Positive Professional Development Tool: Career Stepping Stones

In our ongoing career and professional development, there are times when it's helpful to look at our past. It may be that we're bored and contemplating a change. We may have been laid off and had change thrust upon us. Even as part of our ongoing reflective practice, mining our past experiences can give us great fodder for the future. One way to look at your past is to use... 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 →


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 →


Working with the Questions

Last week I wrote that one of the key 21st century skills I think we need is a more advanced capacity for questions. Questions are a topic I've explored frequently here and they are a skill I'm trying to develop in myself for both professionald and personal reasons. Tenneson Wolf has an excellent post on different types of questions that can be asked that I think provides us with some... Read more →


Are You the Cause or the Effect?

Accountabilty is the willingness to acknowledge that we have participated in creating, through comission or ommision, the conditions that we wish to see changed. Without this capacity to see ourselves as cause, our efforts become either coercive or wishfully dependent on the transformation of others. Community will be created the moment we decide to act as creators of what it can become. This requires us to believe that this organization,... Read more →


Intuition, Scarcity and Experimentation

When I first started planning several months ago for more seriously offering career clarity and professional development workshops, one of the things I was considering was pricing. What do I offer and how do I price it? At one point a thought popped into my head. I could offer everything I do for free, asking people to only pay after they received the service according to how much value they... Read more →


Acting, Reflecting and the Cycle of Learning

Most of us, if we're honest, work like this: Act-->Act-->Act We rush from task to task, often trying to multi-task in a vain attempt to be more productive, with barely room to breathe in our frantic days. The problem with this cycle, from a learning perspective, is that when we're constantly acting, we can't learn from our experiences. There's no space to ask what's working, what isn't and what can... Read more →


How Do You Know When You're Stuck?

I've been writing a lot lately about positive professional development, trying to think differently about how we approach our own learning and growth. But it occurs to me that for many of us, thinking about career and professional growth can be tough if we're feeling stuck in our current careers. All this "positive" stuff can start to sound like the manic ramblings of a crazy person. Who has TIME for... Read more →


Positive Professional Development Online Day Camps

UPDATE! The Postivie Professional Development Online Day Camps are filled as of July 13, but I'm starting a waiting list in case anyone ends up dropping out. If you're still interested in attending, fill out this form and I will add you to the list. You can also complete the form if you are interested in attending, but can't make these particular dates/times. Depending on interest, I may look at... Read more →