Are You Really THAT Busy?

Long hours. . . are often more about proving something to ourselves than actually getting stuff done. --Jessica Stillman, Why Working More than 40 Hours a Week is Useless Over the past few years, I've come to realize that I have about 8-9 hours of work in me per day. That's it. Occasionally, if I'm really engrossed in a project, I can push for more, but usually I pay for... Read more →


Do You Want to Do the Hard Work of Knowing Yourself?

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 →


Changing Joyfully

Change is hard--or so we believe. But what if it isn't? What if we just make it that way because that's what we believe? Yesterday I was reading this post by Megan Thom who writes about how burnt out she was in her work. Until she had an epiphany that for change to happen she must make it joyful and bring to it her authentic self: In my burnt-out, disappointed... Read more →


Build Your Career on Three Hopeful Trends

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 →


Be a Career Inspiration, Not a Cautionary Tale

Throughout my working life, I've encountered people who made me think, "Kill me if I ever start acting and thinking that way." Generally these are people who are bitter and angry about their work, or who are so disengaged as to be practically dead. While I most notice those people who are aggressive about their career unhappiness, there are plenty of other people who simply disappear, I guess hoping to... Read more →


The Power of Positive Peers

Although we don't discuss it much, one of the most powerful influences on our personal and professional development is our peer groups. The people with whom we engage in regular conversations and interactions shape the questions that we ask, the problems that we see, how we approach our work and our sense of identity as professionals. One thing I've been paying more attention to in the past year is the... Read more →


3 Tips for Increasing the Awesome at Work

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 →


Tough Questions for Your Professional Development

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 →


Emotions and Your Career

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 →