Commentaries and career exploration tools by Barbara Reinhold:
- “Customize Your Campaigns: Finding What You Need to Know to Get Noticed.”
- “My Options Sorter: How Well Do My Choices Match My Goals?”
- “Sample Functional Resume”
- “What Would the Buddha Say to Me About my Career Challenges?”
Recommended Books:
Travis Bradberry & Jean Graves, Emotional Intelligence 2.0. The qualities that derail or compromise people’s careers are seldom about the content of the job—rather they have to with how well we manage ourselves and others. Do yourself a favor if you’re wanting to move ahead yourself or help others manage themselves—get this little book for an online assessment of your own emotional intelligence, with terrific strategies for “delevoping” the EQ components that don’t come quite so naturally to your or one of your direct reports.
Deepak Chopra & Rudolf Tanzi, Super Brain. Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, & Spiritual Well-Being. Career explorers definitely need to harness all the strength they have, to put aside old negative assumptions, to access energy for researching and pursuing new options, and to feel their best during times of uncertainty. Chopra, a renowned spiritual guru, has joined with the Harvard neuroscientist Tanzi to show readers just how their brains are available to help them in ways they might not have considered before.
C.J. Hayden, Get Clients Now. This book is a must for “solopreneurs,” free agents working mostly on their own to market their services and related products. If you have tendency to lose track of your “campaign” for clients and customers or to need more structure and follow-through in getting people into your pipeline, then this strategic, step-by-step program is just what you need.
Barrie Hopson & Katie Ledger, And What Do You Do? – 10 Steps to Creating a Portfolio Career. Because so many of us are either choosing to work past traditional retirement years or to want a “change of scenery” at midlife, the portfolio career has come into being as a blueprint for evolving constantly over the course of your working life. This book by British experts Hopson & Ledger offers reassurance about what’s possible, a strategic overview, and practical tactics for how to move across fields and functions to have the variery and change of pace you seek.
Tom Rath, Strengths Finder 2.0. The trick to either getting better at the job you have, or picking a new one is to really, really understand what you’re good at, and do more of it. You can’t find a used copy of this best-seller probably, because the primary reason or buying this is to get the access code in the back of the book to go online and take a short forced-choice quiz about how you like to work and what you like to do. Within half an hour of completing this assessment, you’ll receive via email a print-out of your top five career strengths. What’s different about this book and the philosophy of its author is the conviction that we shouldn’t focus on our weaknesses to try to “fix ourselves” if a career is not going as well as we’d like—but rather we need to figure out better ways to use our natural strengths. If you want to think more creatively about your career concerns, buy this book, take the assessment, and then contact Barbara Reinhold to help you think about the results.
Barbara Reinhold, Free to Succeed. Designing the Life You Want in the New Free Agent Economy. This book of mine is more than a decade old now, but the stories, the self-assessment tool helping you define what your entrepreneurial motivators are, and the commentaries on the need for most people to work for themselves in one way or another before they really retire have never been more relevant.
David Rock, Quiet Leadership. Six Steps for Transforming Performance at Work. David Rock is an executive coach, consultant and trainer of coaches who works around the world teaching leaders, high potential executives and other individuals the secrets of motivating people to do their best work—themselves included. He shows conclusively that people do their best work when they are guided to use their own strengths, all the while tuning in to the styles and motivations of others.
Miriam Salpeter, Social Networking for Career Success. Using Online Tools to Create a Personal Brand. Nobody doubts the efficacy of social networking for defining and developing a personal brand in all realms of our professional lives. Salpeter’s book goes beyond that, with hands-on instructions for which tools to use, how to use them, and how to make it all “fit together” to serve you well. Especially for people making mid-career, pre-retirement or even post-retirement career changes, this accessible guidebook is essential for navigating the necessary shoals of the digital world.
Online Sites:
www.changingcourse.com. If you want access to some “wild ideas” in the form of webinars and virtual and in-person career brainstorming retreats, then visit the web site of Dr. Valerie Young, self-proclaimed “Dreamer In Residence” at Changing Course.Com.
www.bragbetter.com. Peggy Klaus has trained successful women and consulted to companies around the world about how to help people, particularly women, promote themselves better. Her book Brag: How to Toot Your Own Horn Without Blowing It and The Hard Truth about Soft Skills. Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They’d Learned Sooner are both excellent examples of learning to use politics to your own advantage.
www.socialnetworkingforcareersuccess.com. Even if you’re pretty tech-savvy, Miriam Salpeter’s web site is chock full of many of the good ideas we discussed in the book section about using social networking to enhance your career.