Professional Gratitude

It can be very easy to get lost in the dark side of what’s not going well. What could you be grateful for right now in your professional life? For me, I’m feeling grateful on a variety of fronts and excited and energized by the work that I get to do. The Career Growth Program now has customers going through their first month with great feedback and there are more about to start. I’m working with some talented and interesting clients and I’m grateful for the trust they besto…

Professional Investing

When it comes to your personal development and professional development, long experience tells me that results come from when you consistently invest in yourself and your career. To not invest in yourself is like floating down a fast river without a paddle, map or knowledge of what’s around the next bend. Things may go fine for a while, but at some point, you’re going to realize you made a giant mistake. To avoid such unforeseen disaster in your career, you need to invest i…

At the root of failed career changes, bad job choices or an inability to make that next professional step is some level of what I call fuzziness around who we are professionally. Getting a clear and appreciative view of your professional assets is vital, foundational career development work. My friends at VisualCV, a leading online resume-building software provider, invited me to write a guest post. In response, I wrote an in-depth, step-by-step guest article for their blog on what to do if you'…

Updates on our Career Coaching Service Options

I've made updates to the career coaching service options available on the site with the addition of quarterly arrangements as well as the already existing monthly coaching packages. Much of my client work is done a project basis - either with in-depth career move programs, or specific deliverables like LinkedIn profiles, resume writing, etc. In some cases, a monthly or quarterly schedule works great. In the words of one my current clients working on …

Lessons in How to Manage Your Career & Personal Impact from My Dad

My Dad, David Christie, passed away peacefully on Sunday after a long but dignified journey with Alzheimer’s. Reflecting on his life and career, four themes occur to me that serve as valuable reminders for our professional and personal lives. My Dad started his career with the Royal Bank 3 days after completing high school and retired with the bank 43 years later. Here’s what comes to mind as being key lessons from his life.

Old Fa…

How Well Do You Know Your Industry?

One of the valuable skills I learned during my years in the executive search industry was industry mapping.

I would receive an assignment for let's say a VP Logistics in a 3rd party supply chain company and over the course of a couple of weeks I would create a document that mapped the names and locations of the key players in the industry, their relative sizes, the names and titles in each company of the people related to the job and even try and figure out the …