Moving on... It couldn't last forever

Sometimes things have to come to an end...

for new beginnings to happen. I really appreciate all of you who have taken the time to read my first blog. Many of you have sent emails saying you appreciated the writings and quite frankly, when I started the Happen to Your Career Blog it was more just to put my thoughts down somewhere and I didn't really expect that anyone would read them. So... Thank You!

This blog is ending BUT the new and improved version will pick back up at HappenToYourCareer.com 

If you want to continue subscribing to the Happen to Your Career Blog click here and type in your email in the top right and click submit.

We also have some really exciting events that we will "Happen To" over the next 6 months

We are selling advance copies of the "Get a Raise Guide" along with some really cool extras for an Indiegogo campaign to launch a Podcast in Late September. 

To stay up to date with all of this click here and enter your email to sign up.

HTYC Cast:  Inspiring others to discover their strengths and transition to work that they love; Sharing stories, successes and failures from those who already work with purpose, passion and love what they do!

Thanks for all your support! 

for anything else you need at all don't hesitate to email me at scott@happentoyourcareer.com also don't forget to check out Mark Seiverkropp at Seiverkropp.com he will be helping to launch all of these projects and contributing to the Happen to Your Career Blog along the way. 

Are You Willing to Move Carts?

The real reasons why some people progress and others don't

I have been looking for years to separate out the reasons why some people progress in their careers and others don't. Trying to understand what causes some people to be successful by most definitions and others to stay stagnant in their lives. On this quest of over ten years, I of course had my break through revelation in the most logical and classiest of places; the WalMart Parking lot.

As much as I live for wally world shopping trips, I declined to go in and volunteered to stay with two of our three children in the car. My wife, Alyssa,  took our youngest son, Grayson into the store on a life or death mission for M & Ms, which all parents know are a necessity for potting training at least one of your children (whether you want to admit it or not.) While she spent a solid five minutes in our shopping destination of choice (or lack there of), I got down to serious high quality observation and research on success that would make Malcolm Gladwell jealous.

Naturally the one parking spot that was open had carts near the front of it. Two carts in fact, pushed haphazardly up against the gold Mitsubishi in front of me as I pulled into the space. My first thought was to get out and put the carts back in the cart return that was only two stalls over but just then the people who belonged to the vehicle next to the carts came out of the store and delicately tried to get into their car without touching nor moving the carts. This was challenging because one of the two was right in front of the passenger car door. They successfully found their way into the vehicle and eventually pulled away. At this point, I thought, I am going to sit here and just watch what happens.

Confessions of the Verbose

I have a problem.

It's not an issue that I need 12 steps to resolve (well not yet anyways.) It's not the type of difficulty that others might write a country song about (not yet) or the sort that caused me to get beat up in junior high. It's instead the variety of hindrance that causes massive delays at awkward times, the nature of which often don't need to occur at all. This kind of problem has been known to cause massive boredom that could be completely avoided or to not ever allow someone to get to the end  of a resume, cover letter, or 2 page job application that needed 17 extra pages attached.

Politicians suffer from it.

"It's Turribel" (as Charles Barkley would say)

It's almost a sickness, some type of disease, being dragged along every where I go that I am forced to deal with, medicate, mediate, and mitigate on a daily basis.

Are you ready for it?

I am… (far) less than concise.

Ok, maybe being on the "not so" side of concise doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but let's look at the facts.

• I can spend an hour crafting a sentence that really doesn't say anything useful to anybody

• Writing a blog post that is less than 300 words is nearly impossible for me
• Writing anything of relevance or usefulness to anyone, anywhere without taking 7 and a half times as long to say it as the average person, seems to be beyond the upper reaches of what I am capable of.

• If my life depended on being a successful copy writer, I would not be fortunate enough to make it to flag day (I know your brain is rapidly trying to place flag day in one of the calendar months and it's just not finding recognition.)

This nearly terminal condition was diagnosed by my friend Mark Seiverkropp the other day. He writes a blog called "Hard and Simple Things" which, for me, being concise fits perfectly into this category (extremely simple by definition, but very difficult.)

This is so important in the world that I work in because recruiters and hiring managers often spend less than 10 seconds looking at resumes and those that are less than concise. If you can use fewer words to say the same thing, you will often win out.

So in the spirit of brevity and twitter, I will simply provide a quote from Baltasar Gracian who said it best;

"Good things, when short, are twice as good"

Where have you found this quote to be true?

A Marketing Plan for You, Part I: Job Search

I used to have a small contracting business. Small (about 20 seasonal employees) but successful in it's own right. We did mostly exterior painting and I divided my time between operating the business and marketing to generate new business.  My team and I didn't use complicated tactics, at the time we didn't have to worry about the seeming complexities of SEO or buying ads on facebook. We did however run a successful marketing campaign. It dawned on me as I was listening to an interview with Lisa Earle McCloud, marketing expert, I utilized the very principles that she suggests. She cites the analogy of marketers being similar to deer hunters. Avid hunters will learn everything they can about the deer they intend to hunt. They will go to the place where the deer will most likely be, wearing gear that will be most likely to bag a buck.

In her example great marketers will do the exact same thing.  They will  very specifically determine the target customer and then go where they are, do what they do, see how they live, and serve them completely by speaking their language. In the business that I was in, this was pretty easy. I looked at certain zip codes, determined where there were groupings of residential neighborhoods with average incomes over certain levels, and focused on making those people aware of my services and my business.

This same concept can be applied to marketing yourself during a job search or job transition. Think about it as creating a marketing plan and strategy for yourself. For today's post let’s look at 2 of these concepts:

1. Defining your target market
2. Go to where they are

Defining your target market:

What areas are you interested in living or commuting to? If you are only interested in San Francisco there is no use at looking companies that require you to live in West Palm Beach, Florida

What types of roles are you interested in? If your answer is anything then you probably won't like this blog. It's all about how to use

What companies are likely to have these jobs? Google probably doesn't hire that many welders

Go to where they are at:

Are there professional associations, groups, or meetings that take place in the area for the industry, job or career you are interested in? It's likely there are, whether you know about them or not.

Are there local LinkedIn groups, online groups or other digital local avenues where you can get introduced to people in these roles or people who can make or influence hiring decisions? If your answer is no, then you haven't looked hard enough. Get creative. Between all of the avenues available on the internet you can easily gather enough information to understand what these people are involved in and what they participate in.

Call them at their work. When will they be available? This one seems obvious, but I guarantee you will be unlikely to get most professionals in traditional  jobs on the phone at 10am. This is prime time for meetings, activities, and general work flow time. You would have a much better shot closer to 8am or between 4pm and 5:30pm.

Have an offer at the ready:

Who are you? Why are you calling? What do you want? These questions need to be answered in a 2 minute phone call time period. It's great if you talk with.

4 years ago when I decided I was going to make job transition I knew that I wanted to be in the Human Resources field. Got involved with the local Society for Human Resources Management chapter, where I began to meet HR folks from all around the area. I began volunteering for events and in short order ended up on the board of directors for that chapter. At the same time I was contacting several HR VPs and Directors at local area companies each week. I had previously done research on all of the organizations that I was interested in and had limited it down to a list of 20. I asked to meet with many of the people that I contacted and was able to arrange phone calls, interviews or other in person meetings with well over half of them.

This targeted set of activities led to over 20 interviews and  5 job offers over a 6 month period of time. More than that it led to some fantastic long term relationships. I still have people calling me regularly and saying, I know of a job or an opportunity that you  might be interested in.

Remember most people get jobs through relationships. I hear many people say take an inventory of who you know. I simply reversed this and said how I build relationships with those people who can expose me to opportunities.

One important note on all of this, you should never set out to join a group or build relationships just because it will benefit you. The groups that I participated in often required time and energy from me to contribute to the cause. I got involved with numerous groups along the way and did not join any one of them because of the things it would get me.  Instead each of these groups lined up with my values and what I wanted to contribute to both personally and professionally. In the case of contacting employers and meeting with people each time it was something that was mutually beneficial. For them it was a potential addition to someone they  could add to their talent pipeline should they have a need later on down the road.

You can do this too. It doesn't take a scientist or even a marketing expert to use each of these concepts in your career.

Go and Happen to Your Career!

How to REALLY prep for an interview!

What do you do leading up to the interview? prep for a few questions, practice in the mirror, work on your smiling. All great but as they say this can potentially be "putting lipstick on a pig" if you don't have great experiences to draw from.

So what really preps you for an interview?

Good quality experiences are the basis for really good stories. Stories that of course have a great situation leading up to it, show what stellar behavior you chose to exhibit, and display how you achieved an award winning outcome. How you took on an extra project that changed not only the way your department does business but other departments throughout the company. How you had an idea for cost savings, that really didn't take any extra time but simply required you and your coworkers to start to work in a different way, and oh yes… this one saved your organization $27,000 in short order and lead to you getting a raise. People with experiences like these are the ones employers want to hire. These are even the type of people that are likely to get several job offers and have the ability to negotiate both salary and other terms of the position.

"But Scott" you say "I don't have any of these fancy schmancy experiences but I still want that Finance Manager job in that sweet office building down the road with a view." Maybe so but guess what? someone else who has great experiences actively improving her organization and getting results also wants that job. You will be competing against this person. Going up against someone who has great experiences in an interview is a little like the person who swims a couple of times a week in the pool at the YMCA, competing for a single spot in the olympics. Even if you get through the "elimination rounds" you will be able to tell very quickly by the rapidly expanding gap of water, who the star performers are.

Having great experiences can help you change career fields. One common language in many job interviews is leadership and influence around focused improvement. That is something all organizations are looking for and those are always transferrable skills and experiences. In fact what often stands out

Let's dig a little deeper to determine how we get there. How do you start noticing opportunities or problems for improvement in your organization?

Caring about what happens where you work is a start. Now before you launch into your martyr story about how much you care about this or that, I would challenge you to think about this: Does everyone else that you work with feel the same way about you; That you put yourself behind the needs of the organization and the people in it? That's where you start to notice opportunities to get an interview story. You get miffed a little bit when paper gets wasted or we are giving the customer a less than stellar experience. You start to cringe when you see that that since "we have always done it that way" it has lead to no shortage of missed opportunities and  extra expenses.

Another place you can start is by volunteering for projects, more responsibility, additional workload, to work with other departments, channels, or vendors. We have one person on our team right now that was promoted into position a year ago. Since then he has taken on the most challenging projects that nobody else wanted. He has since been very successful with each project. Through these he has achieved some amazing exposure working closely with other teams and at the same time stretched himself outside his comfort zone. Because of this he now has other experiences working with some of our senior leaders and at the same time has given himself a competitive advantage compared to other people in similar level positions. He will likely be very successful when a position comes open for promotion or if he wanted to go someplace else could probably get numerous job offers.

Think about it this way: If you were your own marketing or sales department for the company of You Inc, wouldn't you want to sell products or services that have significant differentiation from your competitors? That is exactly what you are doing here. Creating competitive advantage in the labor marketplace through the accumulation of the best stories is the best way to ensure that you can have the career you want. 

So remember before you get anywhere close to the actual interview the best way to prep is to say yes to experience.

The rest is as simple as just telling stories!

The Happiness Avoidance Problem

We all want happiness, right? So why is it that so many people are unable to get it?

It is remarkably sad that so many people end up devoting their life to things that don't make them happy. They don't intend to of course. It just ends up happening that way through decision after small decision.   I have worked with hundreds of people who have changed jobs because they felt like they weren't happy there. They have even gone so far as to identify what made them unhappy (the hours, the flexibility, the boss, the strange policy about beards and shaving). They then having felt good about saying "yes these things are what I don't want" make a jump to a new job and over the next 6 to 18 months, slowly feel the same way again. Only this time it might be new things, maybe this time you didn't anticipate there would be annoying coworkers or you got the inner cubicle where you had a sweet office all to yourself at your previous job. You think to yourself "unghh! If this  job just didn't have ____________________"

Many years later people have woken up and at that point devoted a lifetime to running away from something instead of defining what they want and going after it.

To understand how and why this happens, think about it this way. Each choice you make regarding your career can be for one of two purposes, It can be made with the intention of trying to do something that will remove something making you unhappy (like all of the reasons someone might leave a job after identifying what has made them unsatisfied). The other purpose for the choice can be to make a move to the things you have identified that will make you happy (this might be by clearly understanding what does make you happy and cause you joy)

When you read those last you sentences you might at first think "isn't that the same thing?" I thought this too for years. Here is why they are different:

• There are infinite possibilities to do things that avoid making you unhappy. If you successfully avoid a few of these that you have identified it does not necessarily mean you will be working in a role, company, environment, or situation that will make you happy.
• In contrast, there are a smaller and finite number of conditions that will make you really happy. Once you have Identified these the rest becomes less important.

I discovered this when my wife, Alyssa, and I had been having little catfights over the course of a few weeks. This was odd for us and I kept thinking "why is she doing this" it seems like I am doing everything possible to avoid her getting mad at me. I have done the dishes, I have vacuumed the house so she didn't have to, I got home early… And the list went on of things that potentially could make her unhappy.

After several very loud and somewhat less than polite discussions, we finally came to what she really wanted: conversation after spending all day with little kids at home. Adult conversation and feeling a connection with her husband was what really made her happy day after day. Both she and I hadn't realized this at the time and I obviously had been focused on eliminating the things that she didn't want.

After we discovered this, I began calling her and having conversations with her on the way home from work, then getting home and taking over dinner and attempting to continue the conversation with the kids hanging around my legs. All of a sudden, even though the dishes and all of those other things were still getting done, they just didn’t matter as much. She was getting what made her happy after having identified it.

Don't get caught up in this trap in your career. Focus in on the things that truly make you happy and NOT on avoiding the things that make you unhappy. You can do this by determining the things in the past that you have enjoyed at work or at home and not on the things you haven't. Make a list keep it and continue to add to it as you discover more about yourself. In short order you will have a better perspective on what really makes you happy. Which is all we really want anyways, right?

Just say "Hi": Simple tips to catapult a career

I work with a guy who says "hi". He is the type of guy who you aren't sure how he gets anything done because when you see him he is in your office, or someone else's office  or talking to one of his team. He is the type of guy that is rarely found in his own office but instead out where the action happens chatting with people. He always looks too happy to be busy and he is always spends way too much time talking to people to get stuff done. Right?

Let's call this guy Charlie. Charlie is actually one of the most productive people I have ever worked with. Not only is he getting results faster than most other people I have interacted with but he also is looked at as the model of discipline in this organization. On top of that it is clear that he will have more opportunities in his career with this same organization. Why is this? How does this seemingly oxymoronic set of events work together? Is he just friendly with the right people?

Well… the short answer is yes. But in a different way than you might think.

Here is what is really happening:

Every day he is stopping by multiple times per day to say hi, at the same time he's talking about what is going on in the business, what is going on that's really good, giving you his fellow co-worker recognition for doing something right or getting that result, telling you how it impacted his team, how it will impact the business, checking in on something that he has going on that involves you, a project, a task, a deliverable. Or he is spending time with his team (where they work) developing them, coaching them, keeping tabs on how they are doing with encouragement and support.

He doesn't spend a lot of time in conventional water cooler type conversations talking about the latest TV shows and politics. He doesn’t spend much time focusing on things that aren't going to generate results. Despite this he still has built some of the best relationships I have seen and has a high degree of respect from the team that he works with. The most common things said about him "I really like that guy!" and "he sure gets things done".

Here is why this works for him. He gets collaboration and accountability from the people he works with because people like him (and he provides the same for them). People like him because he cares enough about them to go out of his way spending maybe 60 seconds a day talking to them about what is important in their world and what he has in common with them. Often this might only be things he needs from them or simply touching base with how something is going but this shows constant follow up and care to his coworkers.

 I will not be surprised if Charlie continues to get amazing productivity and results from all the teams and people he works with and I would also not be surprised if this leads to another promotion for him in the next calendar year.

So although everyone has different personalities and priorities I would challenge you to take a small lesson from real life and, like Charlie, get out of the comfort of your work-space every day to be someone who says "Hi"