Build career confidence in 2 easy steps

Just this past week, a client in Vancouver, who was laid off after 16 years with the same company, said to me, “I’ll be honest with you, I’ve lost my confidence, and don’t know if anyone will ever hire me again.”

I work with many individuals who are laid off or leave a job after 10-20 years with the same company.  In many cases, they don’t know what to do or whether someone else will hire them—because they’re consumed with self-doubt.

There are many signs of self-doubt and they can differ from person to person but I’ve noticed that there is a hesitancy to take credit in many cases.

They have difficulty to acknowledge on-the-job personal achievements.  Instead, they attribute their career achievements to the company, or their boss, or their colleagues, or other external factors. 

Focus on details

With this client in Vancouver, I asked her, what is the most recent project or assignment that you worked on?  What is the biggest project you’ve completed?  What accomplishment are you most proud of?  As I listened to her stories, I focused on her personal contribution, effort, or skill.

I then drilled deeper into her accomplishments.  Tell me what you did specifically as an individual or as part of a team in that project?  How did you do it?  What was the outcome for your employer, i.e. how did you help them make money, save money, improve productivity, attain efficiencies, meet difficult deadlines, work with new products or technologies?

Write it down!

She hadn’t thought about these things at all, so I wrote down my questions and emailed them to her.  Slowly but surely over the next several weeks, she responded with answers.  A direct line of questioning about specific accomplishments reveals a much fuller, richer, detailed story.

She told me it was one of the most helpful exercises that she’d ever done.  By separating the emotions affiliated with losing her job and focusing on facts and details related to achievements, she could view her employment history objectively, clearly, accurately.  And, by doing so, her confidence was bolstered.

This is a very common realization for many of my clients: before they can communicate their value to a new employer, they must be able to see if for themselves. 

Next steps

Then it becomes a matter of me packaging and positioning their experience with a compelling story that gets the attention of potential employers.

There are many vehicles for telling that story, including a resume, LI profile, an interview presentation, and more. 

But, whatever the vehicle, my clients learn to drive their message home with confidence. 

Square peg in round hole

You’ve heard the expression “fitting a square peg into a round hole does not work”.

And yet, this is precisely the situation that many individuals feel about their jobs– their natural strengths do not match the skills needed for core job duties. Many of my clients “grind it out” day after day in order to pay their bills and bank pensionable time, even though it hurts and causes much career pain.  

For example, I’ve worked with some clients over the past 30 years who get hired into an entry level position then show a special ability to step into an unstructured situation to solve problems with people, planning, or productivity.  They have a natural talent for sorting through many complex details to develop a step-by-step solution exactly suited to the people and the situation.   

The outcome of their solution is often the establishment of very efficient and effective structures, systems or processes that improve productivity.  Their accomplishment makes a big splash in the organization and they often get promoted to maintain the new structure or system that they developed. But this new role bores them to tears because maintaining a structured situation requires a different set of skills and motivations than problem-solving in unstructured situation.

In short, they are often the victims of their own success.  The new structure does not produce the same kind of problems as the previous unstructured situation and their natural talents don’t get triggered again.

They might go around looking for new problems to solve–they are simply doing what comes naturally to them–but end up stepping on other people’s toes, crossing boundaries, or unwittingly causing friction with co-workers.

They feel like a square peg in a round hole.  They sometimes blame their employer or themselves for not being able to advance in their career…and they continue to feel that way until they understand their natural strengths and their unique motivational pattern.

My job is to identify and define those key success factors and match them up with the kinds of jobs that need their strengths and the organizations that will reward them for it. 

For example, some of my clients with the talents and motivations described above have gone on to new roles, such as Workflow Analysts, Strategic Consultants, Business Operations Analysts, Project Managers, Change Managers, or similar in large dysfunctional organizations or medium sized ones experiencing rapid growth and all the problems that go with it. 

JobJoy Smile – Work puns

– Employer: We need someone responsible for the job.
Job Applicant: Sir your search ends here! In my previous job whenever something went wrong, everybody said I was responsible.

– A human resource person was quizzing a new employee on the company’s safety manual. “And what steps do you take in case of a fire?” she asked. The new employee replied, “Quick ones.”

– Boss: How is it that you are always sick on weekdays?  Employee: It’s my weekend immune system.

Pivoting successfully in your career journey: here’s an example

I love to get updates from my clients.  A person’s career is literally a story.  It’s about their progress through their working life.

As a career professional, I am part of that story, usually for a short period of time, but I truly value that experience. Sometimes, the update is good, sometimes not so good, depending on what is happening in their journey.


Although we tend to think of career as a steady line that swings upward through progressive phases of advancement, it is often a squiggly line that dips and turns and twists, like much of life. 


Here’s a good update that illustrates what I’m talking about.  I worked with a young adult 15 years ago when he was trying to make his first big career decision.  You can read that part of his story here.

In short, we identified his natural talents and knack for working in a physical world–one that is organized around physical infrastructure that needs to be designed, built, maintained, repaired, restored, and often replaced. 

My assessment was followed by my suggestion that he enter an applied science program and he settled on a 3-year civil construction technology program at a local college.

After graduating, he started his own construction company, as well as a family!  He grew confident with his abilities in a very competitive industry.


Construction is also a volatile industry with its own cycle of ups and downs.  But Gui learned to pivot.  When business would fall off, he would find a job in his field.

He wrote me recently to say: “After 6 years of working for companies–including 3 years as project manager at an Ottawa general contractor;  same thing on the Quebec side for 2.5 years; and, 3 months for a steel fab company as an estimator/installer–I have decided to return to my business and it is booming.”

Business changes, life changes, but building a career around our natural strengths, our deepest values, and our highest motivations can give us the confidence and tools to pivot successfully.  That is job joy!

Are you good at what you love?

Much career advice falls along the lines of “follow your passion.” Like much general advice, the reality is always more complex and nuanced.
 
Many people have a love for animals, or a sport, or music…but not necessarily a talent that is required to make a living at it. 

Examples
 
For example, I’ve worked with dozens of individuals who have a passion for animals but hate the idea of veterinary work because they don’t want to deal with sick animals or euthanize them.  And, since being a vet or a veterinary technician are the only jobs that they believe to match with a passion for animals, they do not pursue a career in that field.
 
Same goes with athletes who aspire to a professional sports career; they might have a passion for the sport but simply don’t have the talent or opportunity to achieve a level where they can earn a living at it.  Same goes for people who love music.  So, most people give up on finding a job related to their passion.
 
Of course there are dozens of jobs involving animals that do not require vet skills, or sports jobs that do not require athletic skills, or music jobs that do not require singing or instrument playing skills.  In fact, that is the case for most jobs in those fields.  The core talent that we usually correlate with any high-profile job is not the only talents needed in a particular field.
 
For example, any professional sports franchise features players on the field, ice, or court but there are dozens of jobs behind the scenes making it possible for those athletes to perform, including individuals working on the manufacturing, distribution, and operations sides of the business, such as scouts, trainers, therapists, agents, physiologists, psychologists, rehab specialists, fitness consultants, facility managers, marketing and promotions specialists, sales professionals, accountants, lawyers, and many more. Sports is just another business selling a product. 


There is more than one way to follow your passion

Many individuals with a love for sports may not have the talent to play professionally but they may have a talent and set of skills very well suited to one of the many other jobs involved in sports.  If that talent can be identified then nurtured through education, training, or other experiences, they could find themselves working in the field they love.

Find out what your natural talents are, what you’re good at.  Yes, learning other skills is necessary and takes time and work…but a career is a lot easier and enjoyable to develop when it is organized around your natural talents.
 
Apply your talents to what you love.

BAM! another cataclysmic change

Have you tried a free demo of Chat GPT?

Go ahead, ask it to do something for you, anything, even something as random as ‘Write a poem for a 25-year-old daughter who is a teacher doing a Master’s and going to PEI for a vacation this week.’  BAM! literally 2 seconds later I got a coherent rhyming poem of six stanzas with four sentences each!

Try typing in one of your core job duties (e.g. if you’re a teacher, ask it to create a lesson plan for a course you teach) …and you’ll see why many people are seeing this technology as a replacement for many jobs or parts of many jobs. 

Most of us got up this morning, went to work, get our paycheque every two weeks, and live our lives in a predictable and lockstep manner through school, work, marriage, family, retirement.  

Then BAM! something comes along—e.g. the financial sub-prime crisis of 2008, the pandemic of 2020—some event or technology, that percolates below the surface of everyday life only to erupt into cataclysmic change sending millions of people out of work.

Change is inevitable

What is abundantly clear, I think, is our inability to control and predict the future in an accurate and reliable manner. No change in your job is not an option. Your work circumstances will change! And you must change with them.

This means we, as individuals and as a community, need to learn about the nature of change. JobJoy is in the change business. Let us help you prepare for what is inevitable—career change—maybe not now, not this year…but it will happen. Career change is now a critical component of lifelong learning.

It is important to understand your past and how it has shaped your present in order to better prepare for your unpredictable future. As you know, I am a personal story analyst, one that puts much emphasis on identifying and defining your motivational pattern. When you understand your key success factors and how you work best, it is easier for you to adapt to the inevitability of change in your working circumstances.

You will lose your job, or have to change jobs, or move to another employer, or learn to work with different kinds of people, or replace a full-time income with a portfolio career.

Understanding who and what you are in terms of your right work will help you adapt to new conditions, to new technologies, to new workplace requirements. Being agile and productive is the key to career success!

Career Change – the practical side

When choosing or changing a career, it is best to align your core job duties with your natural strengths… so that what you do day in and day out energizes rather than drains you.

This is the core principle of my career practice because it leads to many career benefits—a topic I have explored and explained on many occasions in this blog.

Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge other factors.  When advising clients, we often weigh their priorities and preferences.

Sometimes, we even use a chart that gives a number score to each factor, which helps them with their decision.

Money – what you need in the short term, what you want in the long term
Health & Dental benefits – especially important as we get older (or sicker)
Pension – a forced savings plan that is provides some security in an uncertain future
Vacation – what you need in the short term, what you want in the long term
Other benefits – e.g. stock options, tuition reimbursement, car allowance
Work/life balance – when hybrid work and flexibility for childcare is a high priority
Company culture – good relationship with your boss and colleagues
Stability – depends on your responsibilities and obligations, even your personality
Career advancement – opportunity to grow professionally
Timing – some factors we can’t control and we must react to circumstances

Simply listing each of these factors in terms of priority (e.g. 1=high, 2=moderate, 3=low) can help you separate reason from feelings when considering a career choice or change.

If you need help with your career decision-making, contact me to discuss.

Shame and Job Change

Shame.  That’s what a recent client told me he felt about his current situation.  His employer was not satisfied with his performance on the job.  They gave him an ultimatum: submit to a performance appraisal with strict KPIs or face termination.

My client had been hired by this company for a corporate finance role but after undergoing some restructuring a few years ago, they changed the terms and conditions of his employment by assigning him as Senior Product Manager, even though he had no experience for such a role.

His employer provided no training, so my client did the best he could to bring himself up to speed by learning relevant skills and knowledge on his own.  But, according to his employer, that was not good enough.

My client wants to go back to his previous work in corporate finance but do so with another company.   He feels shame that he couldn’t master the Senior Product Manager role.   His confidence has been undermined by this negative experience.  He asked me to help him navigate this difficult situation and find suitable employment.

Legal help

How to make an exit from his current employer?  There are pros and cons to being terminated vs resigning–in terms of risks and benefits related to unemployment insurance, severance, reputation, and so on.

I am not an employment lawyer so I recommended my client engage one to help him sort through the repercussions of an exit.

Help from friends

In terms of finding suitable employment, we focused on the aspects of his corporate finance jobs that were consistently enjoyable and particularly satisfying.  We identified former colleagues and contacts who appreciated his work in the past.

However, he still felt cobbled by feelings of shame due to his “failing” and didn’t want to disclose the reasons that he was looking for work.  As a test run, we developed a script that he could use when conversing with family and friends about his situation.  We revised it according to their feedback and his comfort level.

When he was ready, he reached out to a few contacts and was very surprised and happy how receptive they were to re-connect with him, which bolstered his confidence.  One of them was ready to hire him on the spot but couldn’t do so due to budget constraints.

However, this contact referred him to a large employment agency that specialized in corporate finance roles.  After some research, my client signed an agreement with that agency and was soon working in his field. His long-term goal is to move from a contract position to a permanent job with one of the clients he serves.

Overcoming highly charged emotions, like shame, requires time and attention…and a little help from our friends and career coach.

This is your best workplace

Now that pandemic restrictions have been lifted and most people are returning to their workplaces, I am seeing an increasing number of clients who don’t want to go back. 

Most of them have been on some kind of mental health leave and the prospect of returning to work is causing a lot of anxiety and depression.  Very often these are single mothers with good jobs but they feel trapped in golden handcuffs.

Each situation is unique, of course, and often complicated.  But we have to start somewhere, so I usually start with looking at two key elements of a good job fit:  (1) their core job duties, and (2) the work environment in which they perform those duties.

Core Job Duties

First, let’s be honest, there is no such thing as a perfect job where you are 100% happy and satisfied all the time.  The world is just not organized that way!  One key to job satisfaction is to spend 60% of your day or more performing job duties that energize you.

Because, let’s face it, many job duties are just grunt work, things you can do but don’t really enjoy doing—in fact, these job duties drain you.  Think of your energy level like a bank account; if you keep withdrawing money from it 60% of the time and only putting money in 40% of the time, then you are on the path to financial stress, even bankruptcy.  It might take 10-20 years, but you will crash!

List the job duties that you regularly perform day in and day out.  Then, ask yourself, what percentage of an average workday do I spend performing job duties that drain or bore me?  If it’s greater than 50%, you’re in trouble with your health and well-being.

Work Environment

You could have the best job duties in the world but if you work in a toxic work environment with a bad boss or mean-spirited colleagues, your stress levels will skyrocket.  Working each day in circumstances that don’t align with your values, priorities, and preferences will aggravate you at best and drain you at worst. 

For example, who controls the pace of work is critical…tight deadlines and high-speed is a source of stress if you are not motivated by pressure. If you have no say over what you do, the way you do it, and who you do it with, then your mental health will suffer serious consequences.

Job fit and satisfaction are influenced by many factors related to what energizes you in terms of core job duties and what brings out the best in you in terms of a work environment. 

If you feel confused or sick about your current work situation, let’s meet to discuss your unique situation.

When your job makes you sick

The founder of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.”

What we think, what we believe, reveals our deepest values.  When somebody tells me they really want to change careers but don’t think they can, what they often mean is that they can’t afford to… because they believe that changing careers means trading their current income for something much less.

Fair enough, I get it, money makes the world go round, so their current income is more important to them than anything else…until it isn’t.

For example, the one situation where money becomes much less important is when a person’s health is jeopardized by their job, i.e. when they become too sick, physically or mentally, to keep doing a job, especially if the job itself is making them sick.

After 30 years as a career counsellor, I have seen this scenario play out hundreds of times.  Many of my clients were forced to change careers due to severe back pain, neck and shoulder pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, cancer, heart conditions, depression, crippling anxiety, addiction, and other common conditions.

Those with health benefits often go on long term disability which often only delays the inevitable eventuality of having to find other work.  But serious pain usually forces many of these unlucky individuals into a career change. 

Either way, hard choices are involved because lifestyles will change one way or another; maybe for better, maybe for worse.

Henry Ford filed for bankruptcy twice before he was able to succeed with his Ford Motor Company. Clearly, thinking positively is not enough to guarantee success. 

Ford had to make a plan, take effective actions, make corrections when things didn’t work out, recruit help from others when necessary, and keep going with a clear goal in mind.  But, surely, thinking that he could do it must have helped him through some difficulties!

Making a career change means making changes in your life.  That’s a simple fact.

Getting sick only forces you to make them. 

If you’re healthy now, use your time wisely to create the changes you want!  

To be or not to be…who you are!

I had a client recently who is passionate about animal care…always has been, since childhood. 

At least once a year, for the past 30 years, someone like her enters my practice.  Sometimes young, or middle age, male or female—what they all have in common is this inner longing to take care of animals…for them a stronger desire than taking care of people.

And yet, none of them had been able to move beyond the care of their own pets.  Most of them tried pet-sitting or dog-walking or some related low skill, low pay job but couldn’t make enough money to make ends meet.

Finding the right path

Like my client this week, they go into other careers, usually because they had no desire or inclination to be a vet or a vet’s assistant.  As my client said, “I want to care for them, not kill them!”  This is a typical rationale for such clients:  when the most obvious option that society offers (e.g., be a vet) is not one that interests them, they give up on their heartfelt aspiration.

In her case, she worked as a cashier, custodian, martial arts instructor, and finally trained and worked as a Rehab Assistant, caring for individuals recovering from accidents…but she quit after two years because it didn’t meet her expectations.

She’s determined now to find a career working with animals, which is the only thing she really wants to do. I assured her that there were dozens of animal care jobs, including many she’d never of heard of, and many that don’t require a lot of education or training.

Choosing the right path

In general, jobs with animals fall into three categories: service (care & feeding), resource development and conservation.

I gave her a list of all the jobs related to animal care, everything from animal trainer to bison farmer to wildlife photographer.  I gave her a list of education programs for Resource Development and Animal Conservation.
She loved the idea of wildlife rehabilitation but didn’t want to go back to school.

In the end, she decided to start with Kennel Attendant and work towards owning and operating her own kennel someday.  She may even return to Rehab Assistant part-time, or on contract, to save money to buy some property for a kennel near Winnipeg.

She is finally accepting who she is in terms of her right work and taking responsibility for what she wants in life.

Living the right path

Very often our right work shows up early in life, but other values, priorities, advice, or circumstances get in the way of us following our instincts, intuition, or heartfelt desires.

We often get knocked off our right path early in life and end up surviving on another one…but not thriving.

It’s never too late to get back on it.  Sure, it might not be ideal, but it will certainly be deeply satisfying and rewarding in ways that are often hard to explain to others who have different values or priorities.

Be who you are…you won’t regret it.

JobJoy Smile – Animal Puns

Q: What do you call a sleeping bull?
A: A bull-dozer.

Q: How do you fit more pigs on your farm?
A: Build a sty-scraper!

Q: What did the farmer call the cow that had no milk?
A: An udder failure.

Q: Why do gorillas have big nostrils?
A: Because they have big fingers!

Q: Why are teddy bears never hungry?
A: They are always stuffed!

Q: Why do fish live in salt water?
A: Because pepper makes them sneeze!

Q: What do you get from a pampered cow?
A: Spoiled milk.

Q: Where do polar bears vote?
A: The North Poll

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