Now What?® Coaching

from Laura Berman Fortgang

Opportunity

CUT OUT THE MIDDLE STEP

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by Now What?® Coaching Founder, Laura Berman Fortgang

Four years ago, at a bookstore event, a woman asked a question about a career strategy she was hatching.  Her goal was to become a global director for the multinational company she worked for.  Her question was about her next move to attain an interim position that would get her to her goal.  Immediately, I realized she did not want that interim step but it was what she thought was necessary to get what she wanted. I recommended just going for what she really wanted instead.

I never heard from her again until a few weeks ago. She told me she had been holding that global director position since shortly after she asked that question.

Another woman had come to get some short-term coaching to confirm she had made the right career choice for herself. She was in a pharmacist’s training school.  Once we got to work it was clear that being a pharmacist was not what the woman wanted at all!  She chose that field because she felt it had job security and she could build a good financial future for herself. The truth was she was miserable and hated every minute of it.  She wanted a strong financial future, not a pharmacist’s life.

Both these women and countless others, male and female, mistakenly put a middle step between where they are and where they want to go.  Every path we take in life has its stepping stones.  No one is going to get a driver’s license and then fly an airplane.  You’d need flying lessons and getting the required hours before getting in the air.  However, there are other life steps or career steps that are not necessary but rather, mere creations of our own mistaken rules for accomplishment.

If you hear yourself thinking:  “ I need to do x to get y” think again.  Take out the ‘x’ and re-examine your strategy.  The truth is “I want Y”. The question is ‘how do I get that?’.  That is what should form your strategy.

Life will tell you if there is indeed an interim step you need, you don’t need to make more work for yourself. Take out the middle step and see how you springboard into opportunity.

Vern and his Molecat

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by Kirsten Meneghello, Now What® Facilitator

Our family went to the state fair this weekend and had a great time. I love to see the cows, pigs, llamas, and the proud 4-H kids showing off the animals they have raised. It’s a big deal.

While we were visiting the commercial exhibitors/vendors, we passed the requisite guy selling knives while slicing and dicing veggies and telling corny jokes. But I also met a really interesting guy who was selling an invention called the “Molecat.” It’s a device that kills moles instantly with percussion. It’s a pretty clever device and as I was talking with the salesman, I could tell he was really jazzed about it. I asked him, “Are you the inventor?” and he said proudly, “Yes.”

Since I’m a curious person, I asked him his name and how he came up with the idea. Vern said he used to work for Intel as a “troubleshooter” but was laid off a few years ago. He was helping his wife in the garden and they encountered a big mole problem. He put his troubleshooting and engineering skills to work and created a solution — the Molecat. Now Vern has a patent pending on the device and he and his wife run a business selling Molecats.

I was so touched by his story because when he got laid off from his job, he didn’t see it as the end of the world. He put his same skills to work — troubleshooting and engineering — and looked at opportunities to use them in his daily life. When Vern saw this opportunity, he took action and did something about it.

Since the economy has taken a downturn, there are a lot of people who have been laid off and have not taken it as well as Vern. But even if you have lost your job, you have to remember you have not lost your skills, creativity, work ethic, and knowledge that you have gained along the way. It’s important to step back, realize all you are and all you have accomplished and then apply it in a different way. I know all of us aren’t cut out to be entrepreneurs or inventors. But we can “re-invent” ourselves, if we are OPEN to opportunity and take ACTION when we are presented with options.

P.S. I’m not affiliated with Vern’s product in any way, but if you are curious (like me!) about Vern and his Molecat, his website is www.molecat.com.

It’s All In Your Head

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By Laura Berman Fortgang 

This is going to sound weird, but roll with me here.  Think of a raisin, some are dry and some are plump.  I get that image in my mind because it reminds me of a brain.  When the brain is healthy, the right synapses firing, a feeling of well-being seeps into the whole body—that’s the plump raisin.  The dry one is your brain on negativity, anxiety and fear.  Shriveled, non-pliable, resistant and tough. 

Life is a game that begins in your head.  Your worldview is shaped by your experiences and the reliving of these experiences in your mind or as they get replayed in patterns in your life only further cement that worldview.  Your brain, metaphorically speaking, will become the plump and juicy raisin or the dry and wrinkled one depending on what it practices most.  It is this that will then determine how you are currently handling your career or its reinvention. 

I’ve never believed more deeply than I have in the last couple of years that the key to success is mental focus and expansion.  As more and more people have suffered loss of work or a change in their economic status, the difference between those who recover quickly and those who don’t, gets down to how long the person can stay positive and flexible.  Flexible in what they are willing to try, how far they are willing to go to find work and how much they are willing to listen to the wiser part of their mind that is not necessarily the most logical or safe.

Sheer mind power alone doesn’t always change our circumstances exactly as we’d like, but it is a crucial factor in this recovery. I’ve seen what fear and devastation looks and sounds like and I’ve seen what they can do to moving out of a bad state of affairs.  They slow down the process and make you appear desperate which repels opportunity and causes your physiology to contract, drying up ideas, motivation and optimism.

What’s possible when your brain is ‘plump’, full of possibility, ideas, hope and gratitude (despite the lack of your desired outcome) is that every encounter, every idea and every opportunity gets looked at in a way where creativity can bloom and find a solution and a match.  When we are numbed by our own pain, we can’t often recognize an opportunity unless it’s wrapped in a blue box with a white ribbon and handed to us on a silver platter.

What if you are at the end of your rope with seemingly no prospects in your search or reinvention?  Get your endorphins flowing, take a crash course in meditation, breath ten times (deeply) before bed and upon waking—do anything you know will plump your raisin brain.  From there, follow EVERY inkling that comes to you no matter how stupid, illogical or scary.  This is how you shake the bushes to create opportunity.  You will see traction take place. Be tireless and stay PLUMP!

[An Aside: If you are a raisin-lover, are you are a plump or chewy person? Give me plump—raisin bran muffin, raisins in hot oatmeal, great oatmeal raisin cookies—-.]

Based on concepts from Chapter Three of “Now What? 90 Days to a New Life Direction”, Most Limits Are Self-Imposed

The Difference Between What We Do and Who We Are

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Here is some inspiration from Chris Gardner, the entrepreneur and philanthropist whose rise from homelessness was portrayed in the move: The Pursuit of Happyness. Gardner urges us to use this time of economic challenge as an “awakening”, to comprehend the difference between what we do and who we are, and to risk inventing our own opportunity.

“When the Tough Get Going.” by Chris Gardner