Holiday Review

Beyond strengthening bonds with those around you, the holidays offer an invaluable opportunity for reflection. While the value of New Year’s resolutions has been questioned, I have found that there is a natural cycle occurring during the holidays that I can leverage to reflect on progress, learnings and create plans for the coming year.

Take advantage of this convergence to invest in some reflective time.

Questions to get you started

1. What happened this year that I want to record? …

I have an important concept for you this week. In our arsenal of key concepts, the career management trap that we call accidental career progression resonates with a lot of mid and late-career people. So much so, that part of the tag line for the Bold Career Project contains its opposite: Intentional Career Growth. If in looking back at the years of your professional journey to date, you feel that your decisions and moves weren’t intentional, that you took the first decent job offer, sometimes s…

Career management is not crisis management

I wanted to share with you an important lesson that I was reminded of from two full-process career transition clients that I started working with this week. If you want a career management definition, let's start with what it is NOT. You see, both of these clients, independently, communicated the same thing: If they could go back in time, they would have put more attention, while in the job, on their external profile, network, and relationship management…

Are you excited by what's possible for your professional life this year? Do you have a plan to grow? It is very normal to lose sight of those goals, or ignore the power that a new 12-month cycle can bring us. I'm going to guess that as the New Year rolled over, you had one of three states:

(1) excitement about continued success and growth,

(2) resolution to figure out how to fix a bad or just so-so professional situation, or

(3) resignation/settling that you'll continue to coast or endure your pro…

There Is No Perfect Path

One of the major roadblocks to career growth, is operating on the assumption or belief that there is a perfect career, one magic job or profession that someone should be in, and that if it could be identified, would be the solution to everything. Or, it's the dream job at a Google or Tesla, so far from where they are currently as to be like a Mount Everest to their basic hiking capabilities.

So, in the absence of finding the perfect career (aka right answer), people stay p…

There's more to career growth than aspirations and goals. These four key career growth questions provide a grounded foundation for pursuing those professional goals. I had an excellent intake meeting this week with a Career Growth Program member, someone fully embedded in one company and his leadership role. He had enrolled in the program not because he intends to move jobs but rather with a view to having more influence over what happens in his 50's and beyond. The thought process of our intake…