Queercents

Sorry for the delays in the last installment of the Career & Money Series but here she is…

Planning for retirement. It is a phrase that can confound the best of us. Whether you work for yourself or a company, the fact is that you need to plan financially for your later years of life. Unfortunately for so many either you live on the deferred life plan waiting for that utopia (retirement) to truly do the things you want to do or you find yourself woefully underfunded and unable to retire comfortably or both. This is where some conscious decisionmaking along the way comes in very handy.

I’ll state the obvious upfront. I am not a financial planner nor do I pretend to be. To really get a handle on a plan that is right for you, hire a good planner for yourself. He/she should work as a partner with you to assess where you are today and where you want to go in terms of retirement.

The single most important lesson I ever learned about retirement planning came to me when I was 22 years old, recently out of college, and at my first full time job. Read the rest of this entry »

“There is no happiness if the things you believe are different than the things you do.” – James Arthur Ray

Can a career or job make you happy? Nope. Even the perfect “right fit” career can never make you happy. Happiness can only come from inside of you. On the flip side, even if you are happy as a clam with who you are, the wrong job can make you miserable and drag you down unless you do something about it. That’s why it is critical to understand where you are on the happiness scale before you start jumping jobs or embarking on new career paths.

I wrote quite a bit about the topic “Can a Job Make You Happy?” on my Coaching4Lesbians blog. Bottom line is chasing happiness through the pursuit of a job (or anything external for that matter) is akin to a dog chasing its tail. A lot of action and energy spent but no progress made. Why is that?

As I see it, happiness is a state of being; a being-ness about who you are at the core: how you feel about yourself and your life; how you show up in the world. It is right up there with a connection to a higher power and spiritual life. You can’t put your finger on it, but you feel it and it can make all the difference when it comes to living a meaningful and fulfilling life. On the other hand, a job is all about doing; a doing-ness where it is all about what you do, who you do it with, and the environment you do it in, etc. It is about the roles and responsibilities you assume when you take on a particular job. Since it isn’t connected directly to who you are (who are be-ing) it can neither make you happy nor unhappy.

This is the good and bad news. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you land a job or start your business, the game is over, right? You’ll be happy and content forever and you’ll never need the tips and techniques from this series again; “Happily Ever After” in career land. Ahhhh, that feels good. Now, snap out of it. Unless you’re living in a Disney movie, you know this is the farthest thing from the truth. Even if you’re lucky enough to find a field of work that makes your passion fires glow, you’ll still need to make sure you re-pot, re-invent, and re-visit yourself if you want to keep the fires burning and have a fruitful and enjoyable career.

If you are not growing and evolving you’re dead. The minute you stop learning about yourself, the world, and different skills, you have really stopped living. Careers are much like gardens in that you:

• Decide what you want to plant
• Plant seeds
• Tend to the seeds with water, sunshine, and care providing space and support for growth
• Prune out the stuff you don’t want
• Enjoy the harvest
• Turn what’s left over back in the soil to provide nutrients for the future
• Take periods of rest, mini-retirement, and hibernation to prepare for the next cycle

The stage I am talking about in this article is a combination of deciding what you want to plant, tending to your crop, and taking a step back to see what’s on tap for the next cycle. Just like you need to rotate crops for maximum effectiveness, you need to stay fresh and engaged in what you’re doing or else you just become a burned out shell like the guy with the stapler in the movie Office Space. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that you’ve either landed the job or started your own business you need to make the most of it. Even if you’ve been in the same job a long time and still love it, there is no time like the present to make sure you are maximizing your pay, benefits, and time off.

Whether you are an entrepreneur by trade or not, you need to take an entrepreneurial mindset if you want to make the most of your career. I’ve said this many times before but it bears repeating: even if you work for an employer, you are the CEO of You, Inc. and are the primary person responsible for your success. With this comes the responsibility of:

• investing in your personal and professional growth (education and more)
• staying current in your field or acquiring skills and training for a new field
• getting paid what you’re worth
• securing sufficient time off for personal pursuits and vacations
• funding your retirement
• knowing and capitalizing on benefits

The nice thing about this list is it is a good roadmap to follow whether you work for someone else or are flying solo. While the steps to implement may look different, the principles remain the same. Let’s take a high level look at each of these areas. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last few articles in this series I focused on finding and landing the job. This assumes that after taking a deep look at your values that working for someone else is what you want. For some people, the only way to career success and happiness is being their own boss.

Whether you call yourself an entrepreneur, freelancer, solo-preneur, owner of a home based business or something else, the one thing in common is - you are your own boss. You are responsible for your own destiny — succeed or fail — in a way you never could be working for someone else. There is so much to learn that you will never know all that you need to know. That is the good and the bad news.

The main components to getting started based on my personal experience are as follows:

1) Am I Cut Out for This?
2) Getting a Plan
3) Forming your business
3) Working the Plan & Finding the Funding
4) Creating Your Support Team
5) Getting Clients
6) Managing the Business (systems)
7) Ongoing Learning
Revisiting and Revising Read the rest of this entry »

In Part I of “Landing the Job” I talked about researching possible employers, preparing your resume, and finding and applying for potential positions. This time I’ll cover what happens once you get that call you’ve been hoping for: interviewing, receiving the offer/rejection, and negotiating.

As I said before, the resume’s sole purpose is to get you an interview. The interview is where you get to sell the potential employer on the benefits to them if they hire you. It is also your chance to get into their environment, have a look for yourself, and interview them.

Preparing for the interview phase is crucial. The devil is in the details. You need to be concerned about a myriad of things once you set the date and time of your interview: Read the rest of this entry »

Now that you’re clear about what type of career you want, it’s time to get started. In this article I’m going to talk about strategies and resources for landing a job working for someone else. Whether the employer you are seeking is large or small, the overall process is similar. (Note: for the purpose of this article I am going to call all employers “companies”, but the same process can be adapted to working in academia, non-profits, etc.)

As I see it, once you’re clear on what you want, the process breaks down as follows:

1) Research possible employers
2) Prepare your resume
3) Find and apply for potential positions
4) Interview
5) Receive offer/rejection
6) Negotiate

Wrapped around the entire cycle is the process of networking and connecting with others whether online or offline.

I’m not about to tackle this job search process in great detail. People have written volumes on each of these topics. What I will do, however is bring to your attention key points and resources that, based on my experience and research are critical to your success. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve been thinking about Career & Money Part 4 - Discover Your Ideal Career I decided I needed to share a bit of an addendum to the article. While I helped you to hone in on values, I thought a short distinction around skills versus passions would be worthwhile.

The way the process works for most people is that they discover they have a skill and then they build their career around it. For instance, you find that you’re very good at math and numbers in high school. You’re not really sure what you’re passionate about, but you know you excel with this skill. So, you find yourself in college and are faced with having to declare a major course of study. Again, you’re still not sure what options are REALLY out there and your passions are not yet clear. After all, even if you procrastinate, you’re still forced to declare a major by the time you’re in your late teens or early 20’s. You know you’ve always been good at math and it seems like an employable skill, so you opt for a numbers based degree (math, accounting, finance, engineering, etc.). In this example you are SKILLED at math.

Take another example. You are absolutely passionate about science. You are cuckoo for biology. All your spare time is spent doing science type things. You may or may not be actually skilled in science, but it makes your heart beat faster. In this example you are PASSIONATE about science.

The difference between skills and passion is often ignored until you find yourself in a job you could be good at but are totally bored to tears with and you wonder what happened to passion. Or, you absolutely love what you do but either aren’t very talented at it or find you can’t earn the living you desire doing it.

The key is looking at skills and passion as an equation. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time (Part 3) I talked about how to discover your values and gauge the type of money you’ll need to earn for the lifestyle you desire. In this installment of the Career & Money series I want to talk about finding the right fit and the myriad of ways you can earn money.

Now that you’ve discovered your values you should be starting to get a sense of what is important to you in terms of your life plan and your career plan. As I’ve shared before it is crucial to have these be in alignment. Otherwise you’re faced with a lifetime of miserable Mondays and the prospect of finding a way to numb the pain of a daily existence that makes you truly unhappy.

When it comes to finding the right fit for your career you need to not only take into account your values but also your preferences. This is where getting to know yourself intimately pays dividends. You learn at the core: who you are, what you want, and what you truly do not want from your days on the planet. This relates to your work life in terms of a number of factors. Consider these aspects of a typical career Read the rest of this entry »

In Part 2 of the Career & Money series I talked about how you can do some life planning and determine if you really want a job or a career. This time I am going to take that a step further so you can align your career choices with your values and the type of lifestyle you wish to live.

What Are Your Values?
Our values are the things that allow us to thrive in our life. After our basic emotional and physical needs are met, we yearn for something more in order to feel fulfilled, happy, and purpose driven. This is where our values come in. While we may all have numerous things we value, there are typically 4-6 core values that really make us tick. These core values turn on the Technicolor in our lives.

How can you determine your values? When I work with clients we take an extensive look at needs and values through a series of exercises. However, you can start getting clear on your values with this simple exercise. Read the rest of this entry »