Long-time readers of this blog know that I am a fervent advocate of the "Act/Reflect" cycle of career and professional development. And I know that failure to deal with both sides of this equation is one of your surest routes to stuck. Yesterday I stumbled across this article on the Harvard Business Review Blog on what to do when you don't know what to do. Boy, did it resonate! Career... Read more →

This morning I ran across an excellent post by Penelope Trunk on New Ways to Find a New Job. She began with what I think is probably the most important piece of career advice I could ever give you: When you see someone who has a career you want, it’s a safe bet that they spent the majority of their career clearly defining themselves and then differentiating themselves from all... Read more →

Last week I wrote about how to diagnose and treat your career stuck. This morning I was catching up on my Google Reader and came across this article on 10 Psychnological Keys to Job Satisfaction that I think offers some additional information for our use. First, here are the 10 keys: Little hassles Perception of fair pay Achievment Feedback Complexity and Variety Control Organizational Support Work/Home overflow Job "Honeymoons and... Read more →

As I dive ever deeper into the rabbit hole of what I call Positive Professional Development, I keep thinking about how to harness what's positive in our lives, rather than spending so much time with the negative. How do you increase the awesome? Today I was reading this blog post on hopeful trends for 2012 and it got me thinking about how to build a career on hopeful trends--what would... Read more →

Last night I did an Image Center session with a friend who is going through my Getting Unstuck course. I had her do two images--one that shows where she is now and one that shows where she'd like to be. Here's the image for where she is now: And here's the image for where she wants to be: It wasn't hard to figure out why she feels stuck. She has... Read more →

Last week I wrote about increasing the awesome vs. decreasing the suck and how I think that the only way to decrease what sucks is by focusing on what's awesome. Since then I've been thinking a lot about how to increase the awesome in my work life--what is it that we can do to bring the awesome? Here are three tips I came up with from noticing my own practice.... Read more →

Through a friend, I discovered the In Good Company blog and this excellent post on 5 tough questions entrepreneurs should be asking themselves. Reading through the questions, I thought they could easily be adapted to anyone, whether they work for themselves or for someone else, so here they are. Just replace "business" with "job" if you're working for someone else. 1: If you could wave a magic wand to instantly... Read more →

With my Career Clarity Camp, we're entering the home stretch and starting to integrate the lessons we've learned. One of the things we're working on this week is looking at the emotions we feel about the work we've been doing, which got me thinking about the power of emotions at work. Emotions at Work One thing I've learned about work is that being "professional" often (usually?) means being unemotional. On... Read more →

Tomorrow, I'll be starting a 7-day course on getting unstuck for people who may be feeling like they're getting nowhere fast. (Note--there are still slots available if this is you, so you may want to sign up.) As I'm pulling final pieces together for the class, I'm thinking about the "frames" we set up around being stuck--the stories we tell ourselves when we find ourselves in this situation. Often it's... Read more →

I'm at the end of Week 1 with my Career Clarity Camp and we're heading into Week 2, where we'll start to turn our career visions into some meaningful action. One thing I'm realizing as we go through this process is how often we sideline our dreams. We worry that we may fail in our efforts or that we will do something stupid or embarrassing. Sometimes we wait around for... Read more →