A post from Chris Brogan has me thinking this morning:  Jacqueline brought me iced coffee a few weeks ago, and I commented that it tasted especially delicious. She said, "I used two sugars instead of one or none, the way you usually say you like it." As is often the case with me, I ended up thinking about a bit more than how many sugars I take in my coffee. The truth is, I wasn’t really being honest with myself. I can say I prefer my coffee black, but what I was really saying was, "I know that I’m supposed to have it black." I prefer my coffee with two sugars. It’s much nicer that way. Healthier? No. But I have to be where I am. Maybe it’s a matter of having it sometimes with sugar and sometimes black. One thing I've noticed in myself and in the people I work with is how often we lie to ourselves. In Chris's case, he was telling himself that he "prefers" black coffee, when the reality is that he prefers sugar; he just thinks he should prefer black coffee because it's better for him.  One way we lie to ourselves is through our "shoulds." I should be happy with my work, so I will ignore the reality that I'm not. As if denying reality is an effective method for dealing with our lives.  Another way we lie to ourselves is by saying that something is beyond our power to change. I hear this all the time. "I can't quit my job" or "I can't take that responsibility."  That's not true. Just about everything is within our power to change. The bigger issue is whether or not we can or want to live with the consequences of those changes. There's a big difference between saying "I can't do something" and "I choose not do something because I don't want to experience what I think are the likely consequences." The former makes us a victim. The latter says we are making an informed choice.  One of the reasons we lie to ourselves is because we don't want to be kind to ourselves. We find reality unacceptable, so the it feels like the easiest way to deal with an unacceptable reality is to deny it. But denying reality is one of the best ways for us to stay stuck. We'd be better off exploring and accepting our reality and learning how to be kind to ourselves in the process. No need to start berating ourselves for being whereever we find ourselves. Just accept that we are here and figure out the next step to move forward.  One sure way to explore reality and stop telling ourselves lies is to allow ourselves to feel the emotions that go with our experiences. If I allow myself to feel my responses to what I'm experiencing at work, my emotions can start to help me better understand the reality of where I'm at. At the least I can get clearer about how I'm responding to what's going on, which is half the battle in starting to tell ourselves the truth of our lives.  I know that for me, I deny reality when I want to protect myself from having to make painful or difficult decisions. I don't want to take risks or I don't want to deal with the potential fall out of changed circumstances.  But all that denial does is prolong the inevitable. Eventually, reality will intrude, often in huge ways that force my hand and have far greater consequences than if I'd just accepted reality earlier and done what I needed to do to address it.  I think that part of effectively managing our careers is starting to be scrupulously honest with ourselves. Where are the places that we need to stop denying the reality? What would happen if we stopped doing this? It can be hard to stop lying to ourselves, but ultimately it's liberating. Even if the changes you have to make are difficult or challenging, you also feel a peculiar energy because deep down you know you are dealing with what is, not what you wish it would be. Your body and mind know when you've finally given in and are working from truth.  So what lies do you need to stop telling yourself? How do your options change when you start telling the truth?   

To me, the most energizing questions are those that involve people's values, hopes and ideals--questions that relate to something that's larger than them where they can connect and contribute. People don't have a lot of energy around questions that are about removing pain."                                 --Verna Allee A lot of the work I do with people ends up being around removing pain. There's a problem to be solved or something to be improved or they are at a career crossroads and need to get out--NOW! What I find most challenging in these situations is helping people find the energy to actually do something about the issues they are facing. It's easy to sink into the morass and lethargy that problems seem to generate. Negativity breeds complacency I've found and a kind of learned helplessness that is difficult to escape.  One of the reasons that I've been working so much on asking more powerful questions is because I've seen what happens when we can shift from questions that remove pain to questions that generate possibilities and connection. What we focus on grows, so the more we can ask questions that engage our hopes, dreams and values, the more likely we are to create forward movement. The more I can engage around hopes and possibilities, the better my ability to move toward what I want.  But our world seems to be geared toward pain removal, so it is a daily battle to ask ourselves different questions. Two strategies I've found that help are these.  Follow the energy. The surest route to the right questions is monitoring my own responses and how others seem to be responding as well. If a question is asked and you can feel the collective (usually silent) groan, then you know that most likely you are in a "pain removal" situation. I also find that when the answers or follow-up questions seem to focus on irrelevant details or more complaints, this is another sign that we're focusing on pain, not possibility.  Ask yourself "Is this a pain removal question?"--The more direct route is to evaluate questions and ask yourself if they are about removing pain. This is particularly helpful in the career change realm where I've found that people are likely to focus on how they can escape from a bad situation rather than run toward a good one.  Pain questions are about escape, not possibility. Pay attention to how your question points you toward a positive future rather than away from a bad present. Don't ask "How can I get out of this?" Do ask, "What do I want to move toward?"  I'm finding that the more vigilant I am about the questions I'm asking, the better my outcomes. When I feel stuck, often it's because I'm asking the wrong questions--questions that focus on removing pain. I can generate forward movement again if I go back to reframing what I'm asking. 

We hunger for inspiration, purpose, exhilaration — but mostly, we settle for lives of annihilating boredom, alternating with sheer panic. Perhaps we get our fix of "life" through the finely honed narratives of the hundreds of channels of reality TV and "news" we're smilingly offered night after pixelated night. We want contracts that don't steal our future — but we're often unwilling to walk away from those that already have. Perhaps we feel a sense of moral responsibility to pay our debts — but I'd suggest the greater, perhaps greatest moral responsibility is choosing to live. . .  We don't want the future we're getting — but most of us shrug our shoulders at the end of the day; only to wake up panicked, the next — and begin the cycle all over again. Welcome to the Great Collision. In the aggregate, our preferences are savagely at odds with our expectations; the future we want is at odds with the present we choose.                         --Umair Haque A few days ago I read Umair Haque's The Great Collision on the Harvard Business Review blog. The paragraph that resonated the most for me was this one: It's easy to construct a narrative of victimhood; and a narrative of victimhood is as easily palatable as a Big Mac. Sure, you can argue that the modern condition is a finely jawed trap: bound by the chains of debt peonage, our horizons have been ineluctably delimited. But I'd say we're equal parts victims and victimizers — preying not merely on one another, but our own better selves. When it comes to real human prosperity, in the crudest terms of political economy, "demand" is about what people have the impertinence to, well, demand — and perhaps the simple fact is that we've become a society that's simply not demanding enough. As I go about my work day I'm struck  by how often we see ourselves as victims, at the mercy of other forces greater than ourselves. The boss who won't "let you" do what you know is right. Some other department that has tied your hands. The co-worker who holds you back. The spouse or partner or children who must be served first. It's easy to play this victim card--safer, somehow, and certainly less demanding.  But I agree with Haque that we are equal parts victims and vicimizers. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that we are entirely victimizers, as he puts it "preying on our better selves." Many people--myself included--know in our hearts what it takes to be our better selves. Yet each day, we make small and large choices that keep us tied to being less than we could be. I don't think it's too dramatic to say that we victimize ourselves and those around us when we choose to be less than we are, when we forfeit our best selves to hold on to what seems safe or unchallenging.  Because to be less than our best selves is to choose actions that chip away at us, that challenge our integrity and wholeness. Inevitably we feel this chipping away on a deep, often unacknowledged level, and we take out our anger and resentment and sadness on ourselves and other people. Don't believe me? Then do something that is in alignment with your deepest sense of your best self and watch how it changes your interactions with others and what you bring to the table. Watch what it does to how you treat yourself.  Each day we make choices. Let's make our choices so they support that future we want.  

One of my current projects involves managing an online community of practice for professionals who help people with disabilities find employment. For the past year we've struggled to get folks engaged. Often it feels like I'm throwing information into a digital abyss.  This is a grant-funded project and I'm in the last year of the grant, so decided that we needed to try something different. Going for broke, as it were. So I proposed to the funders that we begin experimenting with face-to-face conversations, what we're calling "Connecting Coffees." These are one hour networking events at local coffee houses that combine networking with conversation on professional development topics.  Earlier this week I put out an announcement about our plan. Since then, there's been more discussion in the group than we've probably had in the last 6 months combined! What it made me realize (again) is how hungry we all are for opportunities to connect in the real world. To sit down and have real conversations about topics that matter to us. The digital world and social media can help us find each other and connect when we aren't able to be together face-to-face, but in the end, we are human and we long for that opportunity to sit around a table, break bread together and just talk.  We need to find more time for this, recognize and accept the importance of informal conversations in the larger world of our work. We need to intentionally build more of these into our practice. They are major drivers for learning, development and growth.  We want connection and we need to support this where ever we can. 

Our instinct is to try to ignore what’s going wrong so it doesn’t bring us down all the time. But really, the key to improving what we don’t like in our lives is to pay attention to it. By paying attention we can’t help but make it better.                             --Penelope Trunk For the past several months, I've been avoiding mirrors. I noticed my clothes getting tighter, but I didnt' really want to see this, so I pretended that wasn't happening. If I didn't give my rising weight attention, then maybe it would go away. This weekend, though, I was forced to pay attention because I needed some new clothes for a big training I'm doing this week. And let me tell you, the image is burned into my brain. Now when I think about dessert, it's been replaced by the picture of me in that mirror.  Why am I talking about the fact that I need to lose weight and what does this have to do with careers?  It clicked for me when I read Penelope Trunk's post this morning on paying attention to problems. This is something we do in our careers all the time--pretend that things aren't as bad as they really are. We avoid looking at what is really going on, both the results and all the behaviors and choices that have brought us here. Just like I've been avoiding paying attention to my creeping weight gain, we avoid paying attention to our creeping career unhappiness. Until that day when we're forced to confront reality. Usually it isn't pretty.  Our days are made up of a million small choices. When we go on auto-pilot (as I've been doing with food, mindlessly eating when I'm not really hungry), we stop paying attention to what's really going on. That's when things get away from us.  Change starts with paying attention. 

. . . look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission. Move sideways, move down, move on, move off. Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they're going to give you. Do real work. Take a sales quota, a line role, an ops job. Don't plan too much, and don't expect a direct climb. If I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed my career.                                    -- Sheryl Sandberg As we leave May and enter June, it's that time of year when graduation speakers give us their best advice. (My favorite graduation speech of all time is Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford talk, by the way.)  This year, it was Sheryl Sandberg's speech at Harvard Business School that caught my eye with her recommendation to treat your career like a jungle gym, not a ladder. That is, to forget the upward climb to the corner office and embrace a more networked career where you are likely to move down a step, then across, then up and then across again. The focus is not on job titles and "building your resume,"  but on developing skills and engaging in experiences that you can take with you across industries and occupational titles.   As we go from the 20-year career to a 4-year career, this is advice I think we need to take to heart--especially those of us who remember a time when people had 20-year careers. We live in a hyper-connected, fast-paced world where it's virtually impossible to predict your career trajectory with any assurance. Some of the jobs with the fastest growth didn't even exist 10 years ago, so "planning" for a career becomes even more difficult to do.  The best we can do to stay on top of things is to be flexible and to focus on developing skills that transfer into different jobs and industries.  As we climb that jungle gym of our work, we need to look for opportunities to re-package our skills and experiences in ways that bring us meaning and engagement, as well as solve problems for our potential employers.  Career ladders are dead for most of us. We are dealing with jungle gym careers. But at least jungle gyms are more fun.  

One thing I've noticed in my 15+ years of helping people figure out what they want to be when they grow up is how uncomfortable we are with questions. Despite the fact that the questions we ask inevitably shape the results and opportunities we find, we are so focused on answers, we don't pay attention to asking the right questions. Nor do we pay attention to how our questions can help us frame new opportunities.  I'm a big believer in managing your career with questions. I think it is by grappling with our questions that we come to true insight and clarity about our journey. But we need to get better at asking powerful questions and make questioning a regular career habit.  What is a Powerful Question? The Art of Powerful Questions says that a powerful question: Generates curiosity in the listener. Stimulates reflective conversation. Is thought-provoking. Surfaces underlying assumptions. Invites creativity and new possibilities. Generates energy and forward movement. Channels attention and focuses inquiry. Touches a deep meaning Evokes more questions.  For me, I know when I've hit on the "right" question when I feel an urgency to explore and answer it OR when I feel huge resistance about dealing with it. Often that resistance is a sign that I REALLY need to deal with that particular question! If the question feels "dead"--if I get a "been there, done that" response to the question, then I know I haven't found a question that's really powerful for me. I need to keep exploring and tinkering until I get it right.  Some Resources for Exploring Questions and Your Career If you're looking for some help in getting started with using questions for career management and exploration, check out some of these resources:  The Art of Powerful Questions--written for the World Cafe community, this is an excellent guide to developing your own powerful questions. Hint: ask more "why," "how" and "what" questions. The Question Log--keep track of your questions and look for trends and themes.  The Power of the Positive Question--use positive questions to create more of what you want.  Working with the Questions--use different types of questions to explore various aspects of your career.  Questions to Compose Your Working Identity--explore your career as a form of identity. 12 Professional Development Questions--although developed for companies, these questions also apply to individuals.  If You Do Not Work on Important Questions, You Will Not Do Important Work--break free from the tyranny of the small question.  The Reflective Practice Series--a whole host of questions and ideas for creatively exploring questions for learning and professional development.  Another techniqe to try is what Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregerson, in their recent Harvard Business Review article Find a Job Using Disruptive Innovation , call "questionstorming":  Take four minutes a day to write down nothing but questions about your job search. Doing this consistently for thirty days will take you down new paths as your questions change and your patterns of action follow. For example, an executive in his mid-thirties and in a career transition began by asking "How can I make a bucket of money?" Over time, that question changed to "What will make me happy for the long term?" Which then changed to "How do I create something for the long term?" As a result, he's moved into different kinds of job interviews, landing one with a big multinational company that otherwise would never have happened had he not changed his question. Questionstorming can be combined with the Question Log to give you some really powerful insights.  Finally, many of the people I work with have had great success in using visuals to explore their career questions. It's the idea behind my Career Clarity Image sessions, where you can work with up 3 big questions--which usually leads to more and deeper questions. And ultimately some clarity.  Questioning is a Fundamental Career Management Skill I'm increasingly finding that developing your skills in the art of the question is one of the best investments in your career you can make. Not only do powerful questions help you gain clarity about your own career, the ability to ask and use powerful questions in other facets of your professional life is a cornerstone for success.  Focusing on answers is easy in the age of Google. It's the questions that really make the difference. 

Earlier this week I referenced an excellent article by Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, Find a Job Using Disruptive Innovation. Their first piece of advice was to ask more and different questions. Their second suggestion was to start looking at the real jobs that need to be done, not at the jobs you once did:   . . . when people become aware of a "job" that they need to get done, they search for a product or service to "hire" for getting the job done effectively. Disruptive innovators grasp the "jobs-to-be-done" better than anyone else because they spend hours, days, and sometimes months watching people use products and services to fully understand the jobs that people are "hiring" products and services to do. Sometimes the jobs are surprising (like Christensen discovered when watching adults frequently "hire" a milkshake to do the job of not getting bored during a long commute). Often these observations pay off with ideas for new products and services better-suited for the job that needs to be done. The same same approach can benefit you as a "job creator." Ask yourself what jobs-to-be-done do you care most about. Which ones are you most competent at? Or, which ones are the companies your targeting in your job search willing to hire you to do? Set aside time to systematically create richer, deeper insights about jobs-to-be-done. Spend a half day a week just watching, taking notes, and if appropriate, videotaping or photographing people using different products and services that are interesting to you (or with the products of targeted companies in your job search). As you watch, constantly ask, "what's surprising or unexpected?" to help you discover new features, products, or services that might do the jobs even better, distinguishing you from other job candidates. While sometimes it makes sense for you to consider your career moves in the context of what's currently available, increasingly I think that we need to take more of a "job creation" approach--looking for the intersection between problems and needs and our own skills, talents and passions. It may be that we are creating freelance opportunities for ourselves or we may be looking at creating new positions within companies or organizations.  Either way, we are thinking about how we can create our own work, rather than just doing the work that is presented to us.  Here are some resources that can help you get started on being your own job creator: Future-Proofing Your Career Three Ways to Create Your Own Job Can't Find a Dream Job? Create Your Own 5 Steps to Creating Your Own Job When Jobs are Scarce, Create Your Own 8 Steps to Getting What You Want Without Formal Credentials

I've noticed that for many of us, careers are binary things--we do this job OR that one. I can work for someone else OR I can work for myself.  Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, this either/or thinking made a lot of sense in a more stable world with relatively limited options. For good or ill, that world has changed though. There is little place for binary thinking. We need to move from careers based on "Or" thinking to careers that embrace "And" thinking.  Try looking at some of the career decisions and issues you have before you. How might they be transformed by removing the word "or" and replacing it with "and"? 

This morning I'm re-reading Steven Pressfield's Do the Work. It's become a go-to-book when I need to remind myself how to start creative projects and move through the massive resistance I face whenever I want to bring something to life.  Lately, I've been sifting through various options for where I want to go next, noticing that I've lost some of the passion that had fed what felt like awesome ideas only a few months ago. And then I read this:  You may think that you've lost your passion, or that you can't identify it, or that you have so much of it, it threatens to overwhelm you. None of these is true.  Fear saps passion. (my emphasis) When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustable well of passion.  This is true. This is what happens. I will feel inside me a great excitement about a potential path and then, just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, the fear will rise inside of me. If my creative project is a potential money-making venture, then most certainly the fear that it will NOT make money comes up first. This is followed by a whole host of other fears--that I will fail or look stupid, that others will react poorly or that it's not really a great idea after all. Also endless permutations of these basic fears. You know the drill.  It is the work of my "rational" mind (which I think is really just my nay-sayer mind) that can quickly overwhelm the initial thrill of knowing that I've hit on something important.  Pressfield reminds me, though, that this fear is just part of Resistance (with a capital "R"). And that Resistance is an inevitable part of the creative process, an external force that rises up to meet us when we try to bring something great into the world. He says: We can navigate Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or purpose that we must follow before all others.  Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. (my emphasis)  The passion-sapping fear I feel is just a tool from the Resistance toolbox, a trick of the mind meant to dissaude me from pursuing those things that are most important for me to go after.  Increasingly I realize that we all know in our hearts what we really want to do. But then Resistance sets in and saps the passion that would helps us move through to what we want. It uses its Jedi mind tricks of fear and distraction to keep us from creating what we know we want to create.  This morning I'm working with my fears, using the List of 100 technique. Just recogizing the impact of fear on passion and getting those fears down on paper is doing wonders to restore me.  How do your fears sap your passion? What happens if you work with your fears? That may be the best way to get the passion to return.