What are your criteria for your ideal career?

I find with many people that when they are looking for a change of direction in their career, or they feel 'stuck in a rut', they pick random ideas for jobs or careers without really recognising and listing their personal criteria (values) for their ideal work. Often the reason people are unhappy in their current work is that some of their top criteria are actually missing or exist at a very low level.

What do I mean by criteria, well it's very often things such as - helping people, flexibility, working in a team, money, location, relaxed culture, size of company, being creative (you own list may include some of these and others that are personal to you). When I work with clients, one of the first things I do is to help them identify and prioritise their core and work values, and from here it becomes easier to identify whether a particular job, company or profession will fulfil your personal criteria. It's also useful to remember that values are context specific, so you may well have a totally different (and sometimes conflicting) set of values for things such as health or relationships. When I discovered my own core values I realised immediately why I hated working for someone else and why now I love running my own business!

Do you want to understand your criteria for your ideal work?

To discover your ideal work, join us on this 2-day fun, creative and inspiring Career Transitions Workshop or weekend Career Transitions Retreat

Great Working Relationships

Working relationships with bosses, colleagues and clients is often a great source of stress and negative emotion. From research and working with clients, it seems a lot of unhappiness is caused by a unsupportive boss, a 'difficult' colleague or an unreasonably demanding client. So what can we, as individuals do to relieve this stress and learn to communicate well with those around us?

One of the things I always bring to mind when I feel frustration or anger building with someone is one of the presuppositions of NLP that says "Everyone is doing the best they can with the resources they have". Most people don't set out to be deliberately 'difficult' or 'overly demanding' and they are usually reacting to the responsibilities and demands made on them in both their personal and professional life. Being able to just accept a person for who they are goes a long way towards a more peaceful relationship between you, and a less stressful life for you. Being able to 'step into their shoes' and see things from their perspective also helps you to understand more about their behaviour and understand that what we might perceive as dominating, controlling, bossy or unreasonable, often comes from a place of fear and insecurity. If you were feeling these kind of feelings and emotions, how would you want others to respond to you, what would you need in order to feel more secure and build trust with those around you? I have created a report which explains step-by-step how to use a great technique called Perceptual Positioning and you can download a copy for free here.

To discover your ideal work, join us on this 2-day fun, creative and inspiring Career Transitions Workshop or weekend Career Transitions Retreat

Do you really need career advice?

Many people, when they are searching for a new career or looking for some direction, think that they need career advice, need someone to tell them which direction to take or which career will suit them best.  If you were to pay an advisor to run some career/personality tests with you and then suggest a list of potential careers, would this really help and would it help you to find a role that fits your personal criteria? What if you took up one of these 'suggestions' and later found that you weren't suited to this work at all, how would you feel? Would you feel motivated to go through the same process again or perhaps you might think you had been given 'wrong advice'?!

People always love to give advice - friends, family, colleagues or well-meaning individuals we meet in the pub or at a party. But how many of us actually WANT their advice or perhaps find conflicting advice from different people more confusing than helpful? If you take someone's advice and it doesn't work out, who do you blame? Does taking advice really help you to think for yourself, or help you to discover through your own actions, experience and intuition what is right for you as a unique individual. What many people don't realise is that they have the  answers within in them, but they are often buried by fears, limiting beliefs about what's possible for them or by what they think they 'should' be doing, rather than what they would really love to do.

When I work with a client on career change, I always work with them to discover their work values; values are your personal criteria and they are different for each of us. We will each have our own unique lists of values for areas such as career, relationships and health and we will prioritise them according to our own desires and experience at the time. Just this process alone often helps people identify why they are not happy in their current role or environment and  helps them to picture the type of work that is likely to fulfil their personal criteria.

Coaching is mostly non-directional and works by moving the coachee beyond their own self-imposed limitations, blocks and limiting beliefs, to find their own answers and take action towards their desired outcome - no advice is necessary, you have the answers, you just need someone to ask you the right questions and tap into your own resources, and of course to support and encourage you along the way!

To discover your ideal work, join us on this 2-day fun, creative and inspiring Career Transitions Workshop or weekend Career Transitions Retreat

Live your life actively

The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing

Michael E Gerbe

To discover your ideal work, join us on this 2-day fun, creative and inspiring Career Transitions Workshop or weekend Career Transitions Retreat

Live your own life - NOW!

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other peoples thinking. Don’t let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs – speaking to a group of graduates after surviving a cancer scare.

To discover your ideal work, join us on this 2-day fun, creative and inspiring Career Transitions Workshop or weekend Career Transitions Retreat