Each day in December, I'm asking a juicy question to help you plan for a healthy, resilient 2014. The questions are in no particular order--just meant to provoke some thinking and get you moving in fresh directions. You can see previous questions here.    This question asks you to go out on a limb and to accept that big rewards in your life only come when you're willing to risk failure.  We are often kept small because we want to stay in the comfort zone of perfectionism. We see failure as something to avoid, rather than as something embrace as part of the journey.  As you think about your life in 2014, how can you invite in more opportunities to fail? And how can you change your relationship with "failure," so that it becomes a necessary by-product of risk-taking, rather than something to avoid at all costs?  Of course, to fail more, you must also be willing to learn from your failures. This is part of the experimental approach to life where we try things out and learn from what happens as a result. Failure that we don't learn from isn't helpful.  So, where in your life do you need to fail more? How can you make friends with failure and enjoy its rewards?  As always, feel free to share your answers in comments or over on The Bamboo Project Facebook page. I'd love to hear from you! And if you want to try out the VisualsSpeak Image Center to explore one of these Juicy Questions, check out my free holiday gift to you!

Throughout December, I asked a juicy question each day to help you plan for a healthy, resilient 2014. You can see all the questions for the month here. We've reached the last day, so it seems appropriate to ask this one: After 30 days of questions meant to help you reflect on so many things, at this point you're ready to be thinking about next steps. What do you want to DO in 2014? One thing that is important about this questions is the issue of readiness--what are you ready to do?  In coaching, I will ask people "What next steps could you take?"  This is a brainstorming question. What are the possibilities before you?  I follow it up with "What next steps will you take?" This is the readiness question. Of all the choices, what will you actually commit to doing?  What is also important is to think of "next steps." Steps are one foot in front of the other. They are not leaping or plunging ahead. They are small and manageable.  So . . . what next steps are you ready to take into 2014?  Happy New Year! And thank you for playing along this month!  

Welcome to 2014!  Last month I shared a series of 30 Juicy Questions to help you grow your life in 2014. They were designed to get you thinking about what you want and how you want to experience your life and career in the coming year.  Now that you're ready for action, I wanted to pull together some resources to keep the momentum going. First, some of my suggestions of career goals for you to consider setting in 2014. Then some resources to help you set and achieve your goals.    Some Smart Career Goals to Set Make 2014 your year to . . .  1. Maintain a Career Journal--People who use career journals tend to be more successful, happier in their careers and better able to think about and work toward their desired futures. At a minimum, consider logging your small wins.   2. Develop multiple income streams-- Smart careerists don't rely on a single source of income, especially in today's economy. Find a way to start working on another income stream so that you can build financial stability and expand your talents through diversification. Consider a soulful sidegig. Believe me, you will learn SO much from the entrenpreneurial experience! 3. Start Experimenting With Your Career--I'm a big believer in taking an experimental approach to your career. Many of my best projects have started with "What happens if I do this?" Your experiments don't have to be huge--shifting your thinking to be more experimental and starting to try out some different things can often create big results. Or start with a 30-Day Trial. This keeps things short and sweet.  4. Get Intentional About Building Your Circles of Connection--Most of us hate "networking"--believe me, I hate it too. But I'm with Jefferey Davis that we should be thinking more about the DIT (Do it Together) economy, rather than the DIY economy. And the best relationships and connections don't just happen by accident. We need to be a little strategic if we want to make new connections and develop our existing relationships.  5. Stop Doing Some Things--Sometimes goal setting and progress is about what we STOP doing, rather than what we start doing. What can you put on your "stop doing" list to make room for healthier habits and goals?    Resources for Setting and Achieving Your Goals Here are some great links to get you started on setting and achieving your 2014 goals:  How to Actually Be Successful in Achieving Your 2014 Goals-Achieving goals is really about changing your daily habits. The best strategy for changing your habits is to form a new identity as a person who does certain things. This post walks you through the process. Change Your Life by Setting Goals with Soul-Danielle LaPorte writes about how goal-setting is really about chasing particular feelings-we set goals because we want to have certain experiences or feel a certain way.  Her suggestion is that you start with the feelings you want to have and go from there.  Find a Word of the Year-Christine Kane suggests that rather than setting specific goals, you find a "word of the year" to focus on.  Then all of your goals flow from there.  Achieve Your Goals in 2014: Here’s Research that Can Help-From the Harvard Business Review, links to a number of different articles to support goal-setting and setting yourself up for success. How to Use If/Then Planning to Achieve Any Goal-A strategy to help deal with distractions in achieving your goals.   What career goals are you setting for yourself in 2014? Let me know in comments or over on the Bamboo Project Facebook page. 

  After much reflection on my Word of the Year for 2014 (Juicy Question #4), I came up with three of them. I'm following Chris Brogan's advice here and the words I chose are interconnected in important ways for me.  The first word for me is "Seed." A word that may seem strange at first, but let me explain. . .  I have spent a lifetime operating within mechanical frames of thinking, where I'm "building" things--building a career, building a life. Everything has been about "building" and "constructing" things.  In the past few years,  though, I've come to realize how that metaphor no longer serves me.  We can only "build" something if we know exactly what we're creating. There are no blueprints or instructions I can follow to create a career or life for myself. That's one of the problems we have in our lives, particularly with our careers. There is no instruction manual that is going to guarantee success if only we follow the rules. Yet we continue to operate as though this is true.  "Seed" reminds me that life (and careers) are more organic than mechanical. We can nurture the soil and plant seeds. We can tend to the garden, pulling weeds, and watering the growing plants, but for the most part, we must plant the seeds and then let go. There is no "building" a plant. You put seeds in the ground, you nurture them and then you harvest when the time comes.  That's another thing--"Seed" reminds me that things happen in their right time. I am impatient and often want to pull up the plants to see how things are progressing. This does nothing but kill (or at least weaken) what I have planted. I must trust in the process and focus on what I can do to nurture the new plant. I have to let go of being able to control outcomes or even know what is happening beneath the  surface of things.  Related to this, I'm realizing, is that not all seeds will grow. Sometimes the conditions aren't right or the seed was just a dud. This means I need to be OK with letting go of seeds that don't germinate right now. I can spend far too much time trying to bring a dying plant back to life. I need to remember that not all seeds will make it to the harvest. And that's OK.  Ultimately I chose "seed" as a way to take action in my life and in my work.  Each morning I am thinking first about what seeds I want to plant that day. What experiences do I want to have? What types of relationships do I want to grow? What small steps forward can I take to seed  greater possibilities on down the road?  I also have to ask myself how I need to tend to the seeds I've already planted. What in my garden needs attention today? And what sort of attention? Is it water? Or plant food? Or do I need to remove the weeds that may be encroaching into my space?  So what seeds are you planting in 2014? What do you want to grow as you move through the year and what do you need to do to tend more carefully to your garden?  Feel free to share your answers in comments or over on The Bamboo Project Facebook page.  

Today is Martin Luther King Day here in the U.S. and it has me thinking about what role being of service to others plays in people's thinking about their professional development and career.  In this case, I'm thinking less about whether or not your job is about service--for example, you work for a nonprofit--and more about the extent to which you incorporate workplace altruism into your daily life. How is doing for others freely and without expectation of something in return a career practice to which you aspire?  University of Pennsylvania Professor Adam Grant is perhaps the most advanced practitioner of the art of workplace altruism and this New York Times article does a nice job of explaining how this works for him: Helpfulness is Grant’s credo. He is the colleague who is always nominating another for an award or taking the time to offer a thoughtful critique or writing a lengthy letter of recommendation for a student — something he does approximately 100 times a year. His largess extends to people he doesn’t even know. A student at Warwick Business School in England recently wrote to express his admiration and to ask Grant how he manages to publish so often, and in such top-tier journals. Grant did not think, upon reading that e-mail, I cannot possibly answer in full every such query and still publish so often, and in such top-tier journals. Instead, Grant, who often returns home after a day of teaching to an in-box of 200 e-mails, responded, "I’m happy to set up a phone call if you want to discuss!" He attached handouts and slides from the presentation on productivity he gave to the Academy of Management annual conference a few years earlier.   Grant's research and his own experiences have shown that the greatest untapped source of motivation is serving others--that we are more creative and productive when we focus on helping others rather than thinking about helping ourselves.  Louise Altman at The Intentional Workplace blog brings additional perspective, pointing out that acts of kindness at work relieve stress and activate the pleasure centers in our brain. Doing something kind for a co-worker can also benefit our own emotional health and well-being.  So today, take a moment to consider how you might be more intentional in incorporating kindness into your life. How can you become more altruistic at work and how can regular kindness help you grow professionally and personally?  Here are a few ways you could get started: Compliment a colleague. Listen with intention when a colleague shares a story or problem.  Offer to help on a project. Buy a cup of coffee or pick up the lunch tab for a colleague. Share an interesting article or resource that you know would be helpful to a co-worker. Talk to someone about their personal or professional dreams and then find a way to help.  There are tons of ways to start being more altruistic--feel free to share in comments what you're doing to brighten someone's day and how you plan to continue this is as part of your career practice. 

While many of us understand the need for feedback to improve ourselves personally and professionally, we often don't understand the best ways to get it. We can tend to ask too generically ("what feedback do you have for me?") or maybe we don't ask at all!   Often we will get unsolicited feedback from supervisors or colleagues, under the guise of "constructive criticism," but this is not always the feedback that is really most helpful and necessary for our own personal and professional growth. As much as we may need that kind of information to do our current jobs, we also need good information that helps us grow and prepare for the future.    Feedback is important. It helps us to get clarity about our gifts and areas where we need more development. It helps us refine our creative projects and beef up our skills.  Feedback can also be a great way to build our circles of connection. By engaging in more robust feedback conversations, we strengthen our relationships with people in our networks and can even be led to new connections.  So how can we do a better job of getting important feedback?  1. Create a structure for requesting feedback. You need to start the feedback process by making it an intentional part of your schedule that is connected to your personal and professional goals.  You could try looking at each day's events and considering where you might request feedback on a particular project or professional development goal you may have.  Or make it a weekly goal to get substantive feedback on at least one area of focus.  The idea here is to tie your feedback requests to your personal and professional goals and then to intentionally build those request into your life.  2. Get specific. As this Fast Company article points out, going around asking for general feedback won't get you very far. It's not another person's job to know where you want or need input on something.  Further, when you ask for general feedback, you are most likely to get information that's related to the other person's agenda, as opposed to information that is useful for what you want to achieve.   Instead, be prepared to ask specific questions: I'm trying to improve my listening skills in meetings. How do you think I did in that last session?  I'm working on this project and I'm trying to find the best ways to get buy-in from people in your department. What thoughts do you have about how I could do that? One area I want to develop in this year is in presentation skills. What do you think are my strengths and weaknesses in presentations? What advice or resources do you have that you think would be helpful for me? Giving people an area of focus helps guide them toward what you're looking for and gives them something meatier to connect to. It also ensures that feedback will be related to the areas you are trying to develop. When you are specific in your questioning, it helps everyone. 3. Act and report back. If someone has taken the time to give you feedback, I think it's also important to let them know how you acted on their advice and the results. This helps strengthen relationships and also gives you another opportunity to deepen your knowledge and understanding.  The report back needn't be long or complicated. If someone gave you a piece of advice on how to improve your presentation skills, then the next time you see them you can tell them that you tried it, that it worked and that you appreciate their help. Closing that loop is critical. It's easy to get lost in the day-to-day and only receive feedback when someone else has decided you need it. But to grow and develop in our work and personal lives, we need to get more intentional and focused in connecting to the constructive criticism that will be most beneficial to us in meeting our own goals.  Getting good feedback is an important tool for building your career resilience. How are you regularly plugging into the great advice and knowledge around you? 

  One of the career books I've been reading recently is Business Model You: A One Page Method for Re-Inventing Your Career. It offers an interesting template for evaluating your career aspirations and looking at them in light of the different ways you can bring value based on your various assets and resources.  I signed up for their email newsletter and this morning received an update on their latest European workshops that included the three questions they use to start their sessions. I think they're excellent ways to stop and take stock of your career, so wanted to share them here. Three Questions for Taking Stock 1. Is it time to move up?  This is a pretty obvious question and one that I think a lot of younger people in particular start asking themselves--are they ready (and willing) to move to another level? This isn't just about hierarchy. It's also about scope. Are you ready to assume more responsibilty? Do you want to leave a bigger mark on the world? If you're self-employed, is it time to expand or to work with a different level of clients?  2. Is it time to move out? This is the question to ask when you are feeling antsy or angry all the time. I talk to many people who feel like they've hit a brick wall with their current employer and find themselves in the same stale situations with colleagues and work scenarios. When you feel like you've "been there, done that, have the t-shirt," then it may be time to move on.  Same thing for self-employed folks. I've discovered this year, for example, that I needed to "fire" certain types of clients. Life is too short and my energy is too precious to spend it on people who don't really want to make changes. There are some markets that just aren't worth it, so it's time to move out of them.  3. Is it time to adapt your style?  This is an interesting one. Often what we find is that work has changed, but we have not changed with it. This is especially true in this era of constant turmoil, where uncertainty is the one thing of which we can be certain.  We may have developed a particular style or approach that made us successful in previous contexts, but that may no longer be working for us. We may be caught up in our old "frames" or stories, making it difficult for us to recognize that the situation has changed and we must change with it.  This style question also has resonance if our role has recently changed at work. For example, I often see that moving from individual contributor to team leader can cause a "style crisis." Moving from "employee" to "freelancer" creates a similar situation.  Taking a step back and looking at how you might need to adapt yourself to new situations is helpful. It can allow you to rejuvenate and renew your commitment to your work.  How do these three questions resonate for you? Can you use them to take stock of your current career situation? Drop me a line in comments or let us know over on Facebook. 

Imagine a course that "just" got employees to get the quiet people talking at the right time. (And I mean really applying the skill on a near daily business. Imagine that an employee is increasingly uncomfortable in a conversation until everyone has chimed in.) I would imagine that students would hate the program. ("Oh, it's so obvious. I already know I should do it, even if I don't." "I

The Federation of American Scientists wrote a paper on Harnessing the power of video games for learning. It is available here: http://fas.org/gamesummit/ Predictably, it is filled with stirring quotes of intellectual criticisms of the current system, detailed modeling of the problems, and vague inspirational quotes of the future opportunity, all by comfortable people. Blah, blah, blah. My first

You and your family are boarding an airplane, and are about to fly across country. How would you want that pilot to have learned how to fly? P.S. It is stormy. Your daughter is going in for an operation. How would you want that doctor to have learned how to operate? You are the defendent a big intellectual property lawsuit. How do you want your lawyer to have learned her craft? Now, is it fair