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How Does Career Decision Coaching Work?

If you’re considering getting help for a career decision, you may wonder what exactly it would look like to work with a career counselor or coach. Here’s a description of the coaching process and tools I often use when I work with clients on a career decision.

Career Decision Coaching:

1. Defining the Problem

The first step for me is to make sure I understand exactly what your needs are, and what you’re hoping to achieve by working with me. For example, you may look for a change in your career, and for help figuring out which direction to take. If you’re hoping to get clarity in a career decision, we’re on a good track and I’ll be confident that my process can help you.

(If you’re looking for something else, I might be able to refer you to one of my colleagues.

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Beat Procrastination Habits With A Three-step Intervention

Do you want to give your productivity a boost? This three-step intervention can help you diagnose and beat some of your most persistent procrastination habits.

Beat Procrastination Habits: Three Step Intervention

Step 1 – Assessment: Diagnose the Problems

Each person is different. What triggers your procrastination?

Procrastination is at its worst when we’re not aware of it. The first step in this intervention is therefore to increase your awareness of what’s tripping you up. You’ll want to get as much insight into yourself as possible, recognizing any problematic habits, or any patterns in your thoughts and behaviors that are getting in your way.

With that goal, keep a productivity journal to collect some data about yourself. You can download a template here and print it out.

Beat Procrastination Habits - Step 1: Assessment with Productivity Journal

Here is how it works: the night before your workday, write a to-do list and a schedule for the following day.

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Common procrastination triggers and fixes

What are some of the most common procrastination triggers? Finding out why you procrastinate will help you tackle each problem one by one.

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How to Manage Stress at Work

If your job is causing you a lot of stress, you’re not alone. In a 2014 survey in the US, almost a third (31%) of the workers reported that they typically feel tense or stressed out during the work day. This number is even higher among millenials (18-34 year old workers) than among any of the older generations.

What are the most common causes for stress at work?

So many issues can cause stress at work. The survey lists the following, with the most commonly experienced stressors on top:

  1. Low salariesHow to Manage Stress at Work: Learn a technique that helps you take control and start tackling your top stressors.
  2. Lack of opportunity for growth and development
  3. Uncertain or undefined job expectations
  4. Job insecurity
  5. Long hours
  6. Too heavy of a workload
  7. Unrealistic job expectations
  8. Work interfering during personal or family time
  9. Lack of participation in decision making
  10. Inflexible hours
  11. Problems with my supervisor
  12. Commuting
  13. Physical illnesses and ailments
  14. Problems with my co-workers
  15. Unpleasant or dangerous physical conditions
  16. Personal life interfering during work hours

Does any of this sound familiar when you think or your own job?

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Self-Assessment: How Awe-Struck are You?

In a earlier post, I wrote about how feelings of awe can affect our decision making. Here you can take a quick self-assessment as to how often you experience awe in your own life.

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Am I a Procrastinator?

Am I a procrastinator?“I know that I am a procrastinator, but taking this survey made me realize just how bad it is!”
– One of my students.

Clarry Lay, a psychology professor at York University in Toronto created the “General Procrastination Scale” as a research tool. While it is not intended for diagnosis, you can still get a general sense of your tendency to procrastinate across a pretty wide a range of situations.

In the interactive form below, you can simply move the sliders around and see your total score at the bottom. The total will be updated as you go along. A lower total score mean less procrastination, from 1, which would mean you don’t procrastinate at all in any of those situations, to 10, which would mean you procrastinate at every opportunity. Only the overall score at the bottom matters, 

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New Productivity Coaching Group

Productivity Coaching Group
Time is our most precious resource – are you getting the most out of yours? Or are you ready for a change? 

My next productivity coaching group will come in a new format, starting with one-on-one sessions and an in-depth assessment before the group meetings.

It is a 3-month package that includes:

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Where Can You Be Generous?

A Different Way to Look at Your “Unique Value Contribution”

In an interview with Chase Jarvis, Seth Godin gave me a lot of food for thought when he suggested that we all ourselves this question:

“Where are you being generous – completely selfless and generous – so that an organization or person is changed for the better? Can you do that again and again and again?” (44m 10s)

Unique Value Contribution

The question is big, and it is very relevant for career coaching and business development. Even without the – perhaps too high – standard of being “completely selfless”, it gives a beautiful angle to the classic and essential question of: “How can you contribute value?”

For example, with a career-coaching client we might explore the question:
“What skills do you already have,

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What Are Your Strengths? Review of Two Self-Assessments

I’m featuring two self-assessments here that focus on clarifying what your strengths are: the Clifton StrengthsFinder®, and the VIA Survey.

The Clifton StrengthsFinder® was developed by the Gallup Organization. Based on a lot of interview data, they came up with 34 distinct patterns of strengths, or what they call “talent themes”. The online self-assessment tells individuals which of those “themes” are most pronounced in them. From the perspective of management consulting, the assumption here is that by identifying people’s strengths, an organization’s overall performance can be improved.

The VIA Survey was created by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman, well-known researchers in the field of positive psychology. It is designed to identify a person’s profile of character strengths. The inventory informed the Character Strengths and Virtues Handbook (CSV), a counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) used in traditional psychology.

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A Career Development Tool For Academics

myIDPContinuing my series about self-assessments, the one I’m reviewing here is for academics:

the myIDP.

The myIDP is an Individual Development Plan for science careers, and is mainly targeted to grad students and postdocs, with the goal of helping them define and pursue their career goals.

It includes a self-assessment part covering skills, interests, and values. Aside from the online questionnaires that show your scores right away, can also download blank skills assessment forms to share with a mentor or colleague. Based on the assessment, it offers a long list of career paths and shows you how well each matches with your interests and skills. As you explore those options, you get suggestions of how to consider your values in those contexts.

After this assessment and exploration part, the website includes a personal planning system for setting your own goals and implementing next steps.

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Self-Assessments: The Myth of Personality Types

Or: Mind the Bell-Curve

First off, here’s a fun article about the Myers Briggs (MBTI) that I wish I had written myself. It speaks from my heart.

But even apart from the Myers Briggs, any theory claiming that people come in distinct personality “types” (e.g., the “Eneagram”, “True Colors”, “Are you a dog or a cat person?”, etc.) has a very fundamental problem: none of those types make sense, for two simple reasons. (Geoffrey Miller explains them in more detail and eloquence in his book “Spent”, which I had reviewed earlier on this blog.)

1. Personality traits have been documented in a huge body of research. After decades of studies by a multitude of independent groups, and after many data-driven revisions of initial theories,

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Interest Profiler for Career Choice and Development

Im my last post, where I discussed a free personality self-assessment, I promised to write more about self-assessments, in particular provide information about a test that is more geared towards career development.

Here is a website that offers several free career-oriented self-assessments and a neat way to explore information about hundreds of occupations: http://www.cacareerzone.org.

The interest profiler, for example, is based on the six Occupational Themes (developed by the psychologist John L. Holland). His idea assumes that people thrive most in career environments that fit their personality, and that jobs and career environments are classifiable in that way. The model classifies jobs and career along six occupational themes or “types”, and all the different combinations of those:

  • Realistic (Doers)
  • Investigative (Thinkers)
  • Artistic (Creators)
  • Social (Helpers)
  • Enterprising (Persuaders)
  • Conventional (Organizers)

As an acronym of those themes,

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Just for Fun: Assessing Your Personality

My clients sometimes ask me if I could do a personality assessment with them. Although I don’t think that’s usually necessary, I understand that learning more about our own personality, and how we compare to other people, can be fascinating and may inform our choices. And the answer is yes, I can. But so can you, if you want.

We are living in a wonderful open-source age, where the best things (especially the most scientific things) may be free, if we know where to find them.

Here, for example, is a short version of the IPIP-NEO personality test:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/j5j/IPIP/ipipneo120.htm.

It looks at 5 broad dimensions (also known as the “Big Five” in the field of personality research), and 30 subdomains of personality. This short version has 120 items to complete. If you feel intrigued or ambitious, you can also do the original long version,

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