Blue Monday blues? It might be time for a career change

Reportedly the most depressing day of the year, Blue Monday typically falls on the third Monday of January and is said to be the result of the festive come-down and the reality of returning to work. Did you find yourself groaning about another Monday in the office this morning? Chances are, Blue Monday is not to blame. Have you considered that maybe it’s time for a career change?

If it isn’t work that’s getting you down, Dr Cliff Arnall (the psychologist behind the original study that highlighted Blue Monday as the most depressing day of the year) has some top tips for increasing motivation and happiness at this time of the year.

·      Be your authentic self – stop pretending to be somebody that you’re not. Embrace your real personality and your true hopes and dreams, and live your authentic life. If this means giving up your day job and pursuing your childhood dreams, then so be it. Don’t squash yourself into a predetermined mould.

·      Get rid of toxic people – negative people bringing you down? Then it is time to remove them from your life. While we may feel we are harsh cutting out toxic people from our lives, it is better for our wellbeing in the long run. Positivity and encouragement are key from friends and family.

·      Simply decide and choose to be happy – a favourite quote from the famous bard, “Tis nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” – Shakespeare. Take charge of your thoughts. Happiness is not something to be found or to be sought after. You just decide and take action.

·      Understand your goals – Dr Cliff Arnall advises a little bit of self-reflection and forward thinking - sit down with a piece of paper and title it “I choose to…”. Follow it up with goals you want to achieve throughout the year, whether this will be to learn a new sport or travel to your dream destination. While these may seem similar to New Year’s Resolutions, heading the sheet with a self-declaration enables you to take responsibility for your actions, motivating you to really take them forward in the following year.

Speaking to the BBC in 2012, Arnall said he was keen to use the day as a “springboard into looking at what actually matters in our lives”, a sentiment that aligns perfectly with reassessing your work-life balance. Do you need a career change? Does work fulfil you as a person? Are you suppressing a life’s dream that you’ve always wanted to pursue? Instead of accepting Blue Monday as the most depressing day of the year, why not use it as an excuse to start pushing yourself to achieve what you’ve always wanted?

While many feel it’s too late to switch directions, with the proper coaching and industry expertise, it is entirely possible to achieve your dreams. As part of the Baker Coaching New Years resolution, we have created a new online career coaching package called ‘Project Star’. This is an engaging and thorough career coaching programme that operates on a three step basis, guiding you through who you really are as a person, what career change would fulfil you fully and how to go about getting there. If you are looking to Explore, Dream and Discover a new year in 2016 why not get in touch so you can be part of this new programme when it launches towards to the end of this month.

Don’t box yourself in and sell yourself short – harness the Blue Monday buzz and get in touch today about maximising your career change potential. Call 01638 751087, email jennifer@jenniferbakercoach.co.uk.

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People Spend More Time on Planning their Holidays than their Life!

Work is one of the most significant and time-consuming elements of many people's lives. It’s also the area where people most often feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled. The average person will spend 40 to 50 years of their life at work. That's too long to spend in the wrong job.

Don't feel trapped in your career you can take control

Continuous professional development is a key requirement for success in any field. It is vital to manage yourself and continuously raise the bar to improve both your personal and professional skills.

The majority of people describe their career as “a series of fairly random events”.  How then, do some people have really successful and fulfilling careers? The answer is, they take control by:

• Having a clear insight into their personal goals
• Understanding their own personal characteristics (strengths/weaknesses) and seek to grow and develop
• Understanding what motivates them
• Find a range of ways to show how they add value to the organisation
• Understanding how others perceive them and actively manage these perceptions
• Learning how to adapt their jobs and keep improving them

In order to determine your drivers and to shape your future aspirations it is important to analyse and reflect on your career to date. 

You can start this process by creating a Career Timeline: draw a horizontal line and divide this into intervals appropriate to the length of your working life e.g. 1, 3, 5, 10 years. Then note high points, above the line, low points, below it. Draw a line to join both the high and low points together to reflect your career history. Then answer these questions:

• What trends are apparent?
• What do you remember most about the high and low points?
• How have the high and low points impacted on your career path i.e. the choices you have made?
• What was the most significant point in your career?

As you journey through life you will need to proactively continue to evaluate and adjust your career plans in response to external factors – such as changes in the workplace, a change in your interests or a change in your life circumstances.

Recognising the high and low points will help you examine the choices you made and consider the thought process you went through. You cannot change the past but you can decide how you let it influence and inspire your future.

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Appraisals aren't just for Bosses

As year-end approaches many organisations will be embarking on annual appraisals.  The process is often seen as little more than a tick box exercise with the same comments reported each year with little significant meaning resulting in a thankless task.  HR spend a lot of time coercing people into doing them while managers look for a variety of other priorities to delay the process, often resulting in appraisals being incomplete or rarely done.

Proactively Develop Your Career

For many managers and employees alike they hate the thought of them finding it an uncomfortable practice, undertaken for the wrong reasons and from the wrong perspective. This can result in putting the manager and the employee on opposing sides.   The employee may feel defensive or expect an unfair review.

If done right however appraisals can be an invaluable feedback tool for managers and a powerful tool for developing your career.

Utilise the appraisal process as an opportunity to raise your profile, to be formally and officially recognised.  Here are a few things you can do:

·         Well in advance ask for a copy of the appraisal form. Become familiar with it. If necessary clarify with your line manager and/or HR any sections you don’t understand.

·         Ideally you should have received confirmation of your yearly objectives.  Have the strategy or any processes changed making them no longer relevant or obsolete?

·         Without blame or being harsh on yourself, objectively and critically evaluate your own reasons for any shortfalls. If you haven’t met your targets have you had access to the right resources? Start to think about how you could go about achieving these targets in the coming year. What could you do differently?

·         Against your key objectives complete a self-assessment and determine your development needs. Assess your skills, knowledge and experience required to do your job satisfactorily and assess the same criteria to achieve above expectations.  Identify your strengths as well as any gaps. Start to think about how to proactively develop any short falls.

·         Are you ready and capable of taking on more responsibility? Are you ready to step up? What else could you do in the coming year to add more value to your organisation?

The appraisal process is not an exclusive tool for managers to assess performance, be proactive and manage your career by taking ownership of your appraisal, thereby ensuring it is meaningful and worthwhile.

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The Core Beliefs of Highly Successful People

As you progress in your career the world of business can at times be ruthless, and even the most successful of individuals will at some point fail. With possible difficulties lying around every corner, what is it then that sets highly successful people apart from the rest of the flock? Undoubtedly, it is their self-belief and resilience to overcome even the worst of situations

Making mistakes is not the important part – it's the getting up, dusting yourself off and moving on that counts. Many great historical figures have commented on failure and success and the intimate relationships between the two; Winston Churchill famously said 'success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm', and it's an attitude reminiscent of this that has pushed renowned business figures like Deborah Meaden and Richard Branson.

Deborah Meaden experienced failure early on, after setting up a glass and ceramics export agency that ultimately failed after 18 months. Deborah said: 'I consider it a failure to slog on with a business that is going to die sooner rather than later. And that's a skill I've had from my very, very early days. A lot of people are blinded. They think, “I can't give this up. I'd feel like a failure.”'

Richard Branson has also experienced a multitude of failed ventures throughout the years, but champions his team's resilience to push through as the basis for his success. He credits recognising mistakes and recovering as essential skills for any successful entrepreneur, saying 'over the years, my team and I have not let mistakes, failures or mishaps get us down. Instead, even when a venture had failed, we try to look for opportunities, to see whether we can capitalise on another gap in the market'.

Branson raises an excellent point, and one that is key to the growth of highly successful people; if you do experience failure, take a step back and see how you can turn the experience into something fruitful and productive. Whether it's just recognising where you went wrong and how to remedy this in the future, or using the situation as a base to progress in another direction, maximising on your mistakes will go a long way to you becoming highly successful in your chosen career.

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Hundreds of Applications and No Interview? Here’s How To Get A Job

Submitted hundreds of applications and had no success? Been told ‘thanks, but no thanks’ one too many times? Whatever it is, something in your job application process may need to change. Here are some top tips on how to maximise your opportunity and increase your chances of securing an interview.

Utilise Social Media

Don’t shy away from social media – embrace the digital age and utilise its potential. If you don’t already have one, set up a professional LinkedIn account, and if you do have one, take some time to bolster your details with case studies and examples of your work.  Ask respected colleagues for genuine recommendations and make sure you return the compliment. Without stalking people seek out good connections within your desired industry and don’t be too shy to say hello. Join groups within your targeted sector and join in the discussions and start creating dialogues. Proactively post comments on interesting articles. Find companies you’re interested in and Follow them. LinkedIn is made for making connections, so get linking.

Create a Professional Blog

Think blogging is just for budding journalists or the fashion savvy? Think again. A good professional blog can showcase not only your interests within your industry’s arena, but also your knowledge through detailed case studies of what you’ve already achieved. The content posted on your blog can also be pushed out via LinkedIn, offering ample opportunity for leaders in your sector to interact and be impressed.

Find a Good Recruitment Company

Take the time to seek out a good recruitment company that will serve your best interests, and not just routinely process you with faceless online forms and automated emails. Find a company that excels within your industry to make the most of their existing contacts. Be sure the recruitment company you choose is putting as much effort into finding you a job as you are.

Target Specific Managers

Out-dated and generic – ‘To Whom It May Concern’ may be killing your application before it has even begun. Take the time to identify the specific manager who you’d be working under and address them directly in a personalised and tailored covering letter. Do some research into their on-going work and generate a current conversation – something they’d be interested in following up on.

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Myth or Reality: Can you really find the perfect work-life balance?

With most people coming to the end of their much deserved summer holiday break, you may find you’re either in the camp of returning to work feeling fully refreshed or dreading the thought and telling yourself things need to change.  

If you’re in the latter camp, you’ll be trying to figure out how to stop working long hours, weekends or reading emails late at night. You’ll be wanting to work out how to create more time to take up exercise, or to eat healthier and spend time with your partner and family. Perhaps you just want to take time for you in an effort to reduce stress. The way you deal with your situation will either exacerbate things or help you achieve a good work-life balance.

One of the quickest things you can do to move towards a better balance is learning how to say no. You may believe you have no choice, but if you really think about it, you do.  It’s not about flatly refusing, but instead saying no in a more empowered way. Here are some options:

• -          Negotiate deadlines
• -          Delegate more
• -          Leave the office 1 day a week at 530pm
• -          Work from home

What’s stopping you? If you answer honestly, this is the real contributing factor to your state of work-life balance.   If we don’t proactively manage ourselves, that’s when our work-life balance gets out of kilter and stress can become chronic.  Human energy is the most critical resource we have. Energy diminishes both with over use and also under use. Energy expenditure must be balanced with intermittent energy renewal.
 

Some new workplace practices are increasingly being utilised to proactively manage stress and improve work life balance.  Some of these include:

• -          Taking recovery breaks every 90-120 minutes
• -          Increase your capability to think clearly and rehydrate the brain - reduce caffeine and increase water intake
• -          Eat slow-release energy food
• -          Limit meetings to 30 minutes

Four things I’d like to ask:

1. What could you do to maximise your energy?

2. What are your barriers?

3. What are 3 options to overcome these?

4. What will you choose to do differently?

By enacting just one new step over 30 days, you’ll develop a new habit that will benefit your working career. Before you know it be on the path to less stress and better work-life balance.

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How To Achieve Maximum Engagement and Increase Motivation

I often find leaders despair about how to get more from their teams. In frustration they cite "we provide great incentives such as bonuses, flexitime, extra holidays and it seemingly has little impact…" A global study by Gallup (2013) found that only 13% of employees are engaged in their job, meaning that they are emotionally invested in and focused on creating value for their organisations every day.

Full engagement is critical to growth and maximising performance. A further study found businesses with the highest engagement scores averaged 18% higher productivity than those with the lowest engagement scores.

Some of the key points that impact engagement include the boss, the individuals themselves, other people and team dynamics, organisation strategy, culture of the organisation and communication. This last point is interesting considering that in a recent survey published by Harvard Business Review (2015), 91% of employees said communication issues are seriously demotivating. Some of the other top issues being cited included:

-        Not recognising employee achievement

-        Not giving clear direction

-        Not making time to meet

-        Not offering constructive feedback

-        Not knowing employees names

How do we get the best out of ourselves and our employees?

The big question organisations want to know is how to achieve maximum engagement and increase motivation.  At a fundamental level people want to know ‘what’s in it for me?’  Career aspects such as financial security, working in a great team, career opportunities, being challenged, flexibility and being able to see how their job makes a difference are all key to maximising engagement.

Leaders and managers should of course expect high performance and contribution from employees. However, full engagement occurs with an alignment of maximum job satisfaction and job contribution. Here are some factors to think about to influence engagement and motivation:

1.     What impact does our leadership style have on how employees feel? Does it hinder or enable best performance?

2.     Wellbeing - how do staff feel about pressure and the balance between work and home life?

3.     Personal growth: to what extent do staff feel they are stretched and challenged by their job?

4.     My manager: how do staff feel towards their immediate boss?

5.     My company: how do people feel about the company they work for?

6.     My team: how do the staff feel about their immediate colleagues?

7.     Fair deal: how happy is the workforce with their pay and benefits?

Whether you’re the boss or employee, what can you do to put engagement and motivation on the company wide agenda? Get this right and get superstar performance from all your employees.

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