Have you ever considered the ways your work comes home — and your home comes to work? One writer recently shared her thoughts in this article titled, “4 Things Business Taught Me About Parenting — and Vice Versa” and I am sure, if you thought about it, you could come up with more things you have learned as you balance career and family.
The reality is that we aren’t compartmentalized into two separate persons who are exclusively at home or exclusively at work. If you are having problems at home, it is easy to bring that stress into the workplace, and the same tendency applies from work to home. But there are good things that overlap, too!
“Treat others the way you’d like to be treated” is a basic childhood lesson that never stops being the right thing to do.
“Be responsible for your behavior” applies pretty much everywhere I can think of.
“Apologize when you are wrong” gets everybody on the same side, and the same team, and frees you to deal with the problem.
“Time out” gives a chance to regroup and respond instead of react. You don’t put a co-worker in the corner, but you could suggest a break and set up a meeting to discuss solutions.
“Nap time/Snack time” acknowledges the physical limitations of a child. But grownups, too, have physical limitations and repeatedly working through lunch or excessive overtime will reveal that fact.
“Respect each other’s boundaries and differences” goes past teaching kids to get along and into the working world with people from many backgrounds and perspectives.
“Do your chores”, or your to-do list, because sometimes you just have to get it done regardless of how you feel about it.
What are some things you have learned from work and applied to home, or vice-versa? I’d love to hear from you!
Don't Kill Your Career: Attitudes Change Your Workplace
Your attitude at work can change your career in ways you may not expect. Just as workplace gossip is seen as a problem, so are rudeness and apathy. These attitudes may not be overtly hostile, but they cause damage all the same and can stop your career in its tracks.
Call centers train their workers to smile when they speak on the phone to customers. This is because a smile is heard in the voice even when you can’t see the speaker and will influence the hearer. If something so simple as a smile will change the way you are heard on the phone, imagine how much your attitude changes the way you interact with your co-workers and customers!
Gossip is a trap many fall into because it is so easy to talk about other people. The long-term effects of gossip are seen with strife in the workplace, time-wasting, and the gossip being considered untrustworthy. Don’t listen to gossip and don’t pass it on.
Rudeness will cause folks to back away and go somewhere else. Why be treated like that when it is easy to find an alternative? There are many reasons given as an excuse for rudeness, and not one of them changes the initial reaction. You may win someone back by apologizing, but it’s better to avoid the problem by thinking about how your attitudes and actions affect other people. Treat others kindly, just like you’d like them to treat you.
Apathy is like quicksand. The longer you sit in it, the harder it is to get out. If you feel like what you are doing every day is worth little, then apathy sets in quickly. No matter where you are in life, apathy changes the way you see your life and the way you interact with others. A wise man once noted that investing in something makes it precious to you. Start putting effort into a task or a person and that task or person becomes important.
My earlier example of the smile over the phone left out one important factor: that smile did not have to be “felt” by the smiler in order to be heard by the caller. Your voice changes when your lips are shaped into a smile. In the same way, your attitudes are not at the mercy of your feelings at the moment. Choose to have a good attitude and see how your workplace changes around you and your career opportunities open up.
Avoiding Red Flags When Updating Your Professional Resume
One of the red flags an interviewer looks for is inconsistency in your information. If you have updated your professional resume, take the time to look at your cover letter and online information carefully to make sure they all match. I’m not saying to keep a falsehood consistent because lying is never a good idea, but I am saying that if you are not updating everything when you refresh one thing it eventually will look like you lied because the records are inconsistent. This is an easy trap to fall into because there are so many places your professional information can be found. If you have recently taken a seminar on a specialty in your field, you may remember to put it on your resume but forget about your LinkedIn profile. Do that three times and your online brand is lacking three important pieces of information about you. Do that ten times, and an interviewer will wonder what’s going on. This is also an easy trap to avoid! All you need to do is understand that updating your professional resume involves more than the pages you print out to mail with a cover letter or attach to an email. When you look at the professional resume packages offered, you’ll see that reflected. If you aren’t going to invest in a service like that, then it is a good idea to post a reminder to yourself in your resume folder that change to one means changing it all. You are a package deal; a composite of experience and training and perspective that will benefit an employer. Your professional resume ‘package’ is a composite of your online brand, resume, and any other information a potential employee can dig up. Keep your information consistent across that package and there won’t be any red flags to find.
Newly Wed And Newly Working — Tips To Make It Work
Getting married means adjustments in your life. Often, there is a new address; always, there are attitude shifts. A new job has many of the same challenges as a new marriage, and sometimes both appear in your life at the same time! The challenge of training, learning to live or work with new people, and adapting to a new schedule at home and the job can be intimidating. Here are some tips to make it work:
Give yourself permission to mess up. It’s like someone gave you a beautiful, shiny new trumpet and now you have to learn how to play it. The first few attempts for every trumpet player sound pretty bad! Any trumpet player will tell you that there’s a lot of practice and a lot of mistakes involved with learning to make music. Marriages and new jobs are the same way — nobody does it perfectly the first few times they do it, no matter what ‘it’ is.
Look at the big picture. Every hour is part of a day, every day is part of a week, every week is part of a year, and every year is part of a life. The bigger your perspective on your marriage or your new job is, the less stress you will feel about smaller parts of it and the easier it will be to see how those smaller parts fit.
Prioritize. It isn’t possible to have every important thing be the most important thing; there will be times you have to choose. A schedule helps a lot here, so the priority can change if you are at work or at home. Expect to mess up here, too, because it takes a while to figure out what works for your new family or job.
Don’t take on any new challenges for a while. Now is not the time to learn a new language. You are already learning a new life and/or a new job, so your energy is limited.
Realize that “this, too, shall pass.” Do you remember how completely intimidating starting at a new school was? How about learning how to drive? You are at the beginning of a steep learning curve, but it will get better every day.
Some of the same characteristics that help you with a new job help you with a new marriage. These “trainability factors” really apply to just about every area of life I can think of. So if you are at the beginning of a kind of scary new phase of life, relax. It will be worth it!
You have carefully crafted your resume, reading all the tips and compiling your information before editing and polishing your presentation to be the best snapshot of the assets you bring to the hiring interview.How do you get that resume distributed so it gets read? It isn’t enough to go through the paper and send envelopes out to any address you find, hoping you get a response. A lot of companies will now ask you to apply online even though they advertise in that newspaper. It’s a good idea to learn how to work with online applications and attach your resume electronically.This is pretty much standard, and not knowing how to do it limits you. It’s also a good job skill so you don’t have an excuse for ignoring that whole technology thing. The next step after writing a resume – distribution – trips a lot of job-seekers up.They don’t really know how to distribute their resume and aren’t honestly aware of all the potential openings available to them. When you employ a hit-or-miss method to looking for a job, you are going to miss a lot of the job openings in your field. A “resume blast” indiscriminately blanketing the job market often is ignored or seen as spam. If you are serious about distributing your resume effectively, consider working with a recruiter.This is a professional whose career is connecting companies and potential employees. They know exactly how to get your resume into the hands of someone who will want to call you in for an interview. Recruiters often specialize in certain industries or areas. You can do the research yourself, hoping you find the right match, or you can do this: Professional Resume Services can connect you with the recruiters who fit your search.Instead of that resume blast or scattered attempts, the database of almost 16,000 recruiters is searched for the best options for you. This database is updated quarterly and has major recruiting firms, contingency and retained recruiters, and more. Once the recruiter is identified, a targeted letter in PDF and MSWord format is sent to each one. Then you get an Excel file with the contact information for every recruiter your resume was sent to.
That’s a lot more effective than circling want ads and hoping you find a job.
Are You An Underearner? What Your Salary Might Say About You
Recently, there was an article on LearnVest titled “Hello, My Name is Tom and I’m an Underearner”.It’s an interesting read about the characteristics of underearners and the presence of an AA-type support group called “Underearners Anonymous,” (Who knew such a group existed?) It got me thinking about how salary means more than money: It can affect how others see you, and how you see yourself, like a dirty window on the world. One of the problems that can develop during a job search is a completely unrealistic idea of salary.It’s easy to undervalue your abilities and ask for too low a wage, or to assume you can demand the paycheck someone with years of experience in your field would get. If you add up your monthly bills and just ask for that much, you aren’t using all the information that should go into salary ranges. Underearners are people who are not getting the salary that someone with their qualifications would reasonably expect. This could be because they don’t value those qualifications or are afraid to ask for a raise. It could be because they’d have to live up to their potential and they are afraid. There are a lot of reasons why salary and self-esteem are connected. In some cases, there is discrimination causing salary issues, but this cannot be assumed because sometimes the reason for the lower paycheck is actually performance-related. You need to dig deeper to find out why that paycheck is that amount. During a job search and interview, salary is a subject that you should be prepared to confidently discuss with a prospective employer without being demanding.The more you understand your worth, the easier it is to see that you deserve (earn) a wage that is accurate. There are two excellent resources available to you:
Job Search Resources — this page has a wealth of information, including salary calculators and self-assessments
Job Search Success System — this is a full course that will give you the skills to show your worth accurately to potential employers.
When you are getting the salary you should be getting, it’s like seeing your world through a clean window.
Even if you have no plans to run a business, you have an online brand: it is the persona the internet world perceives you to be.What comes up when your name is put in a search engine? Are you on social media with embarrassing pictures? Why would I tell you to “own” your online brand? To own something is to be invested in it, to take responsibility for it, and to proactively maintain it.
Any prospective employer is going to be looking at what kind of presence you have online. The positions with more at stake may involve a bit more research, because there will be a desire to know if there’s anything that will be a problem once you are in the company. Security clearances can require quite extensive background checks. Depending on the position you are seeking, what comes up online on your “brand” might cost you a job. Now is the time to invest in your online brand. It can be an investment of time and effort, or you may choose to actually maintain a purchased site in your name with your professional highlights. A LinkedIn profile is worth the research and investment. Learn about online personal branding and get advice on the type of development your career should involve. Now is the time to take responsibility for your online brand. Do what needs to be done to clean up your profiles on Facebook and the rest of the social media you are involved in. Maybe you need to tighten up your privacy settings, and perhaps you should have a professional social media page, or a personal one — and be very careful about what is allowed on each. It isn’t difficult to find horror stories about pictures that should never have been posted being circulated beyond what was intended with consequences unanticipated. If you have made a major mistake, fix it to the best of your ability and be prepared to show how you have matured. Now is the time to proactively maintain it. Make the commitment to own your online brand and consistently check to see how the world sees you. Most of the people in the world will never see you in person, but if they can get online they can find out about you. Do what you need to do in order to keep your brand one that reflects the best about you.
A job search or career change is like building a home: both require thought, research, and careful planning to be successful. When you look at blueprints for a custom-built home, you see the wisdom of many experts compiled to create the perfect house. Codes and construction standards, design details and homeowner’s dreams — it’s all there in the blueprints, ready to become reality. If the experts aren’t part of the design process, those blueprints will be missing something. It’s like a kitchen designed by someone who only eats at restaurants; the non-cook has no grasp on what is practical for a kitchen. You could end up with cupboards too small for cereal boxes, counters with no outlets to plug the toaster into, and an oven that can’t be opened when standing in front of the stove because the island is too close. With a job search, there are similar problems that can arise. If you are trying to design your career plans without expert advice, you are going to miss some important factors that will cause problems later on. It’s just the way things work; we learn through mistakes, and if we are smart, we learn from others’ mistakes too. When you are keeping up-to-date with regular reading of available resources you are going to be able to see where you can do things yourself and where to call in an expert. Our Job Search Resources list contains all you need to accomplish this goal, with links to many experts and tools. You can find links to:
career research and exploration
job search sites for free or pay
social networking
salary calculators
self-assessments
and much more
The more expertise invested in designing the plan, the better your blueprint for a successful job search or career change will be.
