Feed Your Career

Close your eyes, picture yourself a professional singer.  What appeals to you more?  Thoughts of a loud audience clambering for the stage while you with maddening passion sing your heart out with your band and go club hopping  afterwards late into the night?  The songs you sing are ones you wrote yourself, ones that carry meaning from your own life experiences. You pack up every night and play in a new place, big and small cities throughout the US not laying down roots anywhere for long.  Or does a smile cross your face thinking of concert halls, symphonies, formal dress, fancy dinners, being involved in multiple voice productions in different languages touring the larger cities of the world while based in a large European city.  Both use the gifts voice and stage performance but both are set in widely different environments, thus are matched for different personalities.   Much of what appeals to us and that “fits” us well stems from our personality type.

Your personality type is a framework for describing your strengths and preferences for gaining energy, gathering information, making decisions and approaching life.  There is no one or group of preferred personality types.  Each is just different and suits different environments both personally and professionally.

Think about your own family — children, siblings, parents.  I am blessed with four children.  Each is different, each has a different personality.  The same encouragement, learning settings, organization systems, approaches for change, schedules for the day  do not work for them all – that is largely due to their very different personalities.  The same is true for adults, we all have different tendencies, different preferences, respond differently to the same settings, and have different personalities.

A commonly quoted example is your preference for writing with your right or left hand.  You have a natural tendency for one or the other.  You can if necessary learn to write with your other hand (try it now — write your name with you non-dominant hand) but you will never be able to master it as naturally as you can with your dominant hand.

Same goes for personality preferences.  We can and do EVERY DAY use all of the personality preferences but we prefer the ones that are in our natural state.  Feed Your Career has created our own brief Myers-Briggs test so you can determine which of the 16 personality types you are.  I encourage you first sign in as a member (it is free) and then take our personality assessment.  You can then save your resulting personality type  in your Career Manager – a career dashboard where you save information to manage your career.

Member account login
Personality assessment

Knowing your personality type is helpful because it will tell you tasks, work settings, activities that GIVE you energy for life.  If you think of the effort you exerted to concentrate to write your name with your non-dominant hand a moment ago, what if you were doing activities all day that required this type of concentration?  At the end of the day you would feel whipped!  Now picture doing this day after day — wow, you would over time loose enthusiasm for your work and come home exhausted.  Think about the two singers described at the start of this post, what if they switched work for a day?  For a week?  For a year?  If you are a work setting grossly mismatched for your personality you will become exhausted and over time the passion will die and frustration may even replace the enthusiasm you once had.

You may be saying to yourself — I really love my work so I must be working in my personality preferences.  I don’t need to do this personality assessment.  Not true, in reality very few people are working in environments within their personality preference all day.  Instead, they may have a mixture throughout the day, some activities that give them energy and they soar at and others that drain them.  If you enjoy work every day your overall energy reserves must be above zero.  What if you could send your energy reserves sky high?  What if nearly all day you were operating within a work setting supported by your personality preference?  Imagine how successful you would be then, and the enjoyment every day you would experience.

My formula for success is arrange my days to be doing activities at least 80% in the preferences of my personality and no more than 20% performing activities that are not part of my natural self.

There is no way of avoiding activities and settings outside your natural zone, but if you are only there 20% of the time, then you will have plenty of energy to glide right through draining activities and settings you must encounter in your day.  I like to say when I am performing in my personality zone I am offering my best self to the world.  When you are in your personality zone you make better decisions and are able to be much more productive.

Another way of thinking of it is imagine on Sunday you have the entire day to spend doing activities for yourself –  for me that would be meditating, yoga, reading, slow cup of coffee, long walk, glass of wine, definitely some chocolate and phone calls to girlfriends.  Then on Monday if first thing I was faced with was a  crisis –  a surprise inspection from the state department and my two best employees were out; or the head of nursing called a meeting (this really was a meeting for her to vent on the new tray service policy); or my biggest client was announcing he was taking bids from other clients to determine who to sign on with for the next year, I would be ready and at the top of my game to navigate any of these sticky situations that arose.

After spending a day gaining energy and calm for my personality I would be able to take any of these Monday events  calmly and make good decisions that would benefit me and my company greatly in the short and long term.  In reality, on Sundays I do not get to spend all day on myself – not with four kids at home.    But if I do understand myself and my personality I can rearrange both my work and nonwork time to come more from the activities and settings of my personality and less outside my zone.  I also can have people around me that I delegate both professional and personal activities to that are not within my personality.  The result is – no I am not calm and collected 100% of the time with my 4 kids, however, I do offer my best self much of the time to my work and my loved ones and am aware of when I am pulling from activities that put me outside my preferred natural zone and work quickly to get back to my natural zone as soon as possible.

Your North Star

Good News!!  Feed Your Career has created an interactive Discover Yourself tool free to members.  This tool is your North Star.  It will be a central area with information on yourself to use to guide in work and career decisions.  It will help you either tweak your current work so you are a better fit and in your natural zone or look into a new job that better suits your gifts, personality, values and passions. The first part of the Discover Yourself tool focuses on personality type.

The first step is to take Feed Your Career’s personality assessment as encouraged above.  This is then saved to your account – the Discover Yourself tool.  Once you have completed this step  the interactive tool inserts automatically activities that come naturally to you based on your assessed personality type.  The tool allows you to take off activities or add your own in from the list of generated activities – we know everyone does not fit neatly into 16 personalities – we all are truly unique and different.  The activities are suggestions for you to take note on whether you feel energetic and enthusiastic when doing these activities.  If unsure you can take them off and even add ones not listed.  The tool is meant to be developed over time as you discover more about yourself.

Next on the tool activities that are best for you to minimize or delegate to someone else are inserted — these are big energy drainer activities.  Again, the tool allows you to take ones off that you may not mind doing and add in others that you know are best left to someone else to complete.

Take this opportunity to use the Discover Yourself tool to create a custom profile for yourself.  Start rearranging your work and nonwork time to pull from your personality preferences.  You will be giving to those around you your best self — the most precious  gift anyone could ask for.

Two important career questions to ask yourself.

Does the work you do fit with who you are?

Do you feel purpose and meaning in your work?

For a large number of people – even those who appear to have their act together – the answer to these questions is no.

Maybe you are one of the lucky ones who has found a good fit in your work and you feel valued, you find meaning in your work.  If that describes you, then the posts here will give you a structured process to help you continue to make fulfilling career choices.

I want to help you and others discover the truths about who you are, what you do best that will add meaning to your career and those around you.  I want to help you pull back the layers you have put on through the years to find out who you are at your core, in your natural zone. This is why Feed Your Career has developed an online Discover Yourself interactive tool where you select, edit and store important facts about yourself.

It is meant as a lifetime tool to give you direction and guidance whenever making choices about:

* career direction
* career advancement
* maintaining an already fulfilling career
* career change and re-invention
* volunteer and service opportunities

The Discover Yourself information tool acts as a reminder to your career and life priorities, your visions, facts you have discovered about yourself, best practices in order to lead a life filled with passion, purpose and meaning.  It is intended to be a tool you refer to regularly as life itself is filled with distractions and decisions daily that can take you off your intended path.  Never before has a generation had so many decisions on a daily basis that can add or take away from a person’s priorities, their gifts, their life passions and very importantly their life purpose.

Feed Your Career wants to make the journey to definition of who you are as simple as possible and easy to hold on to and build from.  We want your journey to a fulfilling career with the least number of roadblocks and the shortest path to the unveiling of your uniqueness you have to offer in the form of gifts, passions and value to the world today.

Much of what you need you likely already know but just lack the structure to pull it all together.  This is why we created Discover Yourself.  No long note-taking sessions, no big investment in a program required, no long list of  reading to get a clear picture of who you are and the direction you should take your career.  What you need is a centralized place that leads you through the critical information that paints a masterpiece of YOU – your uniqueness, your gifts, your passions.  The Discover Yourself tool is kept in one place for you to go back to to remind yourself of YOU and expand on as you uncover more about YOU and use it to guide you when making decisions regarding:

* your work (paid or volunteer)
* your activities at work
* your goals for your career

This exists now – it is Feed Your Career’s Discover Yourself interactive tool launching August 19th! Watch for more posts on how this indispensable career tool can help you.

I just returned from a 3 week vacation in Spain.  I was told people all over speak English so when I had no time to squeeze in learning a new language before going I was not worried.  When I got there, it was a different reality.  Yes, some people spoke English, but the vast majority did not.  Thankfully the people in Spain are very friendly and patient so my hand and face gestures together with my mini Spanish/English dictionary helped me survive.  I did have a few mishaps (actually more than a few) along the way.

There was the ordering of my favorite drink – hot mocha.  I was craving my favorite drink and ordered coffee, milk and chocolate and got two drinks: hot chocolate and an espresso.  There is no such thing as a mocha drink in Spain.    The word I needed to know was together – junto in Spanish.

Then there is the detergent.  I had rented a flat and there was some laundry left from the last renter.  Using some meant saving a trip to the store.  Word of advise -  know the word for bleach when working with laundry in a different language ( lejía).  The bottle was not regular laundry detergent, it was bleach.  My 14-year olds’ clothes were instantly turned into tie-dye designs.  She was extremely understanding.  She had clothes in that load she had just bought for the trip.  Yes, she had every reason to be upset but thankfully took it in stride.

I found myself at the grocery store for my first trip without my mini-dictionary.  For most food items I could look and grab and know what I was getting.  For milk, it did not work so well.  Being a dietitian I have drank skim milk for past 20 some years.  The next morning on my cereal I tasted whole milk for the first time in a long time.  Wow, that was very different on my tastebuds.  I now know the word for skim milk is leche desnatada.

For me, the best way of learning words and life in Spain was to plunge in and learn as I went along.  Do you have plans for your career?  Where you want to go?  What skills and experiences and credentials you need to get there?  Are you having trouble knowing where to start?  Are you afraid of doing it wrong?  My word of advice is just get STARTED and from there you will learn what you need and are lacking.  If you don’t start, you will never get to where you want to go.  Mistakes are ways of giving us direction in what we want, what we need, how we need to redirect ourselves.  Do not fear making mistakes.  Jack Canfield sums it up wonderfully.

As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not every action will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.

Jack Canfield  – Inspirational Self Help Author and Success Coach, author of book “Chicken Soup for the Soul”

For me, by the end of my trip I was much more comfortable living in Spain and using my limited Spanish to get by with.  I still have a long, long ways to go, but I will not make the same mistakes and was able to create a fabulous daily routine for myself and my kids to enjoy and live life fully for our trip in Spain which was our goal in going.

Mistakes are challenges in disguise. Realistically most of us don’t get it right the first time around. Successful people make mistakes all the time, the difference is that most of the failures go unnoticed because they don’t give up and keep on going.

Successful people evaluate their failures, come up with new solutions to the challenge and try again – this time more educated than the first. Successful people also don’t allow the fear of failure to stop them from achieving their goals.

If you study the failure and challenges of business you will discover the steps needed for achieving success.  These are the key lessons an organization learns as they grow, expand and compete in a changing marketplace. If you want to create shamelessly fabulous success, study all your failures and follow the path that it is laying out for you to sucess. Most highly successful people were not successful from the beginning, they had to struggle a little or a lot to reach their peak potential. Success takes time just as it takes time for you to adjust and learn new skills. But, be aware that mistakes will continue to happen even after you have reached a high level of success. You will always need to be learning something new in business to stay innovative and on top of your game.

Where are You?

Have you started working with social media for your career?  For your business?  What is holding you back?  Much of social media is experimenting and learning  to see what works and does not work to attract new customers.

Thomas Edison was not afraid of mistakes.  He had steel-bending perseverance and determination.  It has been reported that Edison failed over 6,000 times before perfecting the first electric light bulb. On one occasion a young journalist challenged Edison by saying to him, “Mr. Edison, why do you keep trying to make light by using electricity when you have failed so many times? Don’t you know that gas lights are with us to stay?”

Edison replied, “Young man, don’t you realize that I have not failed but have successfully discovered six thousand ways that won’t work!”  What mistakes have you been making and learning from lately?  If none, you are staying too close to your comfort zone.  You need to take calculated risks and learn from them.  There are no successful people who have not made mistakes to get to where they are and they are still making mistakes today.

In life and business, there are two cardinal sins. The first is to act precipitously without thought and the second is to not act at all.

Carl Icahn – Investor and Entrepreneur and Billionaire

What actions are you taking next to find your journey to your success, your dreams, your passion?  What are your mistakes telling you?  Embrace them, they are part of your journey to success.

I recently met with a mid-career nutrition professional who wanted some advice on the direction she should go.  She had narrowed her search to three different directions she could go with her career. She was mapping out her career road map out for the next several years.  I commend her on reaching out to me to ask for help.  I enjoyed meeting her and as usual, gleamed some new things from our encounter.

A hard thing for me is to ask for help on my behalf.  I have no trouble asking on behalf of others (kids, coworkers, friends, family).  But when it comes to my own requests — where did you get those fabulous shoes, can I get your help on a project I am working on, can I have a copy of your recipe for the mushroom risotto, or can I have a few minutes of your time to help you reach cutting edge nutrition professionals.

I usually opt for the research route and find answers myself online or in books.   I am from the stubborn stock of people that believe they can do or find whatever they need themselves.  I mislead myself by telling myself I can do it all alone.

Famous Words from Robin Plotkin

Recently, I had the honor of interviewing Robin Plotkin, culinary and nutrition communications consultant. She is an awe-inspiring entrepreneur.  Be sure to listen to the entire interview.

One point she made during the interview that really struck me was “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”  This is also a famous quote by Mahatma Gandhi.  Robin was advocating  people ask for help/ advice.  She employed this ask philosophy herself to find the dream work she is now doing.  She used the career exploration techniques informational interviewing and job shadowing. I am sure the people she reached out to found they received from the experience.   Additionally, years later, these kind professionals have made a great contact for themselves – the successful Robin Plotkin.

Receive More Than You Ask For

As Feed Your Career grows and gains more recognition I am seeing how the art of asking is far more than a question and answer exchange. When you ask someone you are opening the door for opportunities that never could exist by doing a search in Google.  When asking people for help often times you get back more than you requested – a high dividends payout!

When I met with the nutrition professional I gave her two contact names and  I gained a sense of helping someone.  No frequently asked questions webpage page can replace these perks.

The other day I received a LinkedIn request to connect.  Instead of blindly pressing the “Accept” button, I sent a personal message.  After a couple exchanges with this nutrition professional I was offered a review copy of his soon to be released book.  If I had not reached out to him, I would have missed out on the opportunity to review his book and he would have missed a valuable PR opportunity for his book.

A recommendation I made to the nutrition professional mapping out her career was to conduct informational interviews with professionals in jobs she is interested in.  The goal would be to find out the experience, skills and credentials she needs and determine which direction matches her personality, talents and passions.  I am betting if she reaches out to these professionals she will gather more than information, she may find answers and opportunities she never knew were there.

If I look back over my past I can think of many times where I stubbornly chickened out from asking for help.  I vow to step out of my old comfort zone and “ask for advice or help” with a passionate heart in the future.