Tag Archives: career change

4 Questions To Ask Yourself When Making A Major Career Decision

Making a major career change can be a stressful process. There’s doubt and uncertainty, but there’s also anticipation and excitement. While it may not be the easiest process, there are ways to make yourself feel more certain in your decision. Read these four questions in a Forbes article by Ashira Prossack that can help you make an educated and well thought out decision, and relieve feelings of doubt.

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What the Plumen 001 light bulb and career reinvention have in common

As far back as I can remember, my life and career have been influenced by something an industrial designer created. My Austin Healey “bug eyes” Sprite gave me my first high school taste of freedom and independence, my Silvertone 1448 electric guitar with an amplifier built into the case was my gateway into the world of rock & roll and my custom motorcycle fueled my ability to design a career path based on my passions.

 

If you look around, everything that surrounds you was created by an industrial designer and each design was the answer to a problem. And, design thinking itself has been the bedrock of my work with my career coaching clients: creating meaningful careers by design.  Continue reading What the Plumen 001 light bulb and career reinvention have in common

Learn to Focus on Your Future Self

granite-blockHow often have I heard the well-intentioned advice, “Live in the moment.” Even Henry David Thoreau suggested, “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” Yet, in spite of how long we’ve been encouraged to be ‘in the moment,’  that’s precisely where the greatest risk to our ability to reinvent ourselves lies. Staying in a zone of immovable “mindfulness” is precisely why so many people yearning for more in life continue to merely live in an ongoing state of complacency and habit without ever daring to step out of their comfort zone and explore future possibilities.

To merely ‘live’ in the moment means:

Wall Street investors would never buy stocks because they would have no interest in future return on investment.

michelangelo-davidMichelangelo would never be driven by the source of his greatest accomplishments: “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and in action.  I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.” He would simply leave the granite block sitting in the middle of his studio.

Songwriters would stop creating music because they would cease imagining the future pleasure their songs would give to others by sharing them.

Rebecca Webber’s Psychology Today article, Reinvent Yourself,  contains invaluable reinvention wisdom: “Major life changes are never easy, because your instincts and the urgent matters of the day work against you. But when you learn to focus on your future self, you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve. “ It is only when we leave aside the preoccupations of the day and move on to the most important issue of living the life we imagine for ourselves that we move from the moment into a future of self-realization. Then, and only then, do moments have meaning and purpose as stepping stones to a life of true meaning.