and Sheri's experience reinforced its importance to me. 

• Connecting can also be a powerful way to help other people develop their own patterns of resilience. Sheri talks about how by bringing people together for her online course, she's now seeing them go off to teach courses on their own. A lovely virtuous cycle. 

• Sheri has made great use of the Clarifying pattern, too, focusing on her own strengths and assets and then looking at how she could use technology and her connections to create her own employment opportunities. Her's is an excellent example of how all of these patterns can interact together to synthesize the right option for you. 

• Sometimes you have clarity, but you need courage to take the next step. For many people, courage is forced upon us when we have to face a huge challenge in our lives. But if you meet the challenge head-on, with clarity, then you can create something that's amazing. 

Talking with Sheri and hearing her story was a really powerful lesson for me. Hopefully it will help you learn more about resilience too. 

Related articles

Do You Network to Build Your Career Resilience or to Get Your Work Done?

Career Resilience in Action

Career Resilience for Entrepreneurs

Reader Question: Tech is Eating My Job, So Now What?

Tech Is Eating My Job, So Now What Do I Do? from Michele Martin on Vimeo.

In response to yesterday's post on how technology is eating your job, Deborah Gabriel commented:

So, Michele, I cannot argue with your research data as mine confirms it. What I want to hear are solutions.

Solutions are what interest me, too, so I went to video to explain how I think we, as individuals, can deal with the this issue in our careers.

Some Resources

For Clarifying and Connecting

• The G+ Technological Unemployment Community

• Martin Ford's Blog

• Andrew McAfee's Blog

For Creating

• In A Whole New Mind (book summary), Dan Pink suggests 6 right-brain "senses" that humans do well and that we should build upon. This is a good starting point for creating a plan--which of these skills could you develop? 

• Consider these 3 ways to create your own job 

• Look at this advice on job crafting. 

• Check out 5 Ways to Find Work When There Are No Jobs, which offers some additional good advice.

I'd love to hear from you on this topic. Who are your "Go-To" people for staying on top of all things technological (not just social media)? Which are your favorite sites? What else can we do to deal with the impact of technology on our careers? 

Technology is Eating Your Job (Part 2)--For Those Who Need More Convincing

Last Friday, I wrote about how technology is eating your job. Since then, I've been immersed in further exploring the extent to which this is true and finding more resources to convince you that this is one of the most critical trends impacting your career today. 

First, if you care at all about the future of your job, I encourage you to watch Andrew McAfee's TEDXTalk in Boston above. It provides a compelling summary of how technology is impacting employment and will be the best 15 minutes you can invest in yourself today.  (Here's a link to a blog post about his February TEDTalk appearance, that builds on the video above.) 

I want to pull from it an important chart that you need to pay attention to: 

This is the projected number of people coming into the labor force contrasted with the number of projected jobs that will be available.

As you can see, for the forseeable future, these lines do not meet. In fact, they get futher apart. 

And McAfee argues that he's being optimistic in predicting the number of available jobs in the future because he's basing his predictions on the past. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that, in this case, the past is not a good predictor of the future.   We're on the leading edge of the technology revolution and just beginning to feel the real impacts. 

I also want to point you to some other ways that software and robots are taking over the intellectual tasks we have traditionally considered to be the exclusive domain of humans (from The Rise of Our Robot Overlords). These are important because I think they give you a flavor for the breadth and scope of these changes. We now have: 

• Software grading essays (Teachers, pay attention) 

• Software that can spot trends in big data and write stories about it.  (Writers of all stripes, are you listening?)

• A robot scientist that can formulate and test hypotheses, doing the work of dozens of lab techs and assistants in the process. (Hello, STEM careers) 

And this is just the beginning. As McAfee points out in his TEDTalk, imagine what we'll have when we're able to put together the technology of Siri with the technology of Watson. I don't think we can even begin to fathom the possibilities there. 

What concerns me about all this is that I'm afraid we have "a failure of imagination," as Daniel Lemire describes it. It's hard for us to envision a future where machines do most of the work.

Right now, I think this is partially because we are currently picturing robots taking over our jobs, in a future reminiscent of The Jetsons. Since we don't see too many robots in our daily life, it's easy for us to say "Oh, technology isn't going to impact MY job." But I'm not so sure it's the robot you need to worry about at this juncture (although that's coming.) I think it's the increasingly sophisticated software that is everywhere, including on that smartphone in your pocket. 

And here's something else we rarely discuss, but that is very real and one of the reasons I think we need to be concerned here. Aside from their obvious abilities to perform the tasks,  machines don't have the messy complications of humans, like personal lives and responsiblities or the need to sleep, eat and re-charge.

Machines don't want a vacation.

They don't call off sick or come in late because their kid had croup. 

They don't argue with co-workers.

They aren't passive-aggressive, or jealous or lazy. 

Then don't dress inappropriately, make rude comments or harass other workers. 

They don't complain about their work load or about having to work on weekends

They don't ask for a raise.

In short, machines have that much touted "work ethic," that so many employers complain humans are lacking.

Think about it. If you were a business owner and could buy a machine for $30k that could easily learn new tasks and work for you 24/7 without complaint, what would you do? Hire a person to do that work? I don't think so. 

Finally, we need to pay attention to the fact that there has been a decline in overall demand for cognitive skills that has been going on since 2000. From a recent paper, The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks:

Many researchers have documented a strong, ongoing increase in the demand for skills in the decades leading up to 2000. In this paper, we document a decline in that demand in the years since 2000, even as the supply of high education workers continues to grow. We go on to show that, in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together.

This is partially why a B.A. is now a ticket to a job in a coffee house. Education isn't the panacea we're all claiming that it is. 

In my work over the years as a career coach, I've found that the majority of people do little to really manage their careers until they are hit by some kind of bomb. Sometimes it's being laid off or fired that creates the impetus for change. Sometimes it's when the person can't take it anymore. 

The reason I'm harping on technology so much is because for most of us, I believe this is a ticking time bomb we are trying to ignore. Most of us want to keep our heads down and just keep working, hoping that we aren't going to be the ones displaced by a piece of software or some other form of automation.

This will be a mistake. And it will blow up in your face. You need to start thinking now about how to future-proof yourself as much as possible so that you're more prepared for this breaking wave of technology. 

Some Additional Resources

(Thanks to Matthew Price for these links)

• The G+ Technological Unemployment Community--This group is constantly posting new examples and discussing the implications of technology, particularly for knowledge workers.  

• Technological Unemployment Resources--A Google doc with tons of links collected by the G+ Technological Unemployment community. 

• Lights in the Tunnel--Martin Ford's book on the topic and his excellent blog with more links/reading  is here. 

• Andrew McAfee's Blog

• Part One of this discussion, with more links. 

 

Related articles

Clarifying Your Career Path: Technology is Eating Your Job

The Four Patterns that Should Guide All Your Career Moves

5 Limiting Beliefs About Our Careers We Need to Change

Video Blog 1--Limiting Beliefs - Computer from Michele Martin on Vimeo.

I'm taking my own medicine--doing some experimenting and taking a bit of a risk-- so today's blog post is a video where I go over 5 limiting beliefs that get in the way of your career in today's economy and the alternative beliefs we need to put in their place. 

I also want to point you to this post on 3 ways to create your own opportunities. 

Let me know in comments what you think of these beliefs and any other limiting beliefs you think we need to let go of in order to be more resilient in today's economy. 

Clarifying Your Career Path: Technology is Eating Your Job

This may be the one of the most important career posts I've ever written. I urge you to read it, even if you don't think it applies to you. 

This morning I was tagged in a G+ conversation that linked to this article on the impact of technology in the workplace. It got me thinking, once again, about how technology is transforming the workplace. 

One of the things I've been harping on for awhile now is that as individual workers, we need to be paying better attention to technological changes that are coming our way. This is a HUGE part of the clarifying pattern we need to be developing for career resilience. 

Here's the thing. Clarifying is about looking at how your strengths and skills and passions intersect with what's happening in the job market. As technology continues to transform work and occupations, one area we need to be evaluating continuously is what technology is able to do and how that might impact what we currently do in our jobs.

Stop Underestimating the Impact of Technology on Your Job

If I've learned anything in the past 20 years, it's that the elimination of jobs due to technology keeps creeping up on us. We seem to consistently underestimate the consequences of technological change when it comes to our employment.

One minute people are happily doing their jobs. The next, entire occupations are decimated by new software capabilities or robotics. How long did it take for travel agents to essentially disappear once you were able to book your own travel online? What about all the distribution center workers who are out of work because robots can manage with only 20 human workers? 

Technology is disrupting entire INDUSTRIES--hello Blockbuster, Kodak and every newspaper on the planet--so of course it's going to change your job. You have to start anticipating the changes, though, rather than assuming that technology isn't going to impact you and then having your world turned upside down when it does. 

A couple of examples. . . Right now, drivers of all stripes--cabbies, truck drivers--should be re-thinking their careers because within 5 years, I predict that Google's driverless car is going to put them out of business. Or, at a minimum, drastically reduce both their employment numbers and their wages. 

And teachers, you should be concerned too. Work with robot teachers is showing that they can achieve the results of most human teachers in terms of learning gains and in some cases, the kids actually prefer the robots, as they are more patient and can explain the topic in multiple ways. As artificial intelligence continues to improve, this trend could (will) start to accelerate. 

While we're speaking of teachers, we don't need robots to replace workers to completely disrupt an industry. Technology can impact in other ways. The rise of MOOCs (massive open online courses) could be just as devastating to the employment of teachers as any robot. If it works at the university level, it's only a matter of time before the same model works its way down to the secondary and elementary level--perhaps aided by robot TAs. 

Technology WILL Change What You Do and How Much You're Paid to Do It and May Eliminate Your Job Altogether

I say all of this because I think that as individual workers, we are terrible at thinking through how technology might impact our jobs. Unless the technological change is explicitly happening in our industry or occupation, we tend to ignore it. This is a huge mistake. 

And don't be fooled into thinking that if an industry is growing, that means jobs are growing within that industry. Over the past few years, for example, we've heard about the resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S.. What isn't talked about as much is that this growth in the industry isn't translating into more jobs. That's because robotics and software are doing most of the heavy lifting. Just because an industry seems to be going gangbusters, doesn't mean that jobs are abundant. 

For us to be truly resilient in our careers, we must start educating ourselves more consistently on general technology trends and how these could start disrupting the industries and occupations we work in.  Here's an example of what I mean. Read this from How the Internet Made Us Poor: 

In a gleaming new warehouse in the old market town of Rugley, England, Amazon directs the actions of hundreds of “associates” wielding hand-held computers. These computers tell workers not only which shelf to walk to when they’re pulling goods to be shipped, but also the optimal route by which to get there. Each person’s performance is monitored, and they are given constant feedback about whether or not they are performing their job quickly enough. Their bosses can even send them text messages via their handheld computers, urging them to speed up. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” one manager at Amazon’s warehouse told the Financial Times. “It’s human automation, if you like.”

Now let's apply this to nurses in a hospital. Imagine them walking around with hand-held computers that give them feedback on each patient hooked up to wireless monitors that track everything going on in the patient's body (smart pills will come into play here too). Nurses are able to administer medications, monitor vital signs, etc. on multiple patients through these devices. Bosses can monitor how efficiently they are carrying out their duties and send them messages urging them to speed things up. You may think this won't happen, but I promise you that it already is. 

In general, when it comes to technology, you should assume that if your job involves routine processing of information aided by computer software, then either that job is virtually going to be eliminated (think travel agents and administrative assistants) or there is going to be HUGE downward pressure on wages--neither of which is good for you. 

Don't assume that this applies only to "lower-level" jobs either. One of the reasons we're seeing massive reductions in employment for lawyers is because software can now more efficiently and effectively do the routine document reviews and filings once done by entry-level attorneys. By one estimate, one attorney can do the work of 500 lawyers now.

Another way to think about it--If your job involves telling a computer what to do (think programmers), then you are in pretty good shape. If a computer is telling you what to do, start planning for something else. 

The push for profits and productivity is going to continue to drive the spread of technology. We will not be putting the technology genie back in the bottle. The issue for you is to start thinking NOW about how you're going to respond.

• Do you need to start looking for another occupation, beginning the re-training process now, rather than when you get laid off? 

• Do you need to start developing additional skill sets that will help you adapt to changes that may be coming your way and that would make you more valuable in a technology-enhanced occupation? 

• Is self-employment an area you need to explore, recognizing that entrepreneurs and owners of capital will be the winners in a technology-enhanced future? 

Technology is happening. How are you going to respond? 

A Technology and Jobs Reading List

If you want to dive more deeply into this topic, here are some resources to get you started:

• How the Internet Made Us Poor
• Job Fight: Haves vs. the Have Nots
• Better Than Human: Why Robots Will-And Must-Take Our Jobs
• Holy Hal!  A Robot Stole My Job!
• 60 Minutes: Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?  (answer--yes they are)
• The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers from the Rise of Robots
• The Age of Big Data
• Are You Prepared for the Internet of Things?
• UPDATE--Harold Jarche's bookmarks for "Automated and Outsourced"
• UPDATE--The Tech Debate Blasts Off: A Linkfest

Also, I would highly recommend doing some google searches on technology and your industry. Try searching on:

• "robotics and (your industry)"
• "robots and (your industry)"
• "nanotechnology and (your industry)"
• "automation and (your industry)"

 

Technology-Proofing Yourself

And here are some resources to help you keep yourself relevant and employed in a technology-enhanced world. 

• A Whole New Mind--Although Dan Pink's book is 7 years old now, it still has some important things to say about how to technology-proof yourself for work.

• Future-Proofing Your Career

• Managing Your Career When You Have More than One--Think multiple income streams and self-employment instead of full-time, permanent job. 

• Become Your Own Job Creator--How to take advantage of disruptive trends.

• Future Work Skills 2020

• Build Your Career On Three Hopeful Trends

 

UPDATE--Here's another link to add to your reading list from Harold Jarche--The Post Job Economy.  Thanks to Marco Campana for the link. 

A huge part of developing your career resilience is paying attention to what's going on in your external environment. Technology is one of the biggest trends likely to impact your career. You need to start thinking now about how you're going to respond.  And you need to put some structures into place that let you keep up with how technology could change what you're doing in the future. Otherwise, you're going to be caught in the technology squeeze that has left us with more job seekers than available jobs. 

HERE'S THE LINK TO PART 2 IN THIS SERIES

Career Resilience for Entrepreneurs

 

Regular readers know that I'm a strong proponent of working for yourself. Even if you have a day-job, I think you should always be looking for ways to diversify your income streams as the next lay-off could be right around the corner, despite your best efforts. 

Yesterday's post on career resilience in action got me thinking about how the 4 patterns of resilience apply to those who run their own business(es). These patterns are not just for people who work for someone else. They're patterns that support successful self-employment too. 

Clarifying

The Clarifying pattern when you work for yourself is something you must constantly be working on.

• What is going on with your customers and the industries you are working in? 

• How do your strengths and assets intersect with these trends? 

• What are the most important priorities for you and your business? 

• How do you want your business to reflect your values and the values of your customers?  

Clarity of purpose, clarity of assets and clarity of goals are all critical to the healthy functioning of your business.

As a small business owner myself, I find that I must be intentional about integrating patterns for finding clarity into my work life. It's easy to be so caught up in projects and business administration that I forget the need to periodically take a step back and get clear about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. This is where rituals and reflective practice become important.

Clarity can also be found in making the right kinds of connections and creating mastermind groups for support and accountability. 

Connecting

Clearly the Connecting pattern is critical to small business owners--this is how we find our customers and connecting to others to market our products and services is like breathing for most successful entrepreneurs. We do it without thinking. 

What may happen less often, but be equally important, is using the pattern of connecting to support other aspects of our work. 

As small business people, particularly if we are solo entrepreneurs, we need to make connections that can reinforce our personal and professional growth and that feed our need for social contact. We need to find mentors, communities of practice and mastermind groups who can challenge our thinking and hold us accountable for achieving our goals.

We also need connections that can help us cooperate to compete--people who may offer complementary (or even competitive) products and services with whom we can build new offerings that benefit both their businesses and our own. 

Connections from diverse industries and occupations are also important. They feed us new information, new ideas and new possibilities. But we must seek them out because they won't necessarily come naturally to us. 

We can use our clarifying activities to help us get clearer about where we need to build and strengthen our connections. Then we can be intentional about growing those connections as my friend is doing through her own career resilience work. This is an example of the next pattern we need to work on--Creating. 

Creating

Most successful small business people I know are pretty good at the Creating pattern. After all, without creating, you have nothing to sell. 

But Creation is more than just daily doing and activity. It's also about risk-taking and experimenting.

• How are we stretching ourselves in the creative process to bring something truly great into the world? 

• How are we using what we learn through Clarifying and Connecting to create a business that plays to our strengths and that achieves the goals we've set for ourselves? 

• How are we dealing with and learning from failure? 

The Creating pattern is also about making sure that we've put into place for ourselves the right structures and supports for getting our work done.

• Are we constantly putting out fires or do we have an infrastructure in place that allows us to be more deliberative and intentional in accomplishing our work? 

• Are things falling through the cracks and are we missing opportunities or have we created processes that allow the work to flow?

Our patterns of creating should be structured around inspiration and purpose, not just around our daily to-do lists. For this to happen, though, we must be intentional in developing patterns that allow us to create from a place of inspiration, not desperation. 

Coping

In my dealings with other small business people, as well as in looking at my own life, I see that developing patterns for Coping is probably the area where we entrepreneurs can have the most holes. 

There is a cult of entrepreneurship that drives us to believe that working for yourself means working 24/7, which makes taking care of your emotional, physical and spiritual needs a very low priority. This is true particularly when our businesses are new or if we've failed to put into place the right structures for Creating, Clarifying and Connecting. 

But creating healthy Coping patterns is critical if we hope to run our businesses for the long-term. Making sure that we nurture and sustain those non-work parts of ourselves will prevent burnout. And healthy coping patterns also feed our capacity to engage with the other 3 patterns of resilience. 

In particular I've found that healthy Coping mechanisms are about what I call "following the energy,"--that is, paying attention to how we're feeling throughout the day so that can see which activities and people feed and nurture us and which of these are a drain. Emotions are a powerful indicator of what is and isn't working, but we need to pay attention to them in order to address what they are telling us. 

Coping is also about paying attention to our mental frames--the stories we are telling ourselves about our business and ourselves. Resilient business people need to focus on developing frames that support our business plans, while weeding out those thinking and behavior patterns that hinder us. 

I find that as an entrepreneur myself, I'm constantly having to look at the 4 patterns of resilience and how I'm using/developing them in support of my business. When things don't seem to be going as smoothly, by examining what's happening with these patterns I can quickly see where I need to do some work. 

Resilience is something we all need to develop, but for entrepreneurs, this is probably job one.

How are you, as an entrepreneur developing your career and business resilience? Which areas of resilience are easy for you and which are harder for you to develop? 

Career Resilience in Action

 

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend who started a solo business last year. I was sharing with her my thinking about career resilience and the 4 patterns of success, describing each in more detail. 

When we got to Connecting, she grew thoughtful. "I don't think I've been doing a lot with the Connecting pattern," she told me. "I've been focused on Clarifying and Creating and have let some of my connecting fall by the wayside."

As we talked further, what became clear was while she'd been doing some connecting, she'd been missing a crucial group--people who are still in the trenches of the field where she is working. And she was missing their practical, day-to-day experiences in terms of challenges, aspirations, etc. This is important to her business as well as to her own personal/professional development. 

From there, as the resilient busineess owner she is, she moved into what to do about it. 

She decided that she was going to come up with a plan to reach out to some people and invite them for coffee, just to pick their brains and share ideas. A few days later, she sent me the draft of an email she wanted to send out and she has begun putting her plan into action. 

My friend is a great example of how to work with the patterns of career resilience. She looked at the 4 patterns and how she was applying them in her work life. She saw that there was an area where she needed to do more work  and then came up with a plan to address it.

If you look closely, you see that she was actually using the patterns of resilience to come up with a resilience action plan. She used Clarifying to identify where she needed to make some changes and then Creating to develop the plan to make the changes. 

Another critical element of this story is that she followed up. The Creating pattern with its focus on action and follow-up is one of the most important patterns we can strengthen in developing our resilience. I see so many people (myself included) who recognize a need to take action, but who let that action fall by the wayside as other, competing priorities take precedence. But it's only in the Creating that we truly see change. 

Career resilience is a process. It is not a once and done thing, but an ongoing strategy for approaching our career and professional development. My friend's experience with looking at how the patterns were playing out in her life currently clearly demonstrates how this works. 

You can see as well that the patterns apply not only to employees and job seekers, they also apply to business owners. They too must develop and strengthen their resilience patterns in order to keep their businesses on track. 

For me, it was gratifying to see how my friend worked with the patterns of resilience. She's someone I admire for her ongoing committment to development and it was interesting to see how the resilience framework gave her another way to think about what she needed to do for herself. 

How are you applying the 4 patterns of resilience in your life? Which pattern do you need to work on some more? 

Building Resilience: The 5 Stages of Deliberate Change

Building your career resilience is an intentional, deliberate process. Leaving it up to chance is a recipe for failure. But what's the process for making change happen? 

In The Joy of Appreciative Living (a book I can't recommend highly enough), Jacqueline Kelm lays out 5 stages for deliberative change that I think are instructive for those of us looking to become more resilient. 

1. Awareness

To make a change, you must first become aware that change is necessary. When it comes to resilience, you become aware that something has to change in your approach to your career. Maybe you find that you're on your 3rd layoff in as many years. Or you realize that you're in a constant state of anxiety over work. Somehow, the need for change pushes its way into your consciousness. It's the awareness phase that sets the stage. 

2. Commitment

After you become aware of a situation, the next phase is commitment. You must decide to make things happen. 

Often I find that people become aware that change is necessary, but instead of committing to making a change, they push the awareness out of their consciousness--they go into denial.  

Another response I've seen with people is that they assume that they have little control over their lives--that there are no actions to take, so commitment to change is not going to accomplish anything.

But awareness is not enough to make change happen. You must commit to change in order to move to the next phase. 

3. Action

Once you've committed to making a change, you must now take actions that support the change you want to see. 

This is another area where I see people having some problems. They know there's an issue, they are committed to making changes, but then they don't take action to make those changes a reality. 

Often this is because they aren't sure what actions to take. Fear or confusion holds them back.

But lack of action can also be a sign of the resistance that accompanies every act of creation.  Steven Pressfield, in Do the Work, argues that Resistance (with a capital "R") is the enemy of everything we do to create something new in the world. It is an external force that inevitably rises up to meet us when we strive to do something great. 

Without action, though, we cannot build resilience. It is through action that we start to see the shifts in ourselves that are nessary to meet the challenges of the workplace. 

4. Acclimation

Assuming that we've begun to act, things will start to change around us so we must acclimate to the new reality we are creating for ourselves. This means adjusting to the new and letting go of the old. 

This acclimation phase can be challenging, particularly in terms of releasing what no longer serves us. Often the changes we are pursuing will point out all of the old ways of being and doing that were unconscious before. 

During the acclimation phase, we become more aware of old patterns and beliefs that we must let go of and we begin to see what the new patterns are creating in our lives. These new patterns will require us to adapt again. 

I also find that during acclimation, we can struggle with feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Are we making good choices? Are we looking "stupid"? Are people judging us for the changes that we're making and how does that impact what we do? 

Acclimation is the uncertain phase when we're caught between the old and the new. If we keep up with the changes, then that leads us to the final phase--Realization. 

5. Realization

This is the final stage of intentional change, when we've succeeded in creating new patterns of behavior. It becomes easier for us to make the right choices and to live the new patterns without having to think all the time about what we're doing. 

This is also when we can more consistently reap the rewards of the changes we've made. Enough momentum has built up that we are in the flow of a new way of being in the world. 

To build the four patterns of resilience--Clarifying, Connecting, Creating and Coping--we must be intentional about the change proceess. These patterns don't happen by accident. We must coax them into being through a conscious process of development. 

What phase of resilience are you in? Are you stuck in a phase and need to move to the next level? How will you do that today? 

Do You Network to Build Your Career Resilience or to Get Your Work Done?

I'm currently facilitating an 8-month long leadership course that meets monthly. Yesterday's topic was networking and connecting. As part of our work, I had them go through some exercises to look at their networks and diagnose where they had gaps and needed to do some more work. 

What started to emerge as we went throught the exercise was how many of the participants network and connect on behalf of their companies, but they pay little attention to building connections that support their own career resilience and professional development plans. Connecting, for them, is about connecting to benefit their companies, which may or may not actually benefit them. 

When we think about building our networks, clearly we need to pay attention to developing the connections that allow us to be successful in our jobs. We need to connect with customers and clients and people in our industries so that we're able to be effective in our work. 

However, we need to understand that the connections that we make on behalf of our companies or organizations are not necessarily the connections we need to make to increase our own career resilience. We should never confuse what our company needs us to do with with we need to do for ourselves. 

Connecting to build your resilience means developing connections that energize, nurture and challenge you, connections that help you grow personally and professionally, regardless of whether or not those connections get your company more business.  You need mentors, communities of practice, and "way-showers"--people who can be role-models and supporters of your career and personal growth. 

So here's your challenge for today. Go through your contacts and ask yourself if the people you're connected to are basically connections who benefit your company or organization, or are they connections that also help you grow and adapt to change? 

Career Resilience Requires Persistence

 

Last week I wrote about career resilience and the need for us to develop four patterns in our work lives:

• Clarifying
• Connecting
• Creating
• Coping

One thing that I've observed about resilient people is that they persist. Even when things are at their worst or it seems like they are going nowhere, resilient people are persistent people. As Steve Pavlina puts it, "they press on, even when they feel like quitting."

Persistence is one of the major Coping patterns we need to develop in our lives if we ever hope to be truly resilient. Without persistence, we won't be able to work on any of the other patterns we need to grow in ourselves, because honestly, developing career resilience isn't always easy work. 

The problem with persistence is that it's not terribly sexy. It's the daily, weekly, monthly grind of self-discipline, of slogging through mud when we feel like just giving up. Believe me, I struggle with persistence all the time, so I know it's not an easy thing to do. 

But resilience requires persistence. It takes diligence to forge new habits and self discipline to bring our vision into reality. The essence of reslience is not giving up. Persistence is what makes sure that we don't. 

Where do we need to show persistence? I think in two ways--persistence of vision and persistence of action. 

Persistence of vision is having a clear image of where we want to go--direction, not necessarily destination. Persistence of vision is what drives us to create, to the actions that we need to take to move forward. 

Persistence of action is even more important, though, because this is often where we fall down. We may have a persistent vision of where we want to go, but we fail to take the steps to actually get there.---especially if we encounter obstacles or challenges along the way that make us want to give up. 

So how to develop our persistence muscles? Probably the best advice I've seen on this comes from this post by Todd Warren (quoting Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich). We need to have:

1. "A definite purpose backed by burning desire for its fulfillment"

2. "A definite plan backed by continuous action." 

3.  "A mind closed tightly against all negative and discouraging influences, including negative suggestions of relatives, friends and acquaintances."

4.  "A friendly alliance with one or more persons who will encourage one to follow through with both plan and purpose."

 

A purpose, motivation to achieve that purpose, a plan that turns into action, a positive mind and supportive people--that's what we need to practice persistence. And these are the tools of career resilience, too.