The One Career Tip That Changes Everything
As a HR manager and career development coach, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of entrepreneurs and employees from all ethnicities, backgrounds, levels of experience, industries and ages.
I’ve spoken to people about how to:
- Deal with a horrible boss or hostile work environment
- Strategize for a promotion or raise
- Navigate a challenging work situation
- Resign from a job without burning bridges
And the list goes on and on and on.
And even though each person’s situation seemed different on the surface, once we got down to the heart of it all, the same underlying issue kept showing up for every single one of them.
It was the same issue whether they’d just gotten laid off from their job after many years of service and weren’t sure what to do next. Or if they’d just received a negative review even though they’d tried their best all year long to jump over every hoop laid out in front of them and didn’t know how to bounce back.
What I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter how different we think we are, when it comes to the struggles we face at work (and in life), we’re actually more similar than we think.
What’s interesting about all the people I’ve talked to over the years, is that for those who were successful in their careers and on track to accomplish the goals they’d set for themselves, there was a consistent pattern that emerged from the way they approached everything in their lives.
And for those who weren’t as successful, there was a pattern for them as well – though it wasn’t a pattern that was helping them – it was still a pattern none the less.
What I realized was that this thing – this pattern – was the single most determining factor of career success. It was the secret sauce that separated those that dream from those that do.
So, what’s the secret?
Successful people always know ‘why’ and make sure that everything they do is in line with it.
The key belief successful people hold is that everything we do must be impactful and that the only way to really thrive in life is to live it – on purpose.
They don’t believe in drifting through life.
So, what does this have to do with work?
How does this play out when it comes to your career?
Do you know why you chose the college you went to? The major you studied?
Do you know why you’re really at your current job? Your company?
Do you know how your daily tasks and responsibilities at work move you closer to your ultimate career goal?
Do you even know what your ultimate career goal is?
If you’re unsure of how to answer these questions, don’t be ashamed or embarrassed. It’s just not the way we’re taught to approach our careers. In fact, it’s the complete opposite.
When we’re children, we’re told that we can be anything we want to be when we grow up.
Want to be an astronaut or doctor? Go for it.
Want to be a writer or artist. The sky’s the limit.
But right around the time college rolls around, we’re abruptly told it’s now time to grow up, stop dreaming and that we should focus on realistic things like picking a major that’s going to land us a good job.
The goal goes from pursuing your purpose – your ultimate ‘why’ – to pursuing things.
Things like: status, money, cars, houses, etc.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting and having nice things, and celebrating the fruits of your labor, but there is something wrong with going after these things at the expense of your true purpose.
And because most people end up doing this, they become guilty of using the right gifts, tools, ideas for the wrong things, at the wrong times, in the wrong places.
They’re tricked into believing that since they’re doing their jobs well or that since they aren’t totally miserable, they must be OK. That pursuing purpose is overrated and not realistic or something that matters in real life.
Does this sound familiar to you?
Do you know that you should be doing something more fulfilling, but you just can’t seem to put your finger on what it is?
If yes, then you are not alone.
This is why my approach to career coaching is to 1) help you figure out what your ‘why’ is, 2) search for habits within daily life that aren’t aligned with your ‘why’ and 3) help you create a new set of habits that will bring you closer to the type of career you want to have.
Pursuing a career that is purposeful, productive and profitable isn’t difficult, but it does require work. It also requires you to be serious about taking responsibility for your life and what happens in it.
It requires you to commit to pursuing purpose – your ‘why’ – instead of things.
Get this right and it changes everything.
But only if you’re serious about setting goals that are impactful and deliberate.
If you are, then you should click here to download the free Find Your Purpose blueprint. Yours free, today! In this guide, you will get clear on:
- Who you are
- What you want
- Why you want it
It’s time for you to have more than just a job. You should have a purpose. Don’t waste another moment feeling unfulfilled about what you do for work.
Download your free copy here.
4 Tips for the Perfect Self-Evaluation (Even if You're Not a Professional Writer)
Performance Reviews. Talent Evaluations. Employee Appraisals.
Whatever you call them, they’re an unavoidable part of almost every company’s year-end process. They’re basically the process of asking people to take the time to reflect on all of the things they’ve been able to accomplish (or not) throughout the year.
One of the most challenging parts of the process for people, even beyond having to listen to your manager rehash the play-by-play of the confrontation you had with Bill from Accounting earlier in the year, is the self-evaluation.
Having to not only remember all of the things you’ve done throughout the year, but also put them into a coherent summary to then be judged by your boss, isn’t anyone’s idea of a good time.
Even the most high-performing person can still feel some reservation when it comes to completing their self-evaluation.
I totally get that.
While you might be tempted to jot down a few high-level bullet points (for the moments you can actually remember) or just copy & paste what you wrote in your evaluation last year, you should know that this is an opportunity for you to really highlight your accomplishments and verbalize to your boss the value you bring to the team.
Here are 4 ways to turn your next self-evaluation into a work of art that truly reflects what you’ve done throughout the year – instead of an uninspired piece of junk you don’t even want to write (and your manager won’t want to read).
Highlight Your Strengths
For some reason, even self-assured and confident people become overly critical and self-deprecating when it’s time to write their self-evaluation. It’s like all of your insecurities (and we all have them), come to mind when you sit down to explain how you’ve spent the past year at work.
The goal of your evaluation should be to focus on your strengths and what you bring to the table – not to magnify the areas where you’re struggling. It’s not that you should be deceptive, but you shouldn’t spend too much time focusing on what went wrong.
Instead, talk about what you’ve done well, the lessons you’ve learned and what you’re doing to develop the areas that need work. Your goal is to show your progression over the past year.
Keep Track of Everything You’ve Done Throughout the Year
Starting right now, keep track of every project you’ve completed, working group you’ve participated in, training you’ve attended, etc., so you have content to pull from when it’s time to consolidate your annual achievements. There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write your evaluation and coming down with a serious case of writer’s block.
As humans, we’re prone to discarding information we don’t use on a daily basis – even if it was a positive experience. That’s why you forget about that big project you led in January that received a lot of praise by your team, by the time November rolls around.
Tracking your achievements doesn’t have to be some big, elaborate process either. A simple Excel sheet that lists the date, title/subject, who you worked on the project with, key outcomes and any miscellaneous notes, will be a huge help when it’s time for you to recall all of the information you need for an amazing evaluation.
Create a Highlight Reel
Instead of re-hashing every single thing you’ve worked on throughout the year in a boring, bulleted list, focus on creating a dynamic story based on your 3-5 major highlights. Now that you’ve been keeping a list of all your accomplishments in your tracker, it shouldn’t be difficult to scan it and come up with those things you really want your boss to remember.
Your goal should be to pick achievements that show different parts of your skill set. For example, you could choose one thing that shows your leadership ability, another that shows your technical expertise and another that shows how much of a great team player you are.
Even if you’ve managed to complete 13 projects throughout the year, thoroughly explaining the top 3-5 will force you to focus on quality and not quantity. No one – not even your manager – wants to read a 3-page report on why you’re the best person on the team. It’s in your best interest to be brief, yet compelling – especially if you want your boss to actually read the entire document.
Provide Supporting Information
For every key accomplishment you mention in your self-evaluation, follow up with the words “For example”. This will ensure you’re not just throwing vague and non-descriptive sentences together, but that you’re actually backing up what you’ve just said.
Using exact numbers and specific examples whenever you can, provides additional context for your manager – which is helpful in solidifying your claims of how awesome you are.
As you can see, writing an effective self-evaluation isn’t something only an experienced writer can do well. Following these tips – along with proof reading and spell checking what you’ve wrote – will ensure you’re able to create something that will make your manager take note of all you’ve been able to accomplish throughout the year.
If you’d like further assistance with creating a compelling self-evaluation, prepping for your review conversation and/or setting your career goals for 2017, schedule your Career Confidential call with me today!
The 10 Most Inspiring Career Lessons (In 140 Characters or Less)
As a career coach, I give a lot of advice on work (and sometimes life).
I mean, that’s why people reach out to me in the first place – so they can get help with navigating their professional journey and take their careers to the next level.
What I’ve realized is that no matter how creative I try to be with the way I deliver my words of wisdom, more often than not, the simpler the advice is, the more likely people are to act on it.
With that in mind, here are the 10 most inspiring career lessons I’ve learned over the past decade from my experiences, working with clients and my own mentors – each in 140 characters or less – #twitterstyle.
#1 If at first you don’t succeed, you can always try again.
One of the great things about our career journey is that it’s never set in stone – even though we’re sometimes taught to believe that it is. So, you’ve graduated from college with a certain degree, went to grad school to continue studying in that field, then got a job related to said field, then another one and another one. Guess what? It’s OK to change your mind.
#2 You should have more than just a job, you should have a purpose.
Purpose is what happens when your core values are aligned with what you do for a living. A job can’t get you through the tough times that inevitably plague all of our career paths, but your purpose will.
#3 Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.
100% of the world’s most successful people didn’t wait around for their purpose to fall from the sky. They didn’t sit idly by hoping to one day be lucky enough to find out what they were meant to do for work. Instead, they decided to create opportunities for themselves to showcase their skills and talents.
#4 You can’t think your way to clarity, you’ve got to take action.
There’s a limit on how much thinking you can do or how much advice you can get. There has to come a point where you step on the gas and move. It’s the only way to achieve any real clarity.
#5 Act like what you do matters, because it does.
Where you are in your career today is the direct result of the decisions you’ve made up to this point. If there is any part of you that is unhappy with where you’ve ended up, all you have to do is decide to do things differently. No matter how small that first step is, it’s a step in the right direction and one that will shape where you end up in the future.
#6 You can do anything with a positive attitude better than you can do it with a negative one.
This quote is by Zig Ziglar and is a universal truth.
#7 Asking for help isn't a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.
This has got to be the single most impactful piece of advice I’ve ever been given. Knowing when to ask for help is a skill that not everyone has yet mastered, but for those that do, the sky’s the limit.
#8 Thoughts become things.
Before you can achieve even the smallest amount of professional success, you’ll have to believe you can first. It’s virtually impossible to end up somewhere you don’t even believe exists.
#9 You should always know your ‘why’.
Whether it’s why you’re in the industry you’re in, or why you chose to work for the specific company you did – you should always be crystal clear on the reason behind every step you take in your career. When you know ‘why’, it’s easy to figure out ‘how’ and ‘what next’.
#10 Focus is essential.
Whatever you turn your attention to is what your mind will begin to work on. The longer you focus your attention on something, the more successful you’ll become at it - so be mindful of what you're paying attention to.
While it can sometimes feel like advice – especially when it's related to your career – comes a dime a dozen, each of the above lessons have proven to be valuable throughout my own path as well as for the people I work with on a daily basis.
If you're ready to jump start your own inspiring career path, download the Find Your Purpose blueprint, today. Learn the step by step process to get crystal clear on how to find work you were meant to do. Yours free, today!
Job Interview Tips That Will Actually Get You Hired
Did you know that the process of getting hired for a job starts way before you show up for the actual interview?
That you’re being judged evaluated by recruiters from the very first time they come in contact with you (whether it’s on the phone or in person)?
Anyone who’s successful at interviewing knows there’s really only one thing that sets them apart from the hundreds of other candidates vying for the same jobs.
They know there’s only one thing that means the difference between hearing “you’re hired” and … well, *crickets*.
And yet the first thing most job seekers do after confirming the details of their upcoming interview is to start researching job interview tips – which focus specifically on what to say and do during your interview and almost exclusively ignores what to say and do before the interview.
While it’s probably no surprise that the company you’re interested in interviewing with has an interview strategy – where recruiters and hiring managers spend countless hours thinking about their hiring goals, creating the perfect job description, posting available jobs and screening candidates, picking the right fit – have you ever stopped to consider the benefits of creating your own personal interview strategy as well?
Yes. You. The person being interviewed – should have a strategy.
This is the single most effective job interview tip that separates successful interviewers from everyone else.
The worst thing anyone who’s serious about coming out the other side of the interview process with an actual job offer can do is to just go through the motions without being deliberate and strategic about what they’re doing.
Of the 95% of people who feel they’ve “nailed it” in an interview, only 14% of them actually did. And you can be sure that more often than not, those in the successful pool of candidates not only implemented the normal job interview tips, but also had a well thought out strategy before they even scheduled their first interview.
If you aren’t sure if your interview strategy needs work (or if you’ve never even heard of this before), you’re definitely not alone. Most people feel they can just “wing it” through the interview process, resting solely on their experience and/or networking skills, only to realize this isn’t the case after months or years spent going on interview after interview with no resulting job offers.
Before you send out one more resume or submit a job application anywhere, it’s critical you develop an interview strategy so compelling you’ll have to put your phone on silent just to get a break from all of the recruiters calling to offer you a job at their company.
One of the very first steps you’ll need to take for that to happen is to decide what you’d like your interview brand to be. Your interview brand should complement your personal brand and is basically how you’d like to be remembered by anyone who comes in contact with you during the interview process.
While your interview brand won’t be explicitly referenced on your resume or during your interviews, all of your resume bullet points, email correspondences, answers to interview questions, etc. should center around this brand.
Think of 3-5 words you want to be left in the interviewer’s mind after they’ve read your resume, talked to you on the phone, or met you in person.
For example, do you want to be seen as data driven, team oriented and technologically savvy? Or as a creative project manager with the ability to teach and train junior members of your team? These are prime examples of a strong interview brand.
Some of the key things to think about when deciding on your interview brand are: why you’re the ideal candidate for the specific role you’re interviewing for, the unique value you’ll bring to the table if hired and what aspect of your experience that will not only be relevant, but memorable to a recruiter or hiring manager.
Once you’ve decided on the theme you want to convey, you’ve got to make sure everything you do is consistent with it. This includes what you say, what you do – even how you dress. Everything matters and nothing is off limits.
Now that you’ve developed your interview brand, it’s time for you to begin the actual preparation process – which in an average interview strategy most likely includes a quick once over of the ‘About Us’ section on the company website and glancing at the job description the night before. This approach is the opposite of what a successful interview strategy looks like and isn’t what will ultimately get you the outcome you’re looking for – a job offer.
Instead of just preparing for an interview, you’ll need to get into the habit of strategic preparation. This means prepping for your interview in such a way that all but guarantees you’ll be seen as an ideal candidate for the position.
- For example, strategic interview preparation includes:
- Knowing ‘why’ you’re interviewing for a specific role
- Organizing all of your past experience into your professional story
- Being able to explain why your experience makes you the ideal candidate for the role
- Knowing the key points about the company you’re interviewing for
- Getting to know the background of your interviewers
- Being able to answer interview questions in a way that highlights your value
- Preparing customized and relevant interview questions to ask during the interview
As you can see, strategic preparation isn’t a simple process – and it isn’t something that’s often included in job interview tips conversations – but it’s a critical part of interview success.
The fact that you’ve made it to the interview phase is a feat only a small number of candidates ever get to. Considering only 8-10 people get called in for an interview out of hundreds of applicants, it’s in your best interest to make sure you put your best foot forward so that you’ll be able to stand out in the process.
Think about what you’ve done previously to prepare for interviews you’ve had and how you could have improved your approach based on what you now know about strategic preparation and interview strategy.
If you’re serious about excelling at the interview process and need help creating your own interview strategy, sign up for my free Interview Success email class today. Learn the 5 research-backed and proven job interview preparation tips you need to succeed in your next interview.
