I recently read a Fast Company article titled “The 4 Crucial Expectations Gen Z teams have for the Workplace”. For quite some time marketing conversations about Gen Z have focused on how younger buyers have higher expectations for getting information that is...
Career Development
What Do Others See?
Thinking about several topics – personal branding, intentional connections, career development – a collision happened in my mind. How does our professional brand change as our career evolves? Can we be more intentional about what the long-term imprints look like? Is...
Routines Can Create Ruts
There are so many benefits of routines that help us keep positive habits. Morning routines can ease us into our day. A nighttime routine can do the same to ease into sleep. We add healthy habits to routines like exercise, skin care, brushing our teeth, meditation, and...
Navigating Career Capital
Careers are interesting. There are no roadmaps out there to help you navigate. The process is extremely personal and no one else can define what is best for you in your career journey. Personal branding is an area I’ve spent time learning and...
When Work Feels Like Middle School
A few weeks ago, I had a thought that work meetings can start to feel like middle school. You go from class to class, on the hour, and when the day ends, the homework begins. Conversations with many adult knowledge workers sound similar. We just...
Grow and Give
Jobs and careers move in cycles. When we start a new role, we are learning a lot about the responsibilities, the organization, the team, and the projects. The job is getting done. However, we are primarily following directions and process. This is the time...
What Got Us Here, Won’t Get Us There
In 2007, Marshall Goldsmith wrote a book titled What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. I read the book years ago when making a career transition and would recommend for others to help reframe your approach in a...
The Tricky Move to Manager
I read a Fast Company article called “These are the 4 Key Skills New Managers Need to Develop Most”. The four skills introduced are openness to learning, empathy, giving feedback, and handling pushback. The article suggests that these skills can be developed before...
Understanding Your Motivation
The last two days, we have covered time and strengths as two self-awareness areas to help achieve our goals. Today, we are going to cover the third (and final) area - motivation. The three assessments below can help us understand projects that get us excited to wake...
Begin with Self-Awareness
Yesterday, the blog focused on a career bucket list. Our lists were likely full of all kinds of dreams. Creating an innovative approach to your work. Taking on a special project. Speaking at a prominent event. Achieving a promotion. Better work life integration....
Career Bucket List
It’s National Bucket List Day! The role of the bucket list is to help you get the most out of life. The list contains your hopes, dreams, and aspirations that you want to accomplish before you die. By creating a list, people often start striving to check...
Careers and the Corporate Ladder
For years, the corporate ladder has been used to describe the climb of an individual’s career. You move from independent worker to supervisor of a small team, to managing larger teams, and finally reaching the “top” of your organization or your area of...
Painting a Career
I came across a quote recently that I really connected with. “Life is like a canvas. It begins blank & every day is like another brush stroke. Make your life a masterpiece.” - Nadhuri This could be a wonderful way to think about a career. Imagine how much could be...
Are Barnacles Holding You Back?
There was a concept from the book That Will Never Work by Mark Randolph the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix. He incorporated a process in business that he called “scraping the barnacles off the hull. Background For those who aren’t familiar, barnacles are marine...
The Long Run
When we think about our careers, we often don’t look beyond the next role or promotion we hope to achieve. Exploration of opportunities involves looking at the roles of others in your company or occasionally pursuing LinkedIn to see what interesting roles may be...
Careers are Like a Scavenger Hunt
In the notes app on my phone, I came across a quote that had captured my attention and wanted to remember in the future. A little research guided me to Marcus Buckingham and his most recent book “Work + Love”. In an interview about the book, he had made...
Handling Negative Experiences
We take deep pride in our work. We put our all into the projects we take on and stive to make the work the best it can be. Yet, it’s inevitable that through our career negative reactions and feedback will occur. Work we think is good will get a harsh critique or be...
Your Mind is not a Container & ChatGPT
When we talk about careers and life in general there is always a focus on lifelong learning. Growth and development are promoted to keep ideas fresh and avoid becoming stagnant. When I ran across the quote below, I realized that it’s not enough to just learn we...
Clutter and Creativity
When it comes to creativity, there are mixed messages on mental clutter. On the one hand, a mind cluttered with many experiences and different pieces of knowledge can leverage the information to make new connections and spark creativity. On the other hand, a mind...
The Era of Creativity
There has been a lot written in the past 2-3 years about a move from the Information Era to the Era of Creativity. Businesses will survive by continuing to innovate and develop creative ideas. In fact, the World Economic forum identified that creativity is or is...
Self-Help: Two Sides to Personal Development
I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with the fact that personal development tends to fall into the category of “self-help”. Today, I did some research, dug under the surface, and came to some conclusions about the genre. Rooted in HELP The source of my challenge with...