12.20.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:15 pm by Jackie Jones
One of the things I enjoy most about the holiday season is decorating the house. It changes the routine into something extraordinary.
When I rearrange the furniture to accommodate the Christmas Tree, I get ideas on what pieces to take out or leave in, which art to leave up or take down or substitute. Putting a holiday mantle scarf over the fireplace, moving accent pieces around lets me know that I don’t have to be stuck in one way of doing things.
In the same way, I look at making changes at the way I do business as a way to improve my services and take my mission to another level.
It’s not change for change’s sake, although I imagine that may not be a bad idea from time to time. It is more like a regular checkup to make sure all systems are in working order.
For the past month, I’ve had problems getting my blogsite to work. So I switched over to musing on my Jones Coaching Facebook page, tweeting a little more, emailing contacts.
Soon, this blog will have a new look, combined with my newsletter and my website will undergo a radical transformation. I’ve even had a conversation with a friend and former colleague about getting involved in a startup project that exchanges a bit of sweat equity for a financial stake later in the year.
It’s scary to step out there, not knowing if a project will succeed, but sitting on the sidelines is not my style – at least not a style that I want to maintain.
When the Christmas season ends and the tree is gone, the ornaments and decorations packed away, there will be some changes in the look of my living room. Likewise, my business and career trajectory as going to be different, too.
From now on, it’s going to be about taking care of business.
Happy Holidays and I hope your new year will be all about Taking Care of the Business of You.
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11.16.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:28 pm by Jackie Jones
How many times have you held back from trying something new or letting someone see the first draft of a project because it wasn’t perfect in your estimation?
The need for perfection can keep you from finding your bliss.
If we wait until all the ducks are in a row, we’ll never get started because one of the ducks is always going to step out of line until the line starts moving.
We won’t apply for a job, make the case for moving a relationship to the next level, fill out an application or call for information about an area of interest because we have deemed ourselves not ready.
We can’t be successful because we have not created a successful mindset. We can’t recover from disappointment or rejection because we have not figured out how to do it.
As the kids say, if you don’t know, ask somebody.
“Whatever you want to be, do or live, getting advice from people who excel in your field will be invaluable. People who haven’t lived the dream don’t know what is truly possible,” writes Mastin Kipp, author of the blog, The Daily Love (http://thedailylove.com/).
Mastin cites entrepreneur and uber self-promoter Donald Trump as an example of someone who can lose and recoup fortune because he has a mindset that tells him it is possible.
You don’t have to admire the person or his style, but you can always learn from those who have the knack to do what you see yourself doing but just haven’t figured out how to make it happen.
I tell my clients all the time to go on informational interviews. Call people and ask for a meeting for background data, ideas, advice, direction. Figure out how a company works, who advances there and why. What is the company’s mission and what does senior management look for in viable candidates?
It’s easy to ask those questions when you are not applying for a specific position. It allows you to research the firm and determine if you really fit in that environment. It tells you how to prepare so that if and when you decide to apply for a position you will know what you’re going after and what the company is looking for.
What holds you back from making that call?
Are you afraid that you can’t possibly qualify, or is it that you might actually have to follow through if you discover you do?
Sometimes the fear of success is as limiting as the fear of failure. The fantasy is more comfortable than the reality, the chase more rewarding than the capture.
It’s not the economy. It’s not age or race or height or weight or even experience, in most cases, that keep you from moving ahead.
It’s your (un)willingness to move beyond your comfort zone – especially if it no longer serves you well.
Call your own bluff. Don’t wait for perfection.
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11.08.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:58 pm by Jackie Jones
I recently went on an accreditation visit at a university. My colleagues and I were staggered to learn that tuition for one of the 18-month graduate programs ran about $65,000.
We assumed the students would be, too.
What we discovered, however, was that the students looked at the money as an investment in the future. They were attending a highly-respected program and had access to internships and networking opportunities that few other programs around the country could offer. They were confident that they would find work and, on balance, they said, it was a good deal.
What seemed onerous to us as outsiders was perfectly reasonable to the students who had done their own cost-benefit analysis.
My father used to say when it comes to where you spend your money it’s “all in what you value.”
We find the money, the time and the energy for the events, organizations, people and projects that are important to us. We decide what religious or charitable organizations get our money. We decide with whom we want to spend our time, where and how.
And while others make look at us askance, for the most part we go with what makes us happy.
We should be as deliberate about our work as we are in the other aspects of our lives. The adage about doing what you love and the money will follow is not as pie-in-the-sky as we think. Where we put our focus and energy usually tends to grow.
If that’s the case, then focus on what you want. Whether it’s a gamble or an investment is all in where you’re coming from.
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10.27.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:16 pm by Jackie Jones
Today, Oct. 27, is my mother’s 87th birthday.
When I walked into her room this morning and wished her a Happy Birthday, her reply was, “Thank you. It’s good to be here.”
It is from my mother that I developed the desire to do and be everything I could possibly be. A Depression Era child, my mother spent much of her youth and adulthood playing it safe. Like many adults whose coming of age was forged in economic worry and a World War, my mom toed the line in the hope that her children wouldn’t have to, that we could take assurance in a safety net that she provided so that we could dare to be more than she allowed herself to dream.
As a senior, though, my mom has developed a sense of gratitude for a life that is filled with financial security, a degree of longevity she had not anticipated and love from family, friends and the friends of her children.
I am on the road a lot, but I have a contingent of close friends who check on my mother while I’m gone and who often invite her out to dinner, listen to jazz or take in a museum exhibition. Even when I’m in town, if I can’t make it to an event, they will tease me and say, “We don’t need you; we can see you anytime. We’ll come get mom.”
She loves the attention and seldom turns down an invitation.
“If they call, I’m ready,” she likes to say.
In the oft-quoted words of Woody Allen, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
Mama shows up to play every day. It’s a good place to start for life, for work and play.
In the game of life, you must be present to win.
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10.23.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:47 pm by Jackie Jones
Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I often like to quote song lyrics to make a point.
We hear popular songs in commercials, as the beds to public service announcements or as themes for projects and even sports teams. Do you think that Freddie Mercury really thought “We Are the Champions” would become a song for high school football teams across the country?
But I digress.
Songs that resonate with us become part of the soundtrack of our lives. We hear an old tune and remember where we were the first time we heard it, whom we were dating or maybe a whole season of fun or even pain.
We may not acknowledge it, but songs often play out in our philosophy about life, work and relationships.
We often are convinced we can’t have everything we want in life because no one can. How many times do we listen to love songs in which the singers pine over unrequited romance or a lost love they are desperately seeking to win back?
Those lyrics play in our heads and sometimes keep us stuck, because while it may be happening on a more subconscious level, those words become our thoughts.
Just a few days ago, I was in the car driving home from an appointment when I heard Luther Vandross’ “I’d Rather,” when the chorus – which I know by heart – kicked in:
I’d rather have bad times with you
than good times with someone else
I’d rather be beside you in a storm
than safe and warm by myself
I’d rather have hard times together
than to have it easy apart
I’d rather have the one who holds my heart
The music is sweeping and tender, the kind that makes you sway and think, “How romantic!”
Then reality hits.
Think about those lyrics. He’s saying that he’d rather be back in a miserable situation with somone from whom he has already split than safe, warm, comfortable alone.
Really? Who does that to himself/herself?
We all do. And that applies to work as well as relationships.
How many of us have stayed in jobs we hated because we’d rather have that little miserable piece of a job than no job? Or because we think we need the money from that particular employer? How many of us come home cursing the job, our co-workers and spend time imagining how life could be better with a different job, but end up stunned, shocked and hurt when we are bought out/laid off/fired?
I am not urging you to run out and quit if the energy you hold around work won’t let you trust that something better is right there waiting for you. But I do urge you to look at how to make your situation better where you are as you figure out where you want to go.
Create the intention to do the work you want to do and every day there ought to be some action you take that makes it happen in some small way. Start with baby steps and move up to bigger steps that move you in the right direction.
All you have is the present. Yesterday’s gone and tomorrow hasn’t come. Every waking moment is today.
Bless the job you have. Tell it you are grateful for the opportunities it has provided, but that you are now ready to move on and release it to someone who would love it more. Then set your sights on a plan that will move you forward.
Change the song in your head – or at least rewrite the lyrics.
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10.14.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:17 pm by Jackie Jones
Have you ever overdone it? You know, double-booked appointments, put more on your plate than you really could handle while hoping you would find a way to get it all done?
I have. I still do sometimes.
I made a commitment to blog weekly. I even coached a client who recently launched a blog to be consistent. If you don’t have fresh content at least weekly, I counseled, people will look elsewhere for info.
So last week I didn’t blog.
I meant to. Really. But I agreed to sub for a website editor. In my mind, it was just a few hours a day and I could work it around all my other duties. It turned into a full-time gig. Not only did I miss last week, I nearly missed this week, too.
So I took a break and looked at my priorities. Whom am I trying to serve?
My mission is to help those who want to reinvent their careers. While the temptation to sometimes dabble in my previous life as a full-time journalist will always hover closely, I know that my intention is to help those who want new jobs – whether within their current companies or elsewhere.
If I’m not serving them (and presumably those of you who read my blog regularly), then I can’t expect to succeed.
Now, I’m not going to beat myself up too much. My two-week run is over and I realize, more than ever, that my former career is just that – former. I learned the limits of what I can put on my plate and what truly makes me happy.
And that’s the lesson I want to share with each of you.
There will be times when you take on something that you aren’t wild about, or maybe shouldn’t even remotely consider doing, but you do it. Rather than be angry about the outcome, look at it as an opportunity to learn more about yourself, what you really want, what you reasonably can achieve in this moment and how to keep the focus on doing what you truly want to do.
Don’t even look at it as a mistake. The more you learn about yourself, the easier it is to find out what works best for you.
And isn’t that what you’re trying to do in the first place?
——–
For those of you in the D.C. area, I’ll be speaking Sunday, Oct. 16, at Unity of Bowie at a health and wellness expo about the link between a healthy career and a healthy body. There are two sessions, morning and afternoon. Please join us, if you can. For details, visit: www.wellnesshealthexpo.com.
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09.28.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:04 pm by Jackie Jones
From the act of our birth until the moment we are laid to rest, nothing we do is done in isolation.
We were carried in our mothers’ wombs, we were fed, clothed and nurtured by other people, educated in schools that our parents or taxpayers or scholarship donors provided, lived in homes built by other people or, when we did build them ourselves, we used materials created by others.
Great thinkers, writers and business leaders have all declared the importance of working in concert.
In the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, we are told: “There is nothing new under the sun.” – Every idea already exists in the universe, it is up to us find them.
Poet John Donne wrote the famous “No Man Is an Island,” which was transformed into a poem from a prose meditation. He had not intended to write it as a poem, but much of his career and life was driven by the wishes of others who supported him, financially, spiritually and intellectually.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish as fools,” realized the cooperation of others, even those who may not have believed racial equality was their personal mission, was required if the movement of nonviolent, civil disobedience were to effect change.
And legendary automaker Henry Ford said, “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” He certainly understood working together, he and his engineers developed the assembly line.
Each man certainly had an extraordinary gift, but none of them acted alone. They may have been given credit by others, but they didn’t claim it for themselves. It is something we must remember when we are tempted to claim all the credit when we excel at something – especially at work.
This does not mean that you cannot accept accolades for good work or that your achievements are less noteworthy, but there is an unspoken quid pro quo that you acknowledge the help from others and assist others because somewhere along the line you were aided by someone, even if indirectly.
Great teachers are great because their students took what they were taught and used it to their advantage. A brilliant student was fed intellectually by a teacher or series of teachers who fed his thirst for knowledge and equipped him with the tools to conduct research on his own.
Successful leaders are those who can bring people together to work for the common good. They fail when they see themselves as better than those who did the grunt work that freed the leaders to concentrate on the big picture.
Look around the office. Are there people you feel smarter than or not as smart as? Do you interact with everyone and treat them with equal respect or do you choose only those you consider your peers or whose peer group you aspire to join?
How are you regarded? Are you seen as someone others want to spend time with or do you find yourself all too often feeling as if you were flying solo?
There is a lot of emphasis put on one’s leadership style, but perhaps more focus ought to be put on collegiality.
Benjamin Franklin, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was thinking of something greater than office politics, but certainly captured the spirit of cooperation when he wrote, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”
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09.17.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:59 pm by Jackie Jones
I’ll let you in on a little secret.
While I’m outgoing in one-on-one and very small group situations, speaking in front of a crowd can be unnvering – still – and when i walk into an event and see no familiar faces, I start wondering how long I can stay before I can slip out without being totally rude.
That’s right. I conduct workshops before dozens of people and have been invited to speak to rooms of more than 100, but I get the jitters everytime.
What I know for sure, though, is that if I don’t take the chance and get out there, I’ll miss out on an opportunity to learn something and to meet wonderful people with fresh ideas and different perspectives.
My friends probably will laugh when they read this because I’m probably one of the chattiest people they know. And that’s just it – they KNOW me. We share the same interests, schools, work experiences. We have lots in common.
This weekend, I’m attending Alumni Weekend at my alma mater. The entire time I have not seen one person who was in my cohort, but I made myself walk up to people and introduce myself. I befriended a young woman 20 years my junior who came and was nervous because she didn’t see any classmates either.
I even met go-go king Chuck Brown and had my picture taken with him and went to a concert and danced until my feet hurt. I let my hair down a little bit and felt especially vindicated when the university president – a middle-aged man who looks very much like a college president and not a musician – got on stage and sat in for a couple of songs playing percussion.
No one saw that coming.
At a leadership workshop, one of the speakers said those who are most successful are those willing to take risks – calculated risks, but risks nonetheless.
I knew there was a possibility that strangers might not be willing to engage me in conversation, but I approached them anyway.
I went to the student newspaper office for its alumni event and was the only person in the room over 25. I saw one young student I got to know in a project a few years ago and met another who had seen my RSVP, looked up my background and approached me as if he knew me well. The students welcomed me, made me feel at home and told me to feel free to contact them or come down to the office and hang out when I was on campus.
It’s okay to be nervous, but it’s not okay not to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and take the plunge.
You’ll be surprised to find that once you’re in the pool, the water’s fine.
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09.04.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:00 pm by Jackie Jones
If it’s all about you, then it’s all on you.
It’s all too easy to blame others for a lack of success, for a sense of being overwhelmed and for being left holding the bag when things fall apart.
My granddaughter Amani once complained that something her parents had done wasn’t fair. When they told her that life wasn’t fair, she replied: “It’s not life that isn’t fair; it’s the grownups.”
For a young child whose comings and goings are determined by adults that statement seems accurate. Children little control over what they do and need not only permission, but assistance for much of what they would like to do.
The rest of us, however, have to acknowledge our roles in the way our lives turned out.
That doesn’t mean we get to mope around and curse our fate when we fail to get that job, promotion or big deal we have been pursuing.
It does mean that we need to assess our situation and figure out how to improve upon it.
A close friend of mine likes to take inventory after a dinner party to determine what went well and what needed improvement. If she forgot cocktail napkins near the drinks table or was slow getting the main course together, she took notes for future reference.
After a job interview or a contract presentation, jot down what went well and what you would do differently if given another opportunity. If you allowed someone else to control the conversation or let yourself be thrown off course by critical remarks, outline a strategy that will keep you on point the next time. If there was something you forgot to point out during the interview, find a way to work that into your thank-you note or in a follow-up letter.
You did remember the Thank You note, right?
Make sure you give yourself every chance to succeed. You’re the grownup now and you are in control.
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08.31.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:45 am by Jackie Jones
A lot of clients ask to review potential questions or to do a mock Q&A before a job interview. They want to make sure they have all the right answers.
But the right answer is kind of like the latest fashion or newest car model. What was fine one, two, five years ago, is no longer just right.
Employment experts say there are phrases that have become so empty and cliched that their utterance quickly moves you down the bottom of the list:
1) I am a team player – Most folks think it’s a good thing to say that you work well with others. Well, employers want a demonstration. You should be able to describe a project or an extra effort on your part that shows you are a team player.
2) I have great communication skills – If you do, it will be apparent during the interview.
3) I have a proven track record – Just describe the results of your efforts. If you saved your company money, won a major contract, found the error that averted disaster, that is something documentable.
4) I assisted…. – It sounds like you were just hanging out and stepped in when you saw an extra hand was needed. You either worked on the project or assignment or you didn’t. Just describe your role.
5) I have a strong work ethic – That’s to be expected.
6) I am bottom-line focused – That’s expected, too, but you don’t want to seem to be so focused on one thing that you are unable to look at a situation in context and make a sound judgment call.
7. I am responsible for… – You are responsible for whatever is under your job description, so describe the actual responsibility: supervise, coordinate, create, build, etc.
8. I’m self-motivated – One would certainly hope so.
9. I’m accustomed to a fast-paced environment – So if the pace is slower at a prospective employer’s shop does that mean you would be unhappy or begin to slack off? Or is this a polite way of saying you are used to working amid chaos? If the latter, an employer has to wonder whether you contribute to the chaos, are resigned to accepting it or don’t know how to rein things in.
10. I am a problem-solver – Again, don’t just say that; describe a problem you solved and the resulting benefit to the company.
Generic descriptions in a cover letter, resume summary or an interview are a dime a dozen. You stand out by being clear and direct.
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