I tweet for job changers and community

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Wendy Bay Lewis

For all of my readers, but especially those of you who avoid social networking (you know who you are), I’m going to give you a quick overview of how I’m using Twitter to benefit job hunters, myself, and my community.

Let’s get a few assumptions out of the way. I am not trying to persuade you to use Twitter. I’m certainly not as comfortable with social networking as the digital natives who have used it since they were children.  I don’t expect you to send tweets to Anderson Cooper 360 or follow Ashton Kutcher. Hopefully, you’re at least using LinkedIn to maintain your professional presence online.  That said, the Twitterverse has some very redeeming benefits and it can be fun, too!

Here are some ways Twitter is valuable:

For job hunting. If you’re a job seeker living in Montana or trying to move here, social networking is one of the best ways to find job openings.  Many opportunities are never advertised in print or posted on job boards.  When I hear about a great job, I tweet the link.  In the past few weeks, I’ve posted a tweet about the Yellowstone Park Foundation seeking a Senior Director of Development and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s North America Program recruiting a Conservation and Resource Associate (PhD required).

For staying well-informed. As a career coach, I need to stay on top of timely information about job prospects in Montana.  On Twitter, I follow announcements by major employers and startups in the region as well as reports on economic trends in Montana and nationally.  You can do the same and tailor it to your personal interests.  Twitter makes it possible to tap a wide selection of media as well as very specific information.  For example, I am tracking the impact of the sequester on jobs in Montana.

For publishing content.   If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll receive more than job announcements. I offer career advice and links to topical articles and websites, e.g., new online degree programs and certificates to enhance career advancement. In addition, I tweet announcements of events that benefit job seekers locally, such as the upcoming Veteran Stand Down at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds on June 15.  Members of Gallatin Valley HR Association will be offering career advice.

For networking. Obviously, Twitter is a networking tool.  But it’s way bigger and better than your address book or database.  When you follow someone, you can also see their followers and the people they’re following. You can view their lists of people they follow (a Twitter creation), sorted by topic. For example, I’m building a list of people who tweet about online education.  You can quickly accumulate a lot of information about areas of interest by topic, location, or whatever.

For getting involved. On Twitter, I’m able to hear updates from public policy leaders, entrepreneurs, and others who are committed to building a bright future for Montana’s talented workforce. It pains me to know that Montanans earn an average $37,100 per year, the 44th-lowest wage in the nation.  We can do better and we must in order to grow a healthy economy. On Twitter, I follow a variety of economic development thought-leaders (a favorite title on Twitter and LinkedIn). Right now, I’m following tweets about Governor Bullock’s Main Street Montana Project (#mainstreetMT) as well as messages from Montana’s Congressional delegation.

If you’d like to find me on Twitter, my Twitter handle is @wendybaylewis.  If you’re searching for my job-related tweets, use the keyword (hashtag in Twitter-ese) #montanacareers.

 

 

 

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“I don’t deserve a job.”

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Wendy Bay Lewis

Everyone who is out of work, or stuck in a seemingly dead-end career, has a reason they believe they will never find another job. If you believe looking for a job is pointless, and withdraw from the marketplace, even temporarily, you will likely create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  According to an April 6 article in the Wall Street Journal, “the longer people stay out of work, the harder it is for them to find jobs—thus many of the recent dropouts will likely never return to the labor market….” That’s sobering.

Getting back into the workforce can be tough, but intentionally quitting your job-hunt may make it nearly impossible.  Too many people opt-out before they even get started because they are embarrassed or ashamed of their situation or of something they did. They believe they do not deserve a second chance, even though they may have left their job for valid reasons, often beyond their control.   Some have chosen to stay home and raise children, some go back to school, and some are caring for ailing parents.  Others were fired or lost a business because of the Great Recession.

If you are blaming yourself for being out of work, and sitting on the couch watching daytime television, it’s time to give yourself a dose of self-compassion and take practical steps to get back into the world of work.

Self-compassion means showing kindness to yourself, as you probably would for others in the same situation.  According to self-compassion authority Dr. Kristin Neff (self-compassion.com), you can regain a sense of self-appreciation by taking three steps.

First, take notice of what you are thinking and feeling.  Your thoughts might include self-bashing statements like these: Most people are happier than I am, I feel alone in my failure, and I obsess about everything that’s wrong.

Second, remind yourself that hard knocks are part of life. As Dr. Neff has written in her blog at HuffingtonPost.com, “we are limited, imperfect beings who are impacted by things over which we have no control.”

Third, be more forgiving and kind toward yourself.  You’re going through a bad patch, but it’s temporary. Contrary to what you may think, you are not “letting yourself off the hook” by showing yourself compassion.  Dr. Neff makes the point that “self-compassion leads to taking more, not less responsibility for our actions.”

Here are four self-described situations in which you might find yourself and suggestions for applying self-compassion to overcome a misstep and reenter the competition for a job.

I am ashamed of the 5-year gap in my work history. Depending on the reasons for the gap, you are no different from many other people in the talent pool.  If you were home raising children, then self-compassion means you were taking responsibility as a parent.  If you are asked about the gap in an interview, take the opportunity to explain, for example, how you volunteered at your children’s school, took a class at night, and mastered social networking.

I screwed up when I quit grad school. In retrospect, maybe dropping out was a mistake, but it’s not unusual for people to have breaks in their education, especially in college and graduate school.  Show yourself some understanding and explore ways to finish what you started.  If you are considering a job offer, ask about policies that support employees’ lifelong learning goals.  If you don’t get a job offer, ask about an internship possibility while you finish your degree.

I messed up when I didn’t climb the corporate ladder. Guess what? There are no more career ladders.  In today’s world, there is a career lattice and workers need to move laterally in order to build a successful career.  Treat yourself kindly and think about your next job as a lateral move that will serve your professional aspirations.

I wanted to be in sales, but I failed to close deals. Maybe you don’t belong in sales. What were you good at? Did you develop close relationships with co-workers and customers? Were you a team leader? Focus on what you did well and look for a job where you can showcase your talent.

Every job candidate has shortcomings of some type.  The key to staying in the competition is to jump over the hurdles and take advantage of self-compassion to grow personally and professionally.

– Quarterly column by Wendy Bay Lewis, Career Coach, and Tim Herzog, EdD, ReachingAhead.com – Bozeman Daily Chronicle Business Journal.

 

 

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Career advice from the Land of Oz

Posted on April 21, 2013 by Wendy Bay Lewis

In my last post, I wrote about finding career satisfaction through  flow experiences that capture your total attention and envelop you so completely that you literally lose track of time. However, not everyone can jump into flow mode.  So, today I’m writing about a different approach that might be better suited to your personality.

Clients often tell me they cannot find their passion and they blame themselves.  They have listened to other people rhapsodize about their work and wondered, “what do they know that I don’t?”  On top of that, we live in a society that reveres passionate people, whether they are opera stars or Olympians.  We are bombarded with the message that passion is the key ingredient in a happy, optimistic, and successful career (and life in well).

Lacking passion, you may feel like the scarecrow without his brain or the tin woodsman without his heart. You wish you could visit the Wizard of Oz so he could give you passion by pinning a heart on your lapel.  Well, you can benefit from his wisdom without going to Oz. What he gave the scarecrow, the lion, and the tin woodsman, was confidence in their own abilities and encouragement to think positively. Recent scientific research proves the Wizard knew what he was doing.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, an expert on positivity, discovered that experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones leads people to a tipping point beyond which they…achieve what they once could only imagine. By focusing on your positive feelings, you are able to see new opportunities that you may have missed when you were in a funk.

You can find out your positivity ratio online by taking a 2-minute quiz. You can boost your positivity by giving yourself a peptalk, or, it that doesn’t feel comfortable, remind yourself to be inquisitive about the future and take a  baby step toward your goal.

Adopting a more positive outlook does not require you to mimic feelings you don’t have, or to be inauthentic.  Rather, positive emotions like kindness and gratitude help us become better versions of ourselves, and that makes it possible to recognize the passion you already have.  Find out more by reading Dr. Fredrickson’s post, What Good is Positivity?

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Career Meaning: Joyful Experiences

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Wendy Bay Lewis

You may have read this post earlier on my blog. I am resending it to new subscribers.

I named my blog Make Your Career Meaningful because most people who contemplate changing their career path do so to find a sense of purpose and meaning. They are wondering what meaning is, whether it’s possible to find meaning at work, and how to sustain it.

You won’t find the answer to your search for meaning in a single word or phrase.  Rather, meaning is an experience, or set of experiences, that grow from developing a fresh understanding of how you align your values with what you do.

Using your golf game as a metaphor–even if you don’t play golf–it’s like changing your swing.  You want to be a better golfer because you want more enjoyment from the game. You’d like it to feel effortless. You’d like the sensation of freedom and fulfillment that brings you joy, not frustration and aggravation.  Don’t keep trying to break that club over your knee!

At work, you can find joy if you learn to seek out the sensation of “flow” which happens when you are so engrossed in what you are doing that time seems to fly by and you look forward to work every day.  Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the phrase flow experiences to describe the sense of effortless action that people feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as being in the zone.

You will experience flow at work when your job is the right fit. In his book Finding Flow, Csikszentmihalyi wrote, Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living….

You can read excerpts from Finding Flow in Psychology Today.

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Career dreaming and doing with Pinterest

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Wendy Bay Lewis

Pinterest is a great tool for exploring career options. Through the process of collecting photos and images on the Internet, and sorting them by category, you may see the career path ahead of you.  You may discover your passion is waiting for you in a place you would never have guessed possible.

In a nutshell, all you need to do is open a Pinterest account and upload the PinIt button to the bookmark toolbar in your browser. Now you’re ready to start looking for photos on websites you visit and pinning them to your boards.  Metaphorically, you are tearing an article out of a magazine at the doctor’s office (or a flight magazine) and thumb tacking it to your bulletin board at home.  Yes, you’ve done it!

The cool part is that you can create lots of boards and name them by topic. I opened my Pinterest account a few months ago.  In the beginning, I was pretty timid. I wanted to focus on concrete resources and keep it professional.  I started with video and photos curated from websites like empowered.com, which promotes new careers and continuing education for adults through UCLA Extension.

In short order, I let my imagination run free.  I created a board for movies about people who changed careers.  Didn’t you love Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness? How about Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire? And Melanie Griffith in Working Girl! Talk about inspiration and passion!

Then, because most of my clients live in Montana, I started creating boards devoted to local people and businesses, and especially sites for entrepreneurs and job seekers.  For example, I pinned a photo of Russ Fletcher, the founder of Montana Associated Technology Roundtables. Russ publishes a must-read e-newsletter that promotes economic development and networking between entrepreneurs and business professionals.

Now I have more than 25 boards! Themes include: Work after 50, Change the World, and Places to meet in Bozeman.

I recommend Pinterest to all my clients.  It’s an easy and enjoyable way to rekindle your career dreams and add new ones.  Remember those summers you were a seasonal Park Ranger?  Start a board with photos of your favorite National Parks. Keep going! Your passion is waiting!


 

 

 

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