The Benefits of Creating Your Own Career Plan

A CAREER PLAN CREATES DIRECTION.
In a sense, everyone has a career plan.  Some people just do not know what it is or where that plan leads.

When entering kindergarten or first grade, children begin to participate in a career plan.  The school system laid out the plan.  The result is that students with no further plans of their own often find themselves dropping out of school or finishing school to take whatever job is available.

The specifics of your career plan are relative to where you are in your career.  If you are entering college, your career plan will include the subjects you need to study to enable you to get a job in a particular field.

If you have business experience, you may have already worked with different types of business plans.  A career plan provides the same value as a business plan.  You will identify who these things:

1. Who you are as a brand
2. Your career mission
3. An understanding of what you need to do to achieve your career goals.
4. Ways to present your plan to other people so that you will get the meetings you need for success.

Students and professionals who have who have developed and follow their own career plan have a greater likelihood of success, simply because they know which steps to take for success.

A CAREER PLAN GIVES YOU A SENSE OF PURPOSE.
Have you ever found yourself in a meeting, working on a project, or in any situation where the question came to mind, “What am I doing here?” or “Why am I doing this?”

Have you noticed that associated with those questions is an unpleasant feeling that you are wasting your time?

You have no sense of purpose.

Going to work every day with a sense of purpose is a lot more fun than going to work every day and wondering why you are doing what you are doing.

Also, it seems logical that going to work everyday with a sense of purpose increases your likelihood of being more successful.

1. You will take an interest in your work.
2. You will be focused on your work.
3. You will be more willing to invest energy and time in your work.

Having a career plan gives you a greater sense of purpose.

A CAREER PLAN CREATES A CHECK-OFF LIST OF WHAT YOU NEED.
Part of creating a career plan includes writing a check-off list.  Through this check-off list, you will create focus and direction.  Your intuition can emerge to see options that might somehow never have come to you.

You might consider including the following things:

2. Your education now
3. Your plan for your on-going education
4. The job you are in now
5. The jobs you want to do
6. People you want to help
7. People you will need to help you
8. Things you want to achieve
9. Places you want to go
10. People you want to meet
11. Products you want to create
12. The amount of money you want to make
13. Your physical goals and diet and exercise plan.

A CAREER PLAN IS A LIVING DOCUMENT.
As much as possible, allow yourself to be feel confident that you are on a quest to create a vision of your life the way that you would really want to live it.

As you create your first draft, allow yourself to write down whatever ideas come to mind.  Your career plan is a living document that you will refer to and change as you learn and grow as a professional.  Put aside the limitations of writing structure and just write.  Write what you want to be and what you want to do.  This material is not permanent.  Allow your intuition to become a powerful tool that guides you from map view and street view and back to map view as your proceed.  Give your intuition free reign to see solutions to life events you had only seen as obstacles.

Take breaks and relax as you go through the process of creating your first draft of your career plan. Allow yourself time to create this plan.  As your plan emerges and you get stuck, begin to work on other projects and come back to creating your plan.

What you may find is that the process of creating the plan gives you many more ideas and tools you can develop and ways you can begin to reach out to people you want to help or who can help you.

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A CAREER PLAN CREATES THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE
The psychological advantage is that you are making everything easier for your mind to perform for your success.  Knowing the details of where you want to go and knowing the details of the things you plan to do, your mind will have greater spontaneity and confidence.  The spontaneity and confidence will create greater clarity.

What you are doing is the same mental process that takes place in any performance practice.  Through repetition prior to the actual time of performance, you can respond intuitively when the pressure in on and you must perform in front of other people. Athletes, musicians, actors, and other performers who give all of their focus during practice experience greater ease during actual performance.

Give yourself the opportunity to create a larger, happier, more successful view of your life than you have ever had.

As you take advantage of creating a career plan, you will have more mental freedom and feel less stress whether you are working in front of other people or working alone at your desk.  You will have practiced, rehearsed, over and over how to get where you want to go, gathering the tools you need to get there, and how to meet the people who are important to your career.

In summary, you will have the following psychological benefits from your career plan.

1. Increased creativity and confidence
2. Clear direction
3. Less stress through the simplicity of a planned process
4. Great habits for success
5. The great feelings of a sense of purpose
6. Spontaneity in handling the inevitable turns and redirections
7. Creating a vision for success

Most importantly, you will have enabled your mind to be able to contribute for your success.

As school students, educators had laid out the plan for us to follow to complete certain studies to qualify us for a diploma.

Work breaks are important to your health and to your work performance.

If you are unemployed and in a career search, keeping yourself healthy while experiencing the added stress of looking for a job is critical to keeping up your self-confidence and maintaining a strong self-image.

Even if you workout before or after work and then work at a desk, you may find that your desk job can reduce the fitness gains from those workouts.

The Department of Labor provides a list of minimum paid rest periods by state for every four hours of work.  Most states require companies to give employees a paid 10-minute break for each four hours of work.

If you are a desk worker, taking 10 minutes every four hours is probably less physical activity than you need to receive the physical benefits your body needs from sitting for several hours.

Here are some ideas that can help you refresh your mind, get a little exercise during the day, and stay within your company guidelines for the time you are allowed to take breaks:

1. When you are rearranging things on your desktop, stand up.
2. When you are talking on the phone, stand up.
3. When you are returning or retrieving things from your desktop to your desk drawers, stand up.
4. While you are working at your desk, tighten your stomach, leg, chest, shoulder, ankles, feet and neck. Roll your ankles. Arch your back. Stretch your arms.
5. As you pause from typing or when you are on the phone, roll your neck.
6. When typing, stand up, keep your back straight, and type standing or do a little squat and type squatting.

Some of these suggestions may seem to you as odd at first.  Yet, if you think about it, cashiers work with keypads while standing.  Retail buyers walk aisles with keypad ordering systems.  Some companies provide motorized desks that workers raise and lower during the day.  Typing while standing is not that unique of an idea.

For those paid breaks away from your desk, leave the screens at your desk.  Give your mind a chance to rest completely.  Take a walk.  Join a co-worker, even if that meeting is a standing session outside the office doors.

What ideas do you use to help yourself become more effective and healthy at work?

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

Developing your online profile is as important to your career as developing as your reputation at work or developing your resume for your career change.

The information you post online may also be more in-depth and broader than the information you put in your resume.  On LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, you will find that you are including information that you might not put on your resume.  You might include some of the following information:

1. Recommendations
2. Endorsements
3. Pictures
4. Group Memberships
5. Companies you follow
6. Your clients
7. People who have viewed your profile (on LinkedIn)
8. Statements of your interests, likes, and perhaps dislikes
9. Aspects of your personality

This information provides search engines with keywords that can enable potential clients or hiring companies to find you.

To select the most powerful keywords, go to http://www.google.com/trends.  This website ranks keywords words for search frequency.

After going through a lengthy project that may take several days, I find that the project required so much attention and had such a long list of things to get done, that I get away from preparing a schedule for the day’s activities.

This morning was one of those days for me.  What happens on a day without scheduled events is that I am not very productive.  I check my email.  I check my online network accounts for messages.  I click around a couple of groups to see what might be going on to stimulate my thinking for new projects.  By midday I have very little done and reach a point where I have nothing else to do for the day.

The best way to avoid this loss of productivity is to remember that even on the days on which the work seems to come at me much more quickly than I can manage it, I still need to create an agenda for the day.  Busy days are better directed and slow days become more productive when I have a list of projects in front of me.

The agenda needs to have two aspects to it.

First there is the aspect of the things to get done.

Second is the aspect of the goal of each thing I am doing.

For example, I might have items like to the following.

Activity:  Sort email into these folders:  Delete, Read later, Inbox for high priority, Read.
Objective: Focus on opportunities that bring value to my clients and to me.
Activity:  Call people who are on my calendar for business calls.
Objective: Discuss the goal for each call.  For example, get advice for new project, follow-up on deadlines for submitting new material, and ask for the correct contact for a particular project.

There are several benefits to creating an agenda.

1. The process of creating the agenda stimulates my mind to become more creative
2. The process awakens my mind to more opportunities.
3. The process keeps me focused on what I need to do.
4. The process increases the likelihood that I will become more successful at achieving my goals.

So for me the outline for success is to have a schedule of activities for the day and to use that schedule.  As I complete tasks, I check them as completed and make a record of what I have accomplished for future reference.

What methods do you use for successful management of your schedule?