The Bamboo Project Blog

Laid Off? Don't Put Off That Job Search!

There are two labor markets nowadays. There's the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer.--The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

 

Many laid off workers I know decide they want to "take a break" in between jobs, especially if they got some severance. Big mistake!

In today's job market you simply can't afford to do that. Too many potential employers are only interested in you if you're currently employed or have only recently been laid off. 

Here's a money quote from an article in the Atlantic on some research into the impact of long-term unemployment on your ability to find a new job:

As long as you've been out of work for less than six months, you can get called back even if you don't have experience. But after you've been out of work for six months, it doesn't matter what experience you have. Quite literally. (my emphasis) There's only a 2.12 percentage point difference in callback rates for the long-term unemployed with or without industry experience. That's compared to a 7.13 and 8.95 percentage point difference for the short-and-medium-term unemployed. This is what screening out the long-term unemployed looks like. In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or longer. (my emphasis) 

 

That's right. The longer you are unemployed, the harder it is to find a job. In fact, your best likelihood for finding a job comes in the first few weeks after you've been laid off. That's when your skills are freshest and when people are most willing to help you out. 

I'm in the process of working on a series of posts about things you need to do when you get a lay-off notice, but here's the one piece of advice I want you take right now:

If you lose your job, your # 1 priority needs to be finding another one, ASAP. 

Don't take a break to rejuvenate. Don't take time off to figure out your next move. Don't say "I'll take the summer to be with the kids and then look for a job in the fall." You. Will. Be. Sorry.

Even if you think you want to start a business, I still encourage you to put some time into a job search. You don't know how your self-employment efforts are going to go and believe me, it's easier to start a new business when you're not freaking out about how you're going to pay your electric bill. 

I've worked with too many people who have put off job searching until it was too late. You cannot afford to lose a single day in this process. The time to look for a new position is yesterday. 

Creating Your Career Path: Career Resilience and Multiple Income Streams

 

One aspect of career resilience it's important for us to keep in mind is the need to have multiple options. This is particularly true when it comes to our finances, where we need to be far more entrepreneurial than we've been in the past. It's fine to rely on a single source of income (your job) when that source is very stable. But jobs are anything but stable anymore. In fact, they may be the least stable thing going on right now. 

Last week Harold Jarche wrote that we are in a post-job economy: 

I have been observing for quite some time that most work is getting automated and outsourced, while only complex and creative work remain valued, and therefore wealth-generating for those who do it. The construct of the JOB highlights this problem, because jobs are designed around work that can be copied and workers who can be replaced, but anything that can be reduced to a flowchart will be automated. Relying on the job as society’s main wealth-sharing mechanism is a major mistake in the network era, but one that politicians and many others continue to make. We are entering a post-job economy.

And in Forbes Magazine, Dave Maney makes a compelling case for the death of jobs. 

Imagine for a moment that you’re a company and you’re going to an imaginary store to buy labor solutions for tasks you need done. If it’s 1980, there’s pretty much one item on the shelves, albeit in two different sizes. The boxes are labeled “employee”, and there’s a big box (full-time) and a small box (part-time). You need something done that needs any amount of supervision and interaction – those are pretty much your choices.

Now stroll into the labor solutions store today. You’ll immediately notice an astonishing array of choices on the shelves: Full-time and part-time employees are still there, to be sure, but now they are joined by outsourcing, crowdsourcing, freelancing, social media methodologies, software automation…and more, and all in a million different permutations and varieties.

Collaboration has become increasingly frictionless, meaning increasingly costless. As a result, the one thing that is absolutely certain about the store’s inventory of labor solutions: The largest, most unwieldy, most expensive, most regulated, riskiest, and least flexible box in the entire place is, without question, the full-time job box.

In an era of economic flux and uncertainty, what box is going to be favored? The big box might sell, but only under a set of very particular circumstances. Sane companies will buy every other box first – and they have been, and it’s showing up in our economic statistics month after month after month.

I agree wholeheartedly with this analysis and it's something I've been blogging about for awhile. Putting all your eggs into one basket (your job) is a recipe for career rigidity and financial problems in the future. 

The resilient careerist will recognize this new reality and start working now to diversify possibilities for him/herself. I suggest taking a lesson from the solo entrepreneurs among us--those of us who have been managing multiple streams for awhile in order to make ends meet. 

Learning From Solo Entrepreneurs

In a recent post entitled The Right Mix of Income is Your Safety Net,  Kivi Leroux Miller, one of my favorite nonprofit business people,  does a nice job of laying out how she manages muliple income streams within her small business. When her business was new, it looked like this:

• Steady Clients – I had two clients that I worked for nearly every month.
• Intermittent Clients – I had several clients who gave me a few projects per year.
• Magazine Articles – I wrote articles for trade magazines.
• Online Courses – I taught several online courses through my websites (business writing and writing nonprofit annual reports, at the time).
  
• Tip Sheets – I sold tip sheets on various writing topics through my websites.
• In-person Workshops – I taught workshops through the Duke University Certificate Program in Nonprofit Management.
• Advertising Revenue – I ran Google AdSense ads on most of my websites.
• Affiliate/Reseller Revenue – I ran ads for affiliate program products on most of my websites.

As it has evolved, the mix has now shifted into this:

• Webinar Series and E-Clinics– I offer a weekly webinar series with a subscription fee at Nonprofit Marketing Guide, and also teach webinars almost weekly at CharityHowTo. We also offer more in-depth online training via two-week e-clinics.
• Mentoring Program — I offer a six-month group Mentoring Program for nonprofit communications directors.
• Coaching Clients — I work with three clients currently, helping them work through marketing challenges and develop their marketing teams.
• Public Speaking — I present more than a dozen workshops and keynotes each year, and am paid for almost all of them.
• Book Royalties — I get checks twice a year from my publisher.
• E-Books — We sell a few e-books online.

Kivi's mix is based on her particular interests, passions, skills and the changing needs of her clients. But it's still an instructive combination of products and services that can be an effective jumping off point for your own planning.  

 

Your Path to Diversification

If you're currently working, think of your job as your own version of Kivi's "Steady Clients." This gives you a baseline source from which you can build out your other options. 

Then look to your passions and skills to find other potential revenue streams. Are there skills you use at work that you might also use with customers? Don't forget your hobbies and other interests when thinking about sources of income. Are you a fantasic cook or an artist in your spare time? Maybe you can turn these hobbies into paying opportunities. 

As you develop ideas for side gigs and potential products, don't make the mistake of assuming that they must bring in huge amounts of money. You're looking for diversification. Some strategies will be more financially lucrative than others, but all can combine to create a safety net for you.

Also, I've found it's a good idea to be methodical about this. Lay out all your possibilities and then start prioritizing. Which of these options do you have the will and resources to work on now? Which are opportunities for the future?

If your job is particularly demanding, you may want to focus on finding passive income sources where you create a product to sell and then focus on marketing and selling it. E-books and online tutorials are examples of this kind of passive income opportunity. 

Eventually, your side gigs may become your full-time work. This is how I've developed in my own career and I know it's how Rosetta Thurman's career has evolved too. It may also be that you continue to work at a job, while also doing things on the side. 

The point is that your career becomes more resilient when you weave for yourself a safety net of multiple income streams and opportunities so that you are less dependent on a single job or client. 

I've found that there's an added benefit to this approach that allows you to further develop your skills and talents in ways that best meet your own, individual career needs. By diversifying your career portfolio, you develop new capacities and new connections, building your career resilience. 

While I know that it's tempting to see your job as your single source of financial and career salvation, I promise you that this will eventually be a problem. Resilience is about diversity and one of your greatest opportunities for resilience lies in diversifying your sources of revenue. 

You must be an entrepreneur when it comes to your career, so start thinking now about how you can build new possibilities for yourself. 

Career Resilience Success Story: An Interview with Sheri Ponzi

One of the things I decided to do as I began exploring the concept of career resilience was to begin collecting stories from people about how they've applied the 4 patterns of reslience (Clarifying, Connecting, Creating and Coping) to their own work lives.

To that end, I put out a call on my social networks for volunteers who were willing to share their stories and one of the first people I heard back from was Sheri Ponzi, an artist, teacher and guide running several online programs.  

As part of my plan to continue stretching myself, we decided to get together for a Google Hangout interview to talk about Sheri's career path and her experiences in developing resilience through the "4 C's." Although there were some audio issues (for which I apologize) Sheri's story is really instructive for those of us looking to develop our own career resilience.

For me, there were a few key takeways from the discussion:

• Sheri's "career crisis" came about in part because she had stopped paying attention to the 4 patterns and they basically caught up with her. This to me is more evidence that we need to work with these patterns on a regular basis. 

• Sheri has made particularly strong use of the Connecting pattern, both as a way for her to develop her own personal resilience, but also as a career/business strategy. Her online courses bring together several instructors, each of whom contribute their own particular assets to the projects. Sheri is making it win/win for everyone.  This idea of looking at how to build relationships and collaborate with others as being key to resilience is something I talked about in my recent post on limiting beliefs and Sheri's experience reinforced its importance to me. 

• Connecting can also be a powerful way to help other people develop their own patterns of resilience. Sheri talks about how by bringing people together for her online course, she's now seeing them go off to teach courses on their own. A lovely virtuous cycle. 

• Sheri has made great use of the Clarifying pattern, too, focusing on her own strengths and assets and then looking at how she could use technology and her connections to create her own employment opportunities. Her's is an excellent example of how all of these patterns can interact together to synthesize the right option for you. 

• Sometimes you have clarity, but you need courage to take the next step. For many people, courage is forced upon us when we have to face a huge challenge in our lives. But if you meet the challenge head-on, with clarity, then you can create something that's amazing. 

Talking with Sheri and hearing her story was a really powerful lesson for me. Hopefully it will help you learn more about resilience too. 

Related articles

Do You Network to Build Your Career Resilience or to Get Your Work Done?

Career Resilience in Action

Career Resilience for Entrepreneurs

Reader Question: Tech is Eating My Job, So Now What?

Tech Is Eating My Job, So Now What Do I Do? from Michele Martin on Vimeo.

In response to yesterday's post on how technology is eating your job, Deborah Gabriel commented:

So, Michele, I cannot argue with your research data as mine confirms it. What I want to hear are solutions.

Solutions are what interest me, too, so I went to video to explain how I think we, as individuals, can deal with the this issue in our careers.

Some Resources

For Clarifying and Connecting

• The G+ Technological Unemployment Community

• Martin Ford's Blog

• Andrew McAfee's Blog

For Creating

• In A Whole New Mind (book summary), Dan Pink suggests 6 right-brain "senses" that humans do well and that we should build upon. This is a good starting point for creating a plan--which of these skills could you develop? 

• Consider these 3 ways to create your own job 

• Look at this advice on job crafting. 

• Check out 5 Ways to Find Work When There Are No Jobs, which offers some additional good advice.

I'd love to hear from you on this topic. Who are your "Go-To" people for staying on top of all things technological (not just social media)? Which are your favorite sites? What else can we do to deal with the impact of technology on our careers? 

Technology is Eating Your Job (Part 2)--For Those Who Need More Convincing

Last Friday, I wrote about how technology is eating your job. Since then, I've been immersed in further exploring the extent to which this is true and finding more resources to convince you that this is one of the most critical trends impacting your career today. 

First, if you care at all about the future of your job, I encourage you to watch Andrew McAfee's TEDXTalk in Boston above. It provides a compelling summary of how technology is impacting employment and will be the best 15 minutes you can invest in yourself today.  (Here's a link to a blog post about his February TEDTalk appearance, that builds on the video above.) 

I want to pull from it an important chart that you need to pay attention to: 

This is the projected number of people coming into the labor force contrasted with the number of projected jobs that will be available.

As you can see, for the forseeable future, these lines do not meet. In fact, they get futher apart. 

And McAfee argues that he's being optimistic in predicting the number of available jobs in the future because he's basing his predictions on the past. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that, in this case, the past is not a good predictor of the future.   We're on the leading edge of the technology revolution and just beginning to feel the real impacts. 

I also want to point you to some other ways that software and robots are taking over the intellectual tasks we have traditionally considered to be the exclusive domain of humans (from The Rise of Our Robot Overlords). These are important because I think they give you a flavor for the breadth and scope of these changes. We now have: 

• Software grading essays (Teachers, pay attention) 

• Software that can spot trends in big data and write stories about it.  (Writers of all stripes, are you listening?)

• A robot scientist that can formulate and test hypotheses, doing the work of dozens of lab techs and assistants in the process. (Hello, STEM careers) 

And this is just the beginning. As McAfee points out in his TEDTalk, imagine what we'll have when we're able to put together the technology of Siri with the technology of Watson. I don't think we can even begin to fathom the possibilities there. 

What concerns me about all this is that I'm afraid we have "a failure of imagination," as Daniel Lemire describes it. It's hard for us to envision a future where machines do most of the work.

Right now, I think this is partially because we are currently picturing robots taking over our jobs, in a future reminiscent of The Jetsons. Since we don't see too many robots in our daily life, it's easy for us to say "Oh, technology isn't going to impact MY job." But I'm not so sure it's the robot you need to worry about at this juncture (although that's coming.) I think it's the increasingly sophisticated software that is everywhere, including on that smartphone in your pocket. 

And here's something else we rarely discuss, but that is very real and one of the reasons I think we need to be concerned here. Aside from their obvious abilities to perform the tasks,  machines don't have the messy complications of humans, like personal lives and responsiblities or the need to sleep, eat and re-charge.

Machines don't want a vacation.

They don't call off sick or come in late because their kid had croup. 

They don't argue with co-workers.

They aren't passive-aggressive, or jealous or lazy. 

Then don't dress inappropriately, make rude comments or harass other workers. 

They don't complain about their work load or about having to work on weekends

They don't ask for a raise.

In short, machines have that much touted "work ethic," that so many employers complain humans are lacking.

Think about it. If you were a business owner and could buy a machine for $30k that could easily learn new tasks and work for you 24/7 without complaint, what would you do? Hire a person to do that work? I don't think so. 

Finally, we need to pay attention to the fact that there has been a decline in overall demand for cognitive skills that has been going on since 2000. From a recent paper, The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks:

Many researchers have documented a strong, ongoing increase in the demand for skills in the decades leading up to 2000. In this paper, we document a decline in that demand in the years since 2000, even as the supply of high education workers continues to grow. We go on to show that, in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers. This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force all together.

This is partially why a B.A. is now a ticket to a job in a coffee house. Education isn't the panacea we're all claiming that it is. 

In my work over the years as a career coach, I've found that the majority of people do little to really manage their careers until they are hit by some kind of bomb. Sometimes it's being laid off or fired that creates the impetus for change. Sometimes it's when the person can't take it anymore. 

The reason I'm harping on technology so much is because for most of us, I believe this is a ticking time bomb we are trying to ignore. Most of us want to keep our heads down and just keep working, hoping that we aren't going to be the ones displaced by a piece of software or some other form of automation.

This will be a mistake. And it will blow up in your face. You need to start thinking now about how to future-proof yourself as much as possible so that you're more prepared for this breaking wave of technology. 

Some Additional Resources

(Thanks to Matthew Price for these links)

• The G+ Technological Unemployment Community--This group is constantly posting new examples and discussing the implications of technology, particularly for knowledge workers.  

• Technological Unemployment Resources--A Google doc with tons of links collected by the G+ Technological Unemployment community. 

• Lights in the Tunnel--Martin Ford's book on the topic and his excellent blog with more links/reading  is here. 

• Andrew McAfee's Blog

• Part One of this discussion, with more links. 

 

Related articles

Clarifying Your Career Path: Technology is Eating Your Job

The Four Patterns that Should Guide All Your Career Moves

5 Limiting Beliefs About Our Careers We Need to Change

Video Blog 1--Limiting Beliefs - Computer from Michele Martin on Vimeo.

I'm taking my own medicine--doing some experimenting and taking a bit of a risk-- so today's blog post is a video where I go over 5 limiting beliefs that get in the way of your career in today's economy and the alternative beliefs we need to put in their place. 

I also want to point you to this post on 3 ways to create your own opportunities. 

Let me know in comments what you think of these beliefs and any other limiting beliefs you think we need to let go of in order to be more resilient in today's economy. 

Clarifying Your Career Path: Technology is Eating Your Job

This may be the one of the most important career posts I've ever written. I urge you to read it, even if you don't think it applies to you. 

This morning I was tagged in a G+ conversation that linked to this article on the impact of technology in the workplace. It got me thinking, once again, about how technology is transforming the workplace. 

One of the things I've been harping on for awhile now is that as individual workers, we need to be paying better attention to technological changes that are coming our way. This is a HUGE part of the clarifying pattern we need to be developing for career resilience. 

Here's the thing. Clarifying is about looking at how your strengths and skills and passions intersect with what's happening in the job market. As technology continues to transform work and occupations, one area we need to be evaluating continuously is what technology is able to do and how that might impact what we currently do in our jobs.

Stop Underestimating the Impact of Technology on Your Job

If I've learned anything in the past 20 years, it's that the elimination of jobs due to technology keeps creeping up on us. We seem to consistently underestimate the consequences of technological change when it comes to our employment.

One minute people are happily doing their jobs. The next, entire occupations are decimated by new software capabilities or robotics. How long did it take for travel agents to essentially disappear once you were able to book your own travel online? What about all the distribution center workers who are out of work because robots can manage with only 20 human workers? 

Technology is disrupting entire INDUSTRIES--hello Blockbuster, Kodak and every newspaper on the planet--so of course it's going to change your job. You have to start anticipating the changes, though, rather than assuming that technology isn't going to impact you and then having your world turned upside down when it does. 

A couple of examples. . . Right now, drivers of all stripes--cabbies, truck drivers--should be re-thinking their careers because within 5 years, I predict that Google's driverless car is going to put them out of business. Or, at a minimum, drastically reduce both their employment numbers and their wages. 

And teachers, you should be concerned too. Work with robot teachers is showing that they can achieve the results of most human teachers in terms of learning gains and in some cases, the kids actually prefer the robots, as they are more patient and can explain the topic in multiple ways. As artificial intelligence continues to improve, this trend could (will) start to accelerate. 

While we're speaking of teachers, we don't need robots to replace workers to completely disrupt an industry. Technology can impact in other ways. The rise of MOOCs (massive open online courses) could be just as devastating to the employment of teachers as any robot. If it works at the university level, it's only a matter of time before the same model works its way down to the secondary and elementary level--perhaps aided by robot TAs. 

Technology WILL Change What You Do and How Much You're Paid to Do It and May Eliminate Your Job Altogether

I say all of this because I think that as individual workers, we are terrible at thinking through how technology might impact our jobs. Unless the technological change is explicitly happening in our industry or occupation, we tend to ignore it. This is a huge mistake. 

And don't be fooled into thinking that if an industry is growing, that means jobs are growing within that industry. Over the past few years, for example, we've heard about the resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S.. What isn't talked about as much is that this growth in the industry isn't translating into more jobs. That's because robotics and software are doing most of the heavy lifting. Just because an industry seems to be going gangbusters, doesn't mean that jobs are abundant. 

For us to be truly resilient in our careers, we must start educating ourselves more consistently on general technology trends and how these could start disrupting the industries and occupations we work in.  Here's an example of what I mean. Read this from How the Internet Made Us Poor: 

In a gleaming new warehouse in the old market town of Rugley, England, Amazon directs the actions of hundreds of “associates” wielding hand-held computers. These computers tell workers not only which shelf to walk to when they’re pulling goods to be shipped, but also the optimal route by which to get there. Each person’s performance is monitored, and they are given constant feedback about whether or not they are performing their job quickly enough. Their bosses can even send them text messages via their handheld computers, urging them to speed up. “You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,” one manager at Amazon’s warehouse told the Financial Times. “It’s human automation, if you like.”

Now let's apply this to nurses in a hospital. Imagine them walking around with hand-held computers that give them feedback on each patient hooked up to wireless monitors that track everything going on in the patient's body (smart pills will come into play here too). Nurses are able to administer medications, monitor vital signs, etc. on multiple patients through these devices. Bosses can monitor how efficiently they are carrying out their duties and send them messages urging them to speed things up. You may think this won't happen, but I promise you that it already is. 

In general, when it comes to technology, you should assume that if your job involves routine processing of information aided by computer software, then either that job is virtually going to be eliminated (think travel agents and administrative assistants) or there is going to be HUGE downward pressure on wages--neither of which is good for you. 

Don't assume that this applies only to "lower-level" jobs either. One of the reasons we're seeing massive reductions in employment for lawyers is because software can now more efficiently and effectively do the routine document reviews and filings once done by entry-level attorneys. By one estimate, one attorney can do the work of 500 lawyers now.

Another way to think about it--If your job involves telling a computer what to do (think programmers), then you are in pretty good shape. If a computer is telling you what to do, start planning for something else. 

The push for profits and productivity is going to continue to drive the spread of technology. We will not be putting the technology genie back in the bottle. The issue for you is to start thinking NOW about how you're going to respond.

• Do you need to start looking for another occupation, beginning the re-training process now, rather than when you get laid off? 

• Do you need to start developing additional skill sets that will help you adapt to changes that may be coming your way and that would make you more valuable in a technology-enhanced occupation? 

• Is self-employment an area you need to explore, recognizing that entrepreneurs and owners of capital will be the winners in a technology-enhanced future? 

Technology is happening. How are you going to respond? 

A Technology and Jobs Reading List

If you want to dive more deeply into this topic, here are some resources to get you started:

• How the Internet Made Us Poor
• Job Fight: Haves vs. the Have Nots
• Better Than Human: Why Robots Will-And Must-Take Our Jobs
• Holy Hal!  A Robot Stole My Job!
• 60 Minutes: Are Robots Hurting Job Growth?  (answer--yes they are)
• The End of Labor: How to Protect Workers from the Rise of Robots
• The Age of Big Data
• Are You Prepared for the Internet of Things?
• UPDATE--Harold Jarche's bookmarks for "Automated and Outsourced"
• UPDATE--The Tech Debate Blasts Off: A Linkfest

Also, I would highly recommend doing some google searches on technology and your industry. Try searching on:

• "robotics and (your industry)"
• "robots and (your industry)"
• "nanotechnology and (your industry)"
• "automation and (your industry)"

 

Technology-Proofing Yourself

And here are some resources to help you keep yourself relevant and employed in a technology-enhanced world. 

• A Whole New Mind--Although Dan Pink's book is 7 years old now, it still has some important things to say about how to technology-proof yourself for work.

• Future-Proofing Your Career

• Managing Your Career When You Have More than One--Think multiple income streams and self-employment instead of full-time, permanent job. 

• Become Your Own Job Creator--How to take advantage of disruptive trends.

• Future Work Skills 2020

• Build Your Career On Three Hopeful Trends

 

UPDATE--Here's another link to add to your reading list from Harold Jarche--The Post Job Economy.  Thanks to Marco Campana for the link. 

A huge part of developing your career resilience is paying attention to what's going on in your external environment. Technology is one of the biggest trends likely to impact your career. You need to start thinking now about how you're going to respond.  And you need to put some structures into place that let you keep up with how technology could change what you're doing in the future. Otherwise, you're going to be caught in the technology squeeze that has left us with more job seekers than available jobs. 

HERE'S THE LINK TO PART 2 IN THIS SERIES

Career Resilience for Entrepreneurs

 

Regular readers know that I'm a strong proponent of working for yourself. Even if you have a day-job, I think you should always be looking for ways to diversify your income streams as the next lay-off could be right around the corner, despite your best efforts. 

Yesterday's post on career resilience in action got me thinking about how the 4 patterns of resilience apply to those who run their own business(es). These patterns are not just for people who work for someone else. They're patterns that support successful self-employment too. 

Clarifying

The Clarifying pattern when you work for yourself is something you must constantly be working on.

• What is going on with your customers and the industries you are working in? 

• How do your strengths and assets intersect with these trends? 

• What are the most important priorities for you and your business? 

• How do you want your business to reflect your values and the values of your customers?  

Clarity of purpose, clarity of assets and clarity of goals are all critical to the healthy functioning of your business.

As a small business owner myself, I find that I must be intentional about integrating patterns for finding clarity into my work life. It's easy to be so caught up in projects and business administration that I forget the need to periodically take a step back and get clear about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. This is where rituals and reflective practice become important.

Clarity can also be found in making the right kinds of connections and creating mastermind groups for support and accountability. 

Connecting

Clearly the Connecting pattern is critical to small business owners--this is how we find our customers and connecting to others to market our products and services is like breathing for most successful entrepreneurs. We do it without thinking. 

What may happen less often, but be equally important, is using the pattern of connecting to support other aspects of our work. 

As small business people, particularly if we are solo entrepreneurs, we need to make connections that can reinforce our personal and professional growth and that feed our need for social contact. We need to find mentors, communities of practice and mastermind groups who can challenge our thinking and hold us accountable for achieving our goals.

We also need connections that can help us cooperate to compete--people who may offer complementary (or even competitive) products and services with whom we can build new offerings that benefit both their businesses and our own. 

Connections from diverse industries and occupations are also important. They feed us new information, new ideas and new possibilities. But we must seek them out because they won't necessarily come naturally to us. 

We can use our clarifying activities to help us get clearer about where we need to build and strengthen our connections. Then we can be intentional about growing those connections as my friend is doing through her own career resilience work. This is an example of the next pattern we need to work on--Creating. 

Creating

Most successful small business people I know are pretty good at the Creating pattern. After all, without creating, you have nothing to sell. 

But Creation is more than just daily doing and activity. It's also about risk-taking and experimenting.

• How are we stretching ourselves in the creative process to bring something truly great into the world? 

• How are we using what we learn through Clarifying and Connecting to create a business that plays to our strengths and that achieves the goals we've set for ourselves? 

• How are we dealing with and learning from failure? 

The Creating pattern is also about making sure that we've put into place for ourselves the right structures and supports for getting our work done.

• Are we constantly putting out fires or do we have an infrastructure in place that allows us to be more deliberative and intentional in accomplishing our work? 

• Are things falling through the cracks and are we missing opportunities or have we created processes that allow the work to flow?

Our patterns of creating should be structured around inspiration and purpose, not just around our daily to-do lists. For this to happen, though, we must be intentional in developing patterns that allow us to create from a place of inspiration, not desperation. 

Coping

In my dealings with other small business people, as well as in looking at my own life, I see that developing patterns for Coping is probably the area where we entrepreneurs can have the most holes. 

There is a cult of entrepreneurship that drives us to believe that working for yourself means working 24/7, which makes taking care of your emotional, physical and spiritual needs a very low priority. This is true particularly when our businesses are new or if we've failed to put into place the right structures for Creating, Clarifying and Connecting. 

But creating healthy Coping patterns is critical if we hope to run our businesses for the long-term. Making sure that we nurture and sustain those non-work parts of ourselves will prevent burnout. And healthy coping patterns also feed our capacity to engage with the other 3 patterns of resilience. 

In particular I've found that healthy Coping mechanisms are about what I call "following the energy,"--that is, paying attention to how we're feeling throughout the day so that can see which activities and people feed and nurture us and which of these are a drain. Emotions are a powerful indicator of what is and isn't working, but we need to pay attention to them in order to address what they are telling us. 

Coping is also about paying attention to our mental frames--the stories we are telling ourselves about our business and ourselves. Resilient business people need to focus on developing frames that support our business plans, while weeding out those thinking and behavior patterns that hinder us. 

I find that as an entrepreneur myself, I'm constantly having to look at the 4 patterns of resilience and how I'm using/developing them in support of my business. When things don't seem to be going as smoothly, by examining what's happening with these patterns I can quickly see where I need to do some work. 

Resilience is something we all need to develop, but for entrepreneurs, this is probably job one.

How are you, as an entrepreneur developing your career and business resilience? Which areas of resilience are easy for you and which are harder for you to develop? 

Career Resilience in Action

 

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend who started a solo business last year. I was sharing with her my thinking about career resilience and the 4 patterns of success, describing each in more detail. 

When we got to Connecting, she grew thoughtful. "I don't think I've been doing a lot with the Connecting pattern," she told me. "I've been focused on Clarifying and Creating and have let some of my connecting fall by the wayside."

As we talked further, what became clear was while she'd been doing some connecting, she'd been missing a crucial group--people who are still in the trenches of the field where she is working. And she was missing their practical, day-to-day experiences in terms of challenges, aspirations, etc. This is important to her business as well as to her own personal/professional development. 

From there, as the resilient busineess owner she is, she moved into what to do about it. 

She decided that she was going to come up with a plan to reach out to some people and invite them for coffee, just to pick their brains and share ideas. A few days later, she sent me the draft of an email she wanted to send out and she has begun putting her plan into action. 

My friend is a great example of how to work with the patterns of career resilience. She looked at the 4 patterns and how she was applying them in her work life. She saw that there was an area where she needed to do more work  and then came up with a plan to address it.

If you look closely, you see that she was actually using the patterns of resilience to come up with a resilience action plan. She used Clarifying to identify where she needed to make some changes and then Creating to develop the plan to make the changes. 

Another critical element of this story is that she followed up. The Creating pattern with its focus on action and follow-up is one of the most important patterns we can strengthen in developing our resilience. I see so many people (myself included) who recognize a need to take action, but who let that action fall by the wayside as other, competing priorities take precedence. But it's only in the Creating that we truly see change. 

Career resilience is a process. It is not a once and done thing, but an ongoing strategy for approaching our career and professional development. My friend's experience with looking at how the patterns were playing out in her life currently clearly demonstrates how this works. 

You can see as well that the patterns apply not only to employees and job seekers, they also apply to business owners. They too must develop and strengthen their resilience patterns in order to keep their businesses on track. 

For me, it was gratifying to see how my friend worked with the patterns of resilience. She's someone I admire for her ongoing committment to development and it was interesting to see how the resilience framework gave her another way to think about what she needed to do for herself. 

How are you applying the 4 patterns of resilience in your life? Which pattern do you need to work on some more? 

Building Resilience: The 5 Stages of Deliberate Change

Building your career resilience is an intentional, deliberate process. Leaving it up to chance is a recipe for failure. But what's the process for making change happen? 

In The Joy of Appreciative Living (a book I can't recommend highly enough), Jacqueline Kelm lays out 5 stages for deliberative change that I think are instructive for those of us looking to become more resilient. 

1. Awareness

To make a change, you must first become aware that change is necessary. When it comes to resilience, you become aware that something has to change in your approach to your career. Maybe you find that you're on your 3rd layoff in as many years. Or you realize that you're in a constant state of anxiety over work. Somehow, the need for change pushes its way into your consciousness. It's the awareness phase that sets the stage. 

2. Commitment

After you become aware of a situation, the next phase is commitment. You must decide to make things happen. 

Often I find that people become aware that change is necessary, but instead of committing to making a change, they push the awareness out of their consciousness--they go into denial.  

Another response I've seen with people is that they assume that they have little control over their lives--that there are no actions to take, so commitment to change is not going to accomplish anything.

But awareness is not enough to make change happen. You must commit to change in order to move to the next phase. 

3. Action

Once you've committed to making a change, you must now take actions that support the change you want to see. 

This is another area where I see people having some problems. They know there's an issue, they are committed to making changes, but then they don't take action to make those changes a reality. 

Often this is because they aren't sure what actions to take. Fear or confusion holds them back.

But lack of action can also be a sign of the resistance that accompanies every act of creation.  Steven Pressfield, in Do the Work, argues that Resistance (with a capital "R") is the enemy of everything we do to create something new in the world. It is an external force that inevitably rises up to meet us when we strive to do something great. 

Without action, though, we cannot build resilience. It is through action that we start to see the shifts in ourselves that are nessary to meet the challenges of the workplace. 

4. Acclimation

Assuming that we've begun to act, things will start to change around us so we must acclimate to the new reality we are creating for ourselves. This means adjusting to the new and letting go of the old. 

This acclimation phase can be challenging, particularly in terms of releasing what no longer serves us. Often the changes we are pursuing will point out all of the old ways of being and doing that were unconscious before. 

During the acclimation phase, we become more aware of old patterns and beliefs that we must let go of and we begin to see what the new patterns are creating in our lives. These new patterns will require us to adapt again. 

I also find that during acclimation, we can struggle with feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Are we making good choices? Are we looking "stupid"? Are people judging us for the changes that we're making and how does that impact what we do? 

Acclimation is the uncertain phase when we're caught between the old and the new. If we keep up with the changes, then that leads us to the final phase--Realization. 

5. Realization

This is the final stage of intentional change, when we've succeeded in creating new patterns of behavior. It becomes easier for us to make the right choices and to live the new patterns without having to think all the time about what we're doing. 

This is also when we can more consistently reap the rewards of the changes we've made. Enough momentum has built up that we are in the flow of a new way of being in the world. 

To build the four patterns of resilience--Clarifying, Connecting, Creating and Coping--we must be intentional about the change proceess. These patterns don't happen by accident. We must coax them into being through a conscious process of development. 

What phase of resilience are you in? Are you stuck in a phase and need to move to the next level? How will you do that today?