Now What?® Coaching

from Laura Berman Fortgang

Now What? Newsletter Articles

What’s Energy Got To Do With It?

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by Now What?® Coaching Founder, Laura Berman Fortgang

Feeling stuck stinks.  Nothing’s working. Everything weighs heavily on you and clarity just doesn’t want to come.  As the anxiety grows and  you try harder to make decisions or force answers, the worse things seem to get.  So what do you do?

Here’s what I’d ask you to do.  I’d ask you to take your mind off a problem that has no solution yet.  I’d suggest that you do something that will increase your energy.  Have some fun, exercise, pamper yourself in some way or do something just because you enjoy it.  I’ll expect one of two reactions:  Relief or more anxiety assuming you would feel hugely irresponsible not continuing to beat your head against the wall.

Let me explain what’s at work here.  When your body is stressed and constricted, there is no flow.  What does that mean?  Your energy is being consumed by stress and not being free to draw your interest to places that will make a difference to your career transition.  Your energy is blocked.

It comes down to an energetic equation.  What multiplies your energy and what subtracts it?  In other words, what energizes you and what drains you?  Worry and struggle drain you.  Creative, athletic, connective, loving, educational, or nurturing activities expand you and likely give you energy.  As counter-intuitive as it seems to take your focus off of your dilemma before it is solved, it is exactly what can lead to the breakthrough you seek.

The end of the year is here.  Time to unplug. It’s not a race to the finish line.  If clarity is not yours yet, absorb the slower pace of the next several days if possible and use them to slow down, observe, be more mindful and look for clues.  If you do know what’s next, set the stage for crossing over into another year by getting things in order so you can take action as soon as everyone is back at their desks.  In either case, enjoy!

Happy Holidays and to ALL a very productive and meaningful 2012.

“The higher your energy level, the more efficient your body. The more efficient your body, the better you feel and the more you will use your talent to produce outstanding results.” Tony Robbins

GIVING THANKS GIVES WAY TO SMOOTH CAREER TRANSITIONS

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by Now What?® Coaching Founder, Laura Berman Fortgang

We all know to say please and thank you and send those post-interview thank you notes.  We all know that Thanksgiving is the time to give thanks for all we have.

These are good habits and fruitful ones.  However, there are more ways that gratitude can make life easier if you are in a transition in your life.

Lessons Learned

It’s easy to be bitter or get depressed when a lay off has occurred or money is tight or your life is in crisis for any reason.  Robert Frost once said:  “The easiest way out is through.” In my opinion, there is no better way to ‘get through’ than to find the good you can be grateful for even in the bad.

When we scan our past work, past bosses, past triumphs, and past losses, we need to unhook from the negatives and find what we can be grateful for.  So if somebody was cruel or unfair, thanks goodness!  They taught you to persevere.  Or they taught you how to speak up or they taught you that you belong in an environment where you are appreciated.

Give thanks for lessons learned.

Skills Gained

Similarly, even the worst of scenarios can hold a gift inside of them.  What skills did you gain?  What resume nuggets can you add?  What hard skill or soft skill learning did you take on?

None of these things can be taken away.  They are yours to keep.  Find gratitude for that.

Coming up in my professional life, there were certainly assignments I took on ‘just for the money’ that were not necessarily satisfying or life-affirming.  Nonetheless, at the time, I got through them by being grateful for the income, certainly, but also for the tid-bits of industry knowledge they gave me.  Thanks to the varied exposure, I can now carry on an intelligent business exchange in dozens of areas.  Thank goodness for those less than ideal assignments.

Going deeper

Beyond pleasantries and etiquette is deep, deep gratitude. —Gratitude for the people who have shaped you along your way.  Negative influences and positive, both call for gratitude.  Whether they were grains of irritating sand polishing you into a pearl or they were fuel that rocketed you sky high, they have made you who are today.

Think of those that have influenced your career path.  Think of those that believed in you when you did not believe in yourself.  Think of the person who was selfless on your behalf and the one that was selfish and got you angry enough to learn how to stand up for yourself.

Whether it was a parent, co-worker, boss or stranger everyone has had a hand in your growth and for that, being truly grateful will reap its rewards. Being at peace with past relationships, keeps the new ones free from baggage.  Appreciating those you crossed paths with makes for easy communication if you run into each other in other circles or find that you are to work together again.

Going deeper with your gratitude is not that selfless. It actually serves you very, very well.

So go forth and celebrate Thanksgiving.  Rejoice at your holiday table and keep the gratitude going for a long, long time.

“Choose to see the world through grateful eyes. It will never look the same way again.” Doe Zantamata

COMMITMENT In A WORLD OF FAST CHANGE

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by Now What?® Coaching Founder, Laura Berman Fortgang

In our short-attention-span, instant-gratification, electronic world, it gets increasingly harder for people to stick with something.  Everything changes so quickly—our amazing new gizmo will become obsolete in two years or less, as will our initiatives in the workplace or at home. So many changes, at ever increasing speeds, makes it hard to commit to anything!

Why bother?

Well, there’s the obvious.  Commitment will get you where you want to go. Put on blinders, see nothing else, stay put and don’t wander.  Stay on task, stay focused.  The tougher part of commitment, however, is settling in on why one should commit—to anything.  If it’s going to change next month, isn’t it futile?

How does one commit in a hailstorm of change?  There are two ways: know where you’re headed and be loyal to a way of being instead of an actual task.  When you have a big picture of what you want to accomplish, it is easier to commit despite setbacks and changes.  Is it a 50-year marriage?  An income amount?  A certain company or college you want to get in to?  Stay loyal to that picture and be willing to do whatever it takes and change as many times as you have to to get there.

Secondly, decide (latin root: cut off all other options) WHO you want to be on this journey to the big picture.  Stressed and harried or collected and determined?  Choose a way of being that will fuel the journey to the big picture.  How you behave is much more in your control than all the circumstances are.  So choose carefully, and live that way of being the way a sailboat would catch the wind to get where it wants to go.

This reminds me of the Harry Potter series.  Harry’s big picture—make the most of his gifts of wizardry.  Harry’s way of being—take the high road, use his magic for good.  It doesn’t mean he didn’t have to pull a few punches, because he did.  However, he prevailed to conquer evil.  He had no idea of how he’d get there.  He had to change at every turn and be agile and quick.  He could not stay the same.  Only become better and better versions of himself.

That is what is being asked of you now.  To keep fine tuning the best of what you have to give and use it to it’s greatest advantage. For then and only then, will we make any sense of the unpredictability of change.

SUSPENDED REALITY

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by Now What?® Coaching Founder, Laura Berman Fortgang

THERE COMES A TIME, in almost every career transition, when clarity comes and a sense of determination kicks in despite every logical  reason for it not to.  There comes a suspended reality where you almost can’t believe you are moving forward in this new chosen direction yet there is no turning back.  A cocoon of reason disintegrates and transforms into a new being that can take flight.  It is in this suspended reality that courage comes and doors begin to open without logical explanation as to why. 

In the movie, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, the hero must step out into an infinite abyss to get help to his ailing father.  With each step out into the nothingness, a rock floor would appear to catch him and allow forward motion towards his goal.  That same suspended reality is what it feels like to follow a new direction for your life and career that you know is right but have no evidence or indication of getting the result you want.

How do you do it?

Up The Faith

When you operate in space without a net, where most people in your life think you’ve lost your marbles, you have to believe in your self and the goodness of life in general to make it work.  It’s not the time to be a realist.  It’s a time to be naïve and assume that everyone and everything will work in your favor.  It often will when you become a self-contained, pressurized bottle full of faith.

Follow The Breadcrumbs

When you are researching a new field, trying to find a job or pursuing a specific goal in your new direction, every lead is a hot one.  Being in the gap between now and future busyness in your new career, you have the luxury of time.  You cannot afford to ignore any possibility that can take you in your new direction.  Talking to one person can lead to the next person and so on.  You will be amazed at the path that gets laid out in front of you as you diligently walk through every open door. 

Keep a Solid Home Base

All this is not to say you should abandon all reason.  What allows you to move forward with blind faith and curious tenacity is having a solid home base to operate from.  You’ll need at least one person who believes in you when the rest of your posse thinks you’re nuts.  If possible, keeping your day job will help too even though you’ll have less time for fact-finding.  And if you are in between things, it’s OK, you can still have a solid base. Decide what you can invest in yourself financially and give yourself the time to make the transition.  If that is not in the cards, a solid base is harder, but not impossible.  It’ll then be built on the faith we talked about above and involving others so you can move along more quickly.  Ask, ask, ask—for help, support—whatever you need. Create a base of emotional support no matter which level of financial cushion you can operate from.

A recent client made a decision to act on a long-time hunch that it was time to move on from his current job. Despite the uncertainty of the economy and the ‘sure thing’ that his position was after 20 years with the company, he knew he had to do it.  He got on the phone and explored every hint, tip or lead that was given to him.  Despite his family’s fears that he was blowing a good thing, he persevered, went on interviews, visited other folks that had moved on from his company years before and went to industry events to meet new people to talk to.  He did find a new job that he was happy with and six months later, learned that his former company was making layoffs in the department he had been a part of!

Acting on a hunch will usually lead you to enter a suspended reality.  That’s what we at Now What?® Coaching are here for.  Meet our facilitators.

WHAT MAKES LUCK FLOW?

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by Now What?® Coaching Founder, Laura Berman Fortgang

It is often debated whether you can make your own luck or not.  Personally, I find my luck-making skills to be seasonal but fundamentally in place and ever-improving.  However, through 20 years of clients and hundreds of Now What? ® Facilitator anecdotes, there is enough evidence to point to the circumstances that cause great luck to find you.

Skip Your Reasonable Ideas

Time after time, clients come to the career transition process with two versions of what they’d like to accomplish.  One is the version they feel they likely have the power to make happen.  The other, is the deepest truth about what they want.

“If I were to tell the truth….” is a statement I hear very often.  Why wouldn’t you tell the truth?  Why is it dismissed as a pipe dream?  Those ‘impossible’ dreams hold the springboard to a new direction whether it’s a literal move to the dream or some interpretation of it.

Once the true desire is given air-time, it cannot be taken back, so action becomes inevitable.  Small steps start to get promising results and the traction and speed often take off from there. Blocks seem to move away and your luck ‘magically’ changes.  The truth WILL ‘set you free’! 

Scare Yourself

The bigger the chances you take, the greater the ‘lucky’ things that begin to occur.  Taking risks is a very big factor in shaking the trees and causing ripe fruit to fall into your life.

Michael, who had been out of work, had thought of calling an old boss, but talked himself out of it because their final encounter had not been the most stellar.  He felt a nagging urge to call him but he was afraid to and did not feel it was appropriate to hope for a job by reaching out.  With some encouragement, and a lot of butterflies, he gave his ex-boss a call.  The boss was so glad to hear from Michael that he invited him in to see him.  They met, found they both had felt bad about how things had been left earlier and Michael left with two strong leads for jobs at companies where his boss had contacts. 

 As ‘luck’ would have it, after several weeks, Michael’s old boss had an opening that was a better opportunity than the other two leads he had been pursuing.

Get Gracious

Wanting your luck to change is almost the worst way to get your luck to change.  What I mean is that when you focus on what’s missing, what’s wrong, what’s hurting, it’s really hard to get results to the opposite effect.

The way to shifting results and changing your luck is getting in synch with what you have.  Despite wanting better, being gracious about what you already have, will pave the way to better luck. 

Think of it in dating terms:  If you’re desperate, insecure and twisting yourself into a pretzel to make a match (any match!) your long term relationship wish will be bumpy.  If you are comfortable with how you are and like your life the way it is, you will make a charming, interesting person to meet and your chances of a match go up. It’s the same in making a goal come to be.

Find the good in the ‘bad’ and you will navigate on a smoother road to better days.

Using your endless well of creativity (yes everyone has it), you can find a bridge between your current circumstance and the one you want to create.  You can find a way to align the secret goal with the reasonable plan and come up with one luck-changing game for your life.

Let us know how we can help.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IS Your DRIVE Derailing YOU?

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by Now What?® Coaching Founder, Laura Berman Fortgang

Finding yourself losing your satisfaction with your work or feeling like you just can’t motivate yourself the way you used to?  Maybe you are even losing steam on a job search.  Whatever the scenario, knowing why you are doing something and having a compelling reason to do so (besides a pay check) is a huge factor in succeeding at what you want to do. 

Many people don’t realize it, but their loss of interest or mojo may have everything to do with what had motivated them in the past to get them to where they are now.  What I mean is that we can actually outgrow our motivation! For example, if you were motivated to not be poor like your parents and now you have plenty of money but are losing interest in your work, it may very well be because you are not running on a motivator that means anything to you today.  You already reached where the old motivation got you to!  It’s time for a new drive!

On the other hand, there are situations where people are sooooo driven, that they ruin their relationships or the quality of their lives in tireless pursuit.  Neither way seems to be how we are supposed to be living.  The ideal, as years of listening to people tells me, is to have passion and a sensible balance (although not always consistent or perfect).

To find new motivation that is both healthy and up to date think about the following questions:

What vow did you make a long time ago that may now need updating?

(i.e. I’ll never be poor like my parents or I won’t be stuck like my mother/father was or I won’t be a teenage pregnancy statistic)

What needs must be met for you to be happy at work?

What issue calls you or galls you to the point where it motivates you to take action?

What image for the future compels you to want to make it happen?

When you are running on new fuel that matches who you are today and that means something to you, you will find it so much easier to take action even in the face of adversity.

Get into DRIVE and go!!!!