Habit of Thought

Is Career Specialization Dead?

As children, most of us were interminably asked by adults what we wanted to be when we grew up.

By the end of high school, having some idea of your "final answer" to that question was required by parents and guidance counselors in order to steer you to an appropriate college and degree.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you how much the world has changed, even in just the last five to ten years. I feel very lucky that late in college I fell in love with computers. Information technology gave me a wonderful career at a time when other fields came and went.

All Career Eggs in One Basket?

Can anyone truly afford to roll the dice on one type of career any more? Professions such as attorneys, accountants, physicians, nurses, and information technology experts will be in considerable demand for the foreseeable future. Of course, those careers require a significant, up-front investment in education plus an ongoing commitment to professional development. You had better like what you are doing; the costs to switch to something else from one of these fields is considerable.

For everyone else, having your own plan for your future is not a luxury but a necessity. In an interesting twist on this topic, Penelope Trunk, an influential career advisor, suggests that you can make your life more stable by changing jobs frequently.

Looking for Stability in All the Wrong Places

Even if your chosen specialty survives technological change, economic uncertainty, and business failures, long-term careers within one company are a thing of the past as are the benefits that made them palatable such as orderly promotions and pension plans.

Penelope offers five ways to use frequent job changes to build stability in your life:

1. Build up a strong skill set quickly.
2. Get good at making transitions.
3. Make the most of the in-between-jobs time.
4. Get out of paying your dues.
5. Keep your finances in order.

Her best advice? "The best financial security today is to have great job hunting skills that never stop. Go to the best job, do it until you find another best job. This is the kind of person who will always be able to get money when they need it."

 

10 Reasons Why You Don't Need a Coach

I'm often asked what coaching does for people. The coach's favorite answer is, it depends. It entirely depends on what the person being coached (PBC) wants or needs. The outcomes vary tremendously from PBC to PBC. (I will address what coaching does for companies in a separate post.)

I find a good way to answer the question of what coaching does for people is to describe situations I've encountered where the person didn't need a coach. The list below, in no particular order, contains a sampling of reasons why they didn't.

Time Management

1. You manage how you spend your time by managing your goals and priorities, not by how much you can cram into a given day. You have a system of some kind in place to handle all the incoming stuff yet retain peace of mind.

Physical Health

2. You are physically healthy. You have daily routines for exercise, sleep, and diet that increase your capacity and restore it.

Social Life

3. Your social life is in good order. You connect with people in a meaningful way regularly. You have a good support system of people you love spending time with, who have your back, who push you when you need it, who leave you feeling happier and more alive after spending time with them.

Family Life

4. Your family life works for you. Baggage from the past rarely influences your outlook, relationships or responses today. Family needs are one of the big rocks that go on your calendar and spending list first.

Personal and Professional Development

5. You believe in and routinely engage in some sort of personal and professional development through regular reading, additional education, hobbies, conferences, seminars, or a mentor. If your employer doesn't pay for these things, you invest in them yourself at an affordable level.

Productivity

6. Your home, your office, your workspace, your car, your garage: anywhere you spend a lot of time is organized to meet your needs. You can lay your hands on important paperwork in a matter of minutes. Clutter is managed and purged regularly.

Career

7. You have a handle on your career. You stay up with trends in your field, your industry, your customer base. You watch for the effects of technology in your work and take every opportunity for training that comes your way. You take full responsibility for improving your current skills and learning new ones. You also routinely work to improve your people skills--listening, communication, managing, delegating--as well as any technical skills involved.

Finances

8. Your finances are solid. Will, health proxy, living will are in place. Short- and long-term savings and investments are in progress. You have a good credit rating. Your life, health and belongings are protected at the right level by insurance. How you manage your money works for you.

Leadership

9. You regularly apply your leadership skills in your life and work, regardless of your level or title in a company or your role in your family. You understand leadership is a life skill, not something you only do at your job. You think strategically, respond with emotional intelligence, understand your role, and fulfill your responsibilities.

Values

10. You know what your values, ethics and beliefs are. You make virtually all of your daily choices and decisions in accordance with what's important to you and what brings meaning to your life. You know how to quickly assess requests for your time, money, or energy before saying "yes." You know how to say "no" gracefully.

Perfection Is Not the Goal, Progress Is

This list doesn't mean a meaningful life is possible only if all 10 things (or others you can think of) are in place. For many people, getting one or two of those things in order is enough.

How about you? Are the blessings you already have in your life enough to keep body, soul, and mind together and functioning?

Delete Prior

I had my first BlackBerry cell phone for a year before I found the "Delete Prior" function that allowed me to delete a range of the emails on it.

Before that, I had to delete all the emails individually. It was tedious and painful.

(If you don't know how to find this function on your BB, see instructions at the bottom of this post.)

Click a Button and Get a Clean Slate

Sometimes when I press that BlackBerry button, I wish I could just as easily wipe out all the mistakes and mis-steps and poor decisions of my life and start over. Other times I'd like to do major housekeeping on my to-do list in the same way. Or I might just wish I could start that day over.

Anne Shirley, the feisty heroine of Anne of Green Gables, has an interesting approach. She sees each new day as a fresh start, with no mistakes in it. (She constantly gets into trouble, though her escapades pale in comparison to what kids today get themselves into.)

A Symptom, Not a Treatment

In working through a recent book I read, I've come to understand that impulse as a symptom of a lack of balance, a lack of energy, or both. When I feel that way, I set aside time as soon as I can to assess my commitments and goals at a higher level than managing them day-to-day. That "reset" function clears out the underbrush and helps me remember how much I love my work.

My Actual Reset Button

The real cleanout happens before we go on our two-week vacation. My favorite day of the whole year is the night before we leave on our trip. By that point, everything that's going to get done is finished. Anything that couldn't get done has been scheduled for the days and weeks after our return. Expectations and commitments have either been met or reset or renegotiated.

Something To Think About

How often do you feel overwhelmed?

What do you do to reset commitments and expectations when that happens?

What kind of positive ritual could you create for that reset?

How often do you think you'd need to do it?

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How to Mass Delete Emails on Your BlackBerry

1. Open your mail function on your BlackBerry.

2. Scroll to and highlight (with the rolling ball) the date header for the day where you want to delete all emails before AND INCLUDING that day. For example, let's say you want to keep only those emails that came in today, Oct 17, 2010. Then you would scroll to and highlight the date header for Oct 16, 2010.

3. Press the BlackBerry menu button to the left of the rolling ball. Scroll to the "Delete Prior" menu item. Click on that item.

4. A confirming screen asking "Delete all prior items?" is displayed with the options to Delete or Cancel.

5. Click Delete. All emails prior to that date will be deleted. If you select today's date, all emails that came in today plus all previous emails will be deleted.

Exercise Decision Is More Painful Than Exercising

Like voting, exercise is one of those things everybody knows they should do and most don't.

While I haven't missed an election since I was first eligible to vote (Nixon vs McGovern), let's just say my record on exercise has been far less consistent.

This year I finally have broken the cycle of decide-try-excuses that have torpedoed my resolve. While I'm not exactly ready to try out for "So You Think You Can Dance?," I'm seeing results.

No Secret Formula

I wish I had a secret formula to share with you, a compelling motivation that inspires me. Instead, it's a combination of things. Maybe one or more of these 6 items will click with you, listed from the less compelling to the most compelling to me...

6. Living Longer But Not Better

I took a long hard look at women 65+ in age whom I see when I'm out and about. It's not a pretty picture. With continued excuses and denial on my part, it won't be long before climbing the stairs in my house will be difficult. Among other things, simply aging will kick up the threat of diabetes a notch.

I'm not saying everyone who is in a nursing home could have prevented the circumstances that made them move to one. My mother-in-law lived in her own home until strokes at 85 forced that change. Life will throw me enough aging challenges that limit my options in where I live and how I spend my day. It's my choice not to add to those challenges because of my own negligence.

5. No Time Like the Present

As hard as it is now, starting an exercise program ain't gonna get any easier down the road. See above.

4. Physical Energy Is The Power Plant for Living

A recent book I read proposed the idea of setting up rituals to develop and renew the types of energy that keep me alive and functioning: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Physical energy powers everything else. I like to think of exercise as a positive ritual, not a must-do habit.

3. A No-Excuses Club

I joined a club where I feel truly comfortable. No one cares what you look like with no makeup and old t-shirt--they're too busy doing their own workouts. It's on my way to almost anywhere I go, only 15 minutes by car. Virtually everything I might ever need to work out is there, including a cafe to grab a bite before or after and a spa where I can reward myself with a (non-food) treat now and then for working out.

2. You Gotta Have Friends

Friends, clients, colleagues and acquaintances belong to the same club, though I didn't realize how many when I joined. It's wonderful to see friendly faces with a smile of encouragement. I also want to have a good answer when they ask me how my workouts are going.

1. Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

I'm a coach. I teach people how to set and reach goals. If I don't keep at my own goals, where's my integrity? Even if my clients don't know what my goals are?

The Devil Is in the Details

All my dilly-dallying about when to exercise, how to exercise, where to exercise was far more painful than the actual exercise itself. It wasn't until I got my ducks in a row, that is, I removed obstacles, that it all began to come together. Those things included buying a good quality pair of sneakers (Brooks brand--never heard of them before this), organizing a gym bag with supplies always at the ready, experimenting with times of day to see what works (mornings, hands down), and a routine that is not dependent on attending a class (although I enjoy the classes when I can get there).

What Not To Think About

If your only motivation for exercise is to lose weight, it's not enough. Losing weight is not a motivating factor for me, though I certainly would love to shed pounds. Focusing on just that number, though, has failed me time and time again. My mirror and the fit of my clothes tell me whether I'm on track there, and I don't spend much time thinking about it.

What Values Do You Believe In?

Research has shown that about 95% of our values and beliefs have been learned by the age of 5.

Unless you have actively worked on choosing your values since then, most of your daily decisions are influenced by what you learned from the culture and circumstances of your life before you went to kindergarten.

What Is A Value?

A value is a belief, a mission, or a philosophy. It has intrinsic worth that inspires you and provides meaning that cannot be taken from you. Samples include family, patriotism, safety, creativity, orderliness, punctuality, loyalty, innovation.

Whether you are conscious of them or not, values are like your personal operating system, preprogramming your choice when making a decision.

Values Are the Operating System of Success

"Success is the continual achievement of your own predetermined goals,
stabilized by balance and purified by belief."

In my definition of success, you purify your goals by filtering them through your beliefs. Success means you have used your beliefs and values to actively select and shape your goals, the actions to achieve them, and design how you carry them out.

In computer programming, if-then-else logic drives the outcome based on pre-selected choices. Values are what you use to pre-select life choices. If honesty is one of your values, when presented with an opportunity to lie, you will choose to tell the truth.

Values As A Standard for Managing Your Personal Energy

In Loehr and Schwartz's book, they explain that values drive fuller engagement in all areas of our lives. A values-driven life increases the likelihood that you bring passion, commitment, and perseverance to whatever it is that you do. You make choices about how to behave from a position of confidence, strength and dignity rather than from anger, resentment or insecurity.

In this era of feeling our lives are controlled by everything but ourselves, this model gives us back that control.

What are your top 5 values? How have your actions over the last month reflected those?

 

Balance Part 2: Managing Your Energy

Time isn't the only limitation on your personal capacity and sense of balance. Our lives are powered by energy, both external and internal. We push through our day as if both were unlimited.

In their book, The Power of Full Engagement (link goes to my review of it), authors Loehr and Schwartz make a convincing case for understanding we are personally powered through four levels of energy.

Physical energy runs our bodies, emotional energy comes from positive emotions, mental energy gives us the ability to concentrate, and spiritual energy provides the motivation and direction for how we spend what we have.

At face value, this sounds like everything we've heard before. The difference is in what Loehr and Schwartz observed about how professional athletes improve their performance. The point of the whole book is

"To build capacity, we must systematically expose ourselves
to more stress--followed by adequate recovery." (Emphasis is the authors'.)

I don't know about you, but I don't lack for sources of stress. There is so much to do and so many people depending on us, it seems self-indulgent to rest and recharge before your body demands it. I think of interviews I've read about successful people who claim to get by on 4 hours sleep at night and the occasional power nap. (How much sleep we need is a controversial topic with conflicting advice.)

But do we build in time to recover from periods of stress? Rarely if at all.

The book offers a systematic yet flexible approach to building your energy capacity in all four dimensions. There are no quick fixes, but there are simple things you can do, and you must start with managing your physical energy. Without that, there isn't any other kind.

One of their clients, William, made one relatively simple change in the way he worked. He began taking a break every 90 to 120 minutes, during which he ate something, drank some water, and took at least a brief walk. Based on this strategy alone, within 2 weeks William estimated a 30 percent increase in his energy in the afternoons.

I could use a 30 percent increase my energy--how about you?

What would it take for you to factor in a break of some kind every 90-120 minutes during your day?

 

Work-Life Balance: It's All About the Container

Work-life balance is lot like fashion. Its definition changes with seasons, trends, the economy, gender roles, and cultures.

The problem is, our life's container is time, which we perceive through the concept of a 24-hour day. All of those other influences come and go, but no one, not even Einstein and his theory of relativity, has found a way to increase the hours in a day.

Balance as a Life Stabilizer

The definition of success I work with includes goals that are stabilized by balance. Creating a dream inventory where you wish and brainstorm to your heart's content is one thing. Flooding your to-do list with tasks is another. Your sense of balance in your life is your thermostat telling you when to adjust how many goals and tasks you have in play at one time. Too many goals overwhelm you; too few goals give you little sense of fulfillment.

What Balance Is Not

All areas of your life, e.g., work, children, aging parents, home repair, finances, social life, hobbies, professional development, do not have to get equal time in order to have balance. Trying to do so will guarantee you won't have any sense of balance at all.

What makes you feel a sense of balance will change with time, life circumstances, your health, your finances, and other aspects.

There is no one perfect balance to strive for. This is where the "if onlies" can really derail you: if only I had more time, made more money, exercised more; if only the kids would clean up around the house; if only I had a more understanding boss; and so on.

The Big Rocks Story

Steven Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, tells a story learned from an associate who attended a seminar. The seminar presenter used a glass jar, rocks, sand, and water. The jar represents your life. If you fill the jar with sand and water to fill every conceivable space (the tons of little stuff that lands on your desk), then you have no room to put in your big rocks (the people and activities that mean something to you).

Building a sense of balance in your life requires recognizing that you are dealing with an inflexible, limited boundary we call time. Just as jamming too many rocks into a glass jar will shatter it, putting too much in your life can cause painful breaks in your health and relationships.

A Practical View of the Time Container

I will go into more detail on this in a later post, but through another book I discovered that using Microsoft Outlook 2007's weekly calendar view as my "jar" works wonders in my ability to manage my time, and therefore, my sense of balance. Dealing with my life in weekly chunks with occasional forays into months and the whole year has made a world of difference in managing what I need to do and what I need to let go of.

I cannot locate the originator of my favorite definition of balance, but here it is anyway:

Balance is time for your passions.

How much time are you spending on your passions?

Here's WHY to Have SMART Goals

SMART goals were first introduced about 30 years ago. Much more recently, Evan Carmichael suggests DUMB goals might inject more inspiration and passion into the mundane stuff that can come out of SMART goal thinking. 

Evan has a point. Thinking in specific and measurable terms can keep you in the mode of incremental change when what is really needed is a bigger leap. Or something else entirely.

Still, thinking through a goal is a good habit to get into. And if you really want to achieve it, putting some energy into predicting and preventing obstacles will significantly increase the chances of success.

In my work with clients, I add three more letters to the SMART acronym: WHY.

W stands for written. This may seem obvious, but people do much better with goals when they write them down. Keep a list of 3-5 goals on an index card with you and read it several times a day. This helps focus your energy and attention on the goals, which increases the probablility of success.

H stands for harmonious. As much as we sometimes think of our lives in compartments, work and home, for example, daily living is much more integrated than that. For any one goal to be achievable, you need to make sure you don't have other competing goals taking you in the opposite direction. Also, goals should be not only harmonious within your own life but also with the goals of significant others.

Y stands for yours. Take a minute to write down a few goals you already have in mind. Then think about where they came from. Did all of them originate within you, or did someone else hand you one or more of them? For example, work objectives are usually laid down by your boss. Did you have a chance to discuss their impact on your current workload before agreeing to take them? If not, and if you truly haven't accepted them, that will have an impact on your ability to achieve them.

If you'd care to do any research yourself on whether setting goals is worth the time and effort, here are a few things to consider:

• To find research about goals via Google or other search engines, you need to search on terms like "proximal goal" (near-term goal) or "distal goal" (long-term goal). Those are the terms researchers use.


• If you search on the phrase "written goals," you are likely to come across a description of a 1953 study made by an ivy-league university such as Harvard or Yale. It's a story repeated across the Internet on many a consultant's web site. And it's not true. Fast Company magazine debunked that goal study back in 1996.

Further reading I've enjoyed:

• "Setting Goals When Performance Doesn't Matter" by Gerald H. Seijts. This article published in 2001 is one of the best research reports I've found on the effect of goals on performance.


• "Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey" by Edwin P. Locke and Gary P. Latham. While written in a bit more scholarly voice, this article published in the September 2002 issue of American Psychologist provides a fascinating (and brief) overview the last 35 years of research into the relationship between setting goals and performance.


• Education.com has an excellent summary about goals in which they include some of the key points from Locke and Latham.

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So, have I convinced you to give goals a try? Why or why not?

 

A New Definition of Success for A New Year

"Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person we become."

—Jim Rohn

One of the challenges in today's complex society is how to define success for yourself. In the olden days, success was pretty clear: food on the table, a roof over your head, clothes on your back, maybe education thrown in.

Today the media scream that success is lots of money to buy European cars, exotic vacations, expensive watches, designer clothes, and all manner of material things. The people in those ads look so happy and relaxed, comfortable in their own skin (which hasn't a blemish on it), without a care in the world.

It's tempting to let the outside world define success for us. Various studies claim we're exposed to  anywhere from 247 to 3000 ads a day.

I propose a definition of success that is universally applicable to all humans regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, income, geography, religion, or job.

"Success is the continual achievement of your own predetermined goals,
stabilized by balance and purified by belief."

What's your definition of success? How does it compare to this statement?