Last week Allison Jones pointed to an excellent post from Amber Nusland on letting go of the things you're not good at. In it she says: Part of why people struggle in their careers is our collective insistence that they do things that they aren’t really good at. Almost every bit of business literature you read these days (don’t even get me started on some of it) talks about how... Read more →

When I first started playing around with writing about career journals, I asked on Twitter if anyone was using them. I heard back from Harold Jarche, who wondered if a blog "counts" as a journal. Of course it does and many of us use our blogs this way, collecting, processing, documenting and thinking things through. But I tend to think that we may miss something if our blogs are our... Read more →

One of the best tools I've found for my own ongoing professional development is a career journal. I began journaling for professional purposes about 7 years ago when I bought an artist's sketchbook to maintain all of my ideas related to a particular project I was working on. Since then, my journaling practices have evolved and in this post I want to explore the different ways you can use a... Read more →

As regular readers know, I've been focusing a lot on conversation this year. I see it as a tremendous professional development opportunity, but I also think conversations are fun. For the past several months, I've been kicking around the idea of bringing together two of my favorite things--food and conversation--into a fun event that would help build connections and community. One of my observations of modern society--at least in the... Read more →

In my life, I've had some of the most profound and important realizations about myself when I've been working with relative strangers. I was thinking about this in regard to my upcoming Dream It/Do It Retreat where I'll be bringing together a group of people who don't know each other to work on their creative projects. I've found that people are often reluctant to do really personal work around people... Read more →

Jay Cross, one of my favorite learning experts, announced on his blog last week that he has a "new muse": For the better part of forty years, my work has focused on adult learning. I’ve strived to make learning at work more effective, relevant, enjoyable, and cost-effective. Today I am shifting direction. My new muse is well-being. I'm intrigued by how and why people make the career transitions that they... Read more →

One of the ways that I think we learn best is when we hear the stories of other people's career experiences. When we're in the middle of figuring out our own next moves, it can be helpful to see that someone has made a successful transition and how they did it. With that in mind, I'd like to start a periodic series here at The Bamboo Project on successful career... Read more →

The most common career advice around is to "follow your passion." But for some people, this is easier said than done. They may have lost sight of their passions or they may have a bunch of them. Sometimes it's a matter of re-framing things. So here are a few other strategies for re-defining your career that may work better than "follow your bliss." Focus on a Problem Maybe instead of... Read more →

Sometimes I find that when I'm stuck or I'm working with people who are stuck, what keeps us in the same place is that we're asking ourselves the wrong question. We don't realize we are asking this question, but we are. This is the question we're stuck in: What's wrong with me? This post by Andrea Sher about her struggle with infertility reminded me of how often we can get... Read more →

Allison Jones has a great blog post today on places where she finds career inspiration. She says: When it comes to career advice, it is very easy to focus on tactics: how to write a resume; how to use social media to find a job; how to network. However, in the time that I have been blogging about nonprofit careers, I have realized that while tactics are important, they make... Read more →