Work, success, and meaning at every stage of your career
Steven L. Katz is the author of Lion Taming: Working Successfully with Leaders, Bosses and Other Tough Customers. Katz has worked as a corporate lion tamer for over 20 years; he’s been the executive assistant and right hand to many high-level executives and leaders, including a senior (unnamed in the book) U.S. senator. He intersperses real lion tamer advice from circus performers with advice on how to work with powerful leaders in business.
Since you’re making all those other New Year’s resolutions, why not add a couple to perk up your career prospects? Here are two suggestions that will add value to your resume and that can be accomplished in your spare time.
Heather Huhman wrote a great post about the personal qualities that hiring managers don’t like to see in a candidate. But it’s the Smart Brief link title that caught my eye: Are you too boring to hire?
Huhman writes:
“Hiring managers don’t want to see a candidate who has no additional interests or personality beyond what’s required to get a job in their industry. You need to show you’re a human being, not a robot. Hiring managers love to see candidates with hobbies, or even those who have taken on a second job—it shows you’re able to make good use of your free time to expand your skills and interests, and this is a quality that’s likely to spill over into your professional life.”
When asked the question “At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?” only 20 percent answered yes; the other 80 percent felt that they were not using their strengths in their roles at work.
Buckingham starts out by defining “strength” as “near perfect, consistent performance.” Being pretty good at something is not enough. It starts with talent, which Buckingham describes as an innate ability – something you may have been a natural at all your life. In fact, being a natural is what keeps many of us from understanding true strengths; if it’s that easy for me, doesn’t everyone find it to be easy too?
Q: I’m unemployed right now, and I’ve heard that it’s a waste of time to conduct a job search during the holiday season. Should I just forget about it until January?
What could be wrong with being nice? Here are six signs that you might be nice to the point of unhealthy.
If you’re like most job seekers across most industries, the success of your job search will depend on your ability to reach out to people in the real world through phone calls, meetings over coffee, and conversations at social events. But as vital as face-to-face contact will be, you’ll still need to pay close attention to the online branch of your search. And if your online efforts aren’t taking you anywhere or don’t seem to be paying off, you may benefit by giving your digital strategy a few tweaks.
This week is the one we set aside to give thanks for our blessings. If you’ve been unemployed for a while, you may have trouble summoning a sense of gratitude for your experience over the past few months (or years.)
Gratitude, like most feelings, can be both an experience and a practice. Many people practice gratitude each day to remind themselves of the abundance of good things in life, even if (maybe especially if)they are going through a difficult period.
Being rejected is not fun. If you’re in an extended job search, every call you don’t get feels like a fresh rejection, and that can wear down your confidence fast. That’s a problem, because your confidence and energy level are two of the first things your network – and recruiters – notice about you. Here are some tips on how to boost your confidence.
