The hardest part of doing anything is just getting started.
If you are considering a job search this year, you probably all too aware that the hardest part of doing anything is just getting started. This can be especially true for projects that involve putting yourself out there in the public sphere and being judged.
As an academic job seeker, your job search may follow the academic cycle, with a majority of positions being posted by March, followed by interview periods from April to August, and start dates in August or September. So it’s important to a avoid stumbling out of the gate.
Mark Dykeman, creator of the Unstuck, Focused and Organized System
Mark Dykeman, my guest this morning at 11:00 a.m. on the Higher Ed Career Coach Show on BlogTalkRadio, has a good method for getting your plan together: mind-mapping. Mark is the creator of the blogs Thoughtwrestling and the Broadcasting Brain. I met him through Third Tribe (affiliate link), a membership site put together by Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan and Sonia Simone and dedicated to helping small business owners authentically market their products and businesses.
Mark is a well-known and well-connected social media entrepreneur, and a really nice guy. He’s known for helping people get unstuck, focused and organized, and he’s a strong proponent of the idea of mind-mapping to clear out your mental clutter, unlock your creativity, and move forward with new ideas and plans.
I recently bought his new product, Unstuck, Focused and Organized, because I’ve been looking for ways to get more organized and stay on task. I’ve been getting much busier lately, and needed some fresh perspectives on how to organize my ideas and thoughts. I liked it so much that I joined his affiliate program, and invited him to talk about how job seekers can use mind-mapping to move forward in their search.
In today’s BlogTalkRadio show, Mark and I will talk about using Mind-Mapping to et unstuck in your job search and plan your way forward. I was able to ask Mark a few initial questions ahead of time about his program and ways that job seekers could use his approach.
Unstuck, Focused and Organized: Mind-Mapping for Higher Ed Job Seekers
(Questions are in bold, Mark’s answers are inset and italicized.)
How could someone use mind-mapping to plan their career?
Mind mapping could be used in a number of different ways. For example, if there are different stages of your intended career and different milestones, you could use the mind map to examine each stage. Here’s a simple example: have major categories or branches of the mind map to correspond to different levels of corporate hierarchy:
consultant/team member
team leader
manager
director
vice-president
You could explore each role in detail, including key education requirements, work experience, networking, mentors, and so on. This would be a useful first step in coming up with a plan. You could also do something similar with the type of companies that you would want to work at as well, focusing on both functional experience and industry segment experience.
If you were planning a job search during the next year, how could mind-mapping help you focus your efforts?
There’s several different ways that you could plan your job search. You could conduct a SWOT analysis using a separate branch for each aspect. You could use a mind map to compare your skills and experience to different types of jobs about there: the mind map could help you find key skills to emphasize in your job search as well as important gaps or shortfalls to consider.
You could also use the mind map to explore all possible ways to network and search for the job, which is much better than firing resumes into the ether and hoping for the best.
What’s the best way to start?
The best way to start mind mapping, if you’ve never done it before, is to use a pencil and a huge piece of paper. Write your central or core idea that you want to explore in the center of the paper. Then start writing down every thought or idea that you can think of around the center of the paper. When you’ve gotten everything out that you can think of, take a few minutes and look at it. Look for connections between things. See if you can group similar things together into major categories. Draw lines between things that could be connected. Doodle and draw on it, if you feel like it, in ways that would be meaningful. Look for holes – things that are missing.
The reason for using a pencil? Because you’ll probably want to redraw the mind map after this first try!
We’ll discuss the features and benefits of Mark’s UFO program and different ways to use mind-mapping to plan your job search and your career in general. He’ll also announce a special promotion he’s running next week.
Please join us at 11 a.m. today (Friday, November 5) for the podcast, and call in with your questions and comments to (347) 989-0055 or via Skype click-to-talk.
Have you ever had a busy time, when you knew you couldn’t afford to miss a step? You knew it was coming, and you made a plan to juggle all your responsibilities, and you were ready, in the words of Project Runway’s infamous Tim Gunn, to just “make it work.”
And then, despite all the planning, thinking things out from different angles, and even planning the contingencies, you trip over some unexpected change in terrain….
Boom.Flutter.Fall.
Flat on your face. Ouch-ey! And you wonder whether you should even bother to get up.
Fall has been kinda like that for me, and I’m finally at a point where I need to start over, focus on some core priorities, and let some other things go (or delegate them out). This week, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been doing with my time, and ask you to help me prioritize a bit by letting me know what you’d like to see.
Part 1: The Blog(s)
Readership was pretty consistent last spring during the “placement conference season” and through the summer. July was the best month for traffic, probably in part due to the “down time” many of us experience right before the August/September madness. Since August readership has been down, and I’ve been struggling to come up with fresh content, in part because I am juggling several other projects now, including a part-time gig with Wesleyan College down in Macon, GA, a hybrid coaching course for placement season, some webinars, some guest posts for other blogs and web sites, and the beginnings of some e-books and other “informational products.” I also helped plan a half-marathon.
I thought I had some good plans for this fall, and a good idea of how to execute them. But I got stuck in a few details, distracted by other projects (who knew planning a half-marathon would require so much work?) and then thrown off by a few life events (both cars robbed in my own driveway a couple of weeks back.) So my blogs are off-track, my business has taken a back-seat to a race, my office is a mess, my schedule is full, and there are days I look back over my shoulder and say “where did the day go, and what do I have to show for it?”
I’ve been teetering between the two big options lately: giving up and bucking up. When I set out to do this, I had idealistic reasons in mind, and some pie-in-the-sky ideas about how I’d turn my interests and idealism into a sustainable business and lifestyle. The reality is that I’ve been stumbling through some of it, and like anyone, I could use some feedback and direction. So I’m turning to you. I’ve decided not to quit (at least not yet).
What do you think I should do to mold this idealistic vision of helping higher ed job seekers into a sustainable business model?
What interests you?
What would you be willing to pay for?
What do you want?
And what do you need?
Last year, I did a good job of building up some partnerships and getting guest writers. In July I had a few, and it was the best month for readership for both HigherEdLifeCoach.Com and HigherEdCareerCoach.Com. Many of my regular guest bloggers have started new jobs or had other significant changes in their lives. I’m working with a couple to find time to “get back on the horse,” but I’m also going to bring in some new contributors, so the content can be fresh, and so new voices can find a platform. As I do, I could use your input to help me prioritize any changes or updates to the blogs.
As a reader:
Which past guest posts have you enjoyed the most?
Which contributors?
What topics do you want to read more about?
And if you are a writer or a fellow coach, what would you like to contribute?
Should we have more video and audio posts, slideshows, resource lists, tips and tricks?
Do you like book reviews, product reviews, or “wish list” types of posts?
How often should we have new posts? I had been shooting for 2-3 per week.
Please share some ideas that will help improve the blog, either by commenting below or by sending feedback to sean@higheredcareercoach.com.
RescueTime is a great tool to help you get a handle on how you spend your time. If you are interested, sign up for the free acount through my referral link and I’ll earn two weeks of free RescueTime. Sign up for a paid account, and you’ll help me extend my account by 30 days. This is also a great way for you to get to use this tool, since referrals earn you free time. I’m sure that many of you will be interested after watching my tutorial video.
Also, if you are entrepreneurial at heart but struggle with marketing yourself, learning how to run business, or you just want to be immersed in social media and have the opportunity to learn first-hand from some great business minds, check out Third Tribe. They have an affiliate program, too, so if you sign up through my link, I will earn a commission.I have found the advice I get there to be worth several times the membership cost, and I can safely say that if I have to trim back on expenses, this will be among the last to go. The community there is awesome, and it goes way beyond the founders (Brian Clark, Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan and Sonia Simone).
I hope you found this tour of RescueTime interesting and that you’ll give it a spin. It’s really been helping me, and I think it could help you, too. My best wishes to you as you find ways to rescue time and find more life in your work/life balance.
Today’s episode of the Higher Ed Life and Careers Show will center on the ever-elusive idea of maintaining work/life balance. It’s a rough topic for many in higher ed, especially in Student Affairs, where work doesn’t just follow you home. Work is home. And home is work.
So where do you fit in a “life” when the lines are blurred?
I’ll be discussing this with my friend and periodic co-host Bryan Koval, who has been juggling a new job at Carnegie Mellon University, a doctoral program with a distance education component, and for now, living away from his partner, Jessica, who still works at Penn State. We’ll talk about our personal experiences, share tips and ideas, and take calls.
Please tune in today at 11 am. EDT and call in with your questions, thoughts and ideas!
Click on the logo below to go to the episode page.
There are some important periods of the academic year to pay attention to when you work in higher ed. Everyone acknowledges that the busiest times…welcome week, exam week, and closing for the summer… can eat up your time and energy. But it’s equally important to pay attention to the times which are slower-moving, because they sometimes represent “the calm before the storm”
When I worked in Residence Life, I always had a mid-semester slog starting around October. People were settling into routines, events were happening here and there, and my calendar would feel pretty set, with regular committee meetings, 1-on-1 meetings with supervisees, and loads and loads of busy work. It was always around this time, too, when we’d start to see roommate and neighbor conflicts pick up, alcohol poisonings increase, and psychological issues rear their ugly head.
This period between early October and Thanksgiving always felt to me like wading through molasses. When this feeling hits you (and it will, sometime between now and Thanksgiving, I guarantee it!), you may do one of two things…bury yourself in work so that you feel busy and productive, or avoid work like the plague, put off unpleasant tasks as long as you can, and just hope to ride it out until break. Neither of these methods should be mistaken for work/life balance.
Times like these call on you to stop ad pay attention to how you are balancing your priorities. If you don’t, it can be like a slow, smoldering burn, ready to flash into a fireball at any moment, and leave you ashen, grey, or even burnt to a cinder.
So do yourself a favor: Pay attention to how you are spending your time, and find some time for yourself. If you don’t insist on work/life balance, you won’t have any!
What do you do to make it through your mid-semester slog? Share your ideas, questions and thoughts in the comments below.
Sean Cook, Certified Life Purpose & Career Coach
Sean Cook is a certified Life Purpose and Career Coach based in Athens, GA. Before completing his certification from the Life Purpose Institute, he earned his M.Ed. in Counseling and Guidance Services from Clemson University, and spent over 15 years various student affairs roles in higher education. He specializes in working with college students, recent graduates, and higher ed professionals, and acts as publisher for HigherEdCareerCoach.Com and HigherEdLifeCoach.Com. You can listen to his periodic podcast, the Higher Ed Life and Careers Show, at 11 a.m. Eastern on Fridays on BlogTalkRadio.com. Look for his upcoming contribution to SelfGrowth.Com’s new book “101 Great Ways to Enhance Your Career” later this Fall.
Work with Sean. I help higher ed professionals take control of their careers with tailored services including resume and CV development, LinkedIn profile optimization and networking strategy, interview coaching, and one-on-one career guidance.
