Over-50

Anatomy of Career Changes

9/11 put the nail in the coffin of my dying industry. 

My field might have come back in several years. But, before then there were bills to pay.

So, to gear up for a career change I enrolled in a seminar at the Hartford, Connecticut Metro area franchise of Dale Carnegie Systems. The instructor/coach was Michael Francoeur. At that time, it was all in-person. Currently learning also takes place remote. And Francoeur also provides stand-alone coaching. 

I chose Dale Carnegie Systems because that's where I sought guidance at the end of the 1980s. That was to shift from being a corporate player to an entrepreneur. 

Like millions in middle management I had been downsized out. We were reeling. We had assumed we would retire from corporate life. 

Among what I learned in Dale Carnegie was this: I could change.

The business I set up thrived. That is, until the 2002 recession.

What I learned from Francoeur was this: I could change, yet again. In addition, I also learned that I could reach out and ask for help.

Soon enough after the Dale Carnegie seminar I set up a boutique in digital communications. My first client came via the then head of nonprofit Boundless Playgrounds - Amy Jaffe Barzach. After I had applied for a full-time job there and was turned out, I asked Barzach for feedback. Here's how she responded: She took me to lunch and brought along a client. She told me that I didn't belong working in an organization or in the Hartford Metro area.

Recently, I circled back to Dale Carnegie. As many know, in the communications industry, just about every niche, had become glutted. Even Don Draper from "Mad Men" might be having trouble getting work. 

Not that this was new. Many consider communications a glam field and it's always had an oversupply of talent. But the economic fallout from COVID-19 accelerated that. It also put the kibosh on the rate of compensation. Too often prospects for my services offered me peanuts.

From the past I knew: I could change.

I reached back to 2008. The Great Recession. Back then I had launched a small career coaching service. Mostly the clients had been displaced lawyers and new law graduates who couldn't land that first job. I lectured at the New York State Bar Association and my recommendations had been published in the American Bar Association and Abovethelaw.

I kept that business going but it had not been the core competence. 

Now it is. Don't ask me how I got the strength to do that. But that I did.

I phased out the communications enterprise.

I plowed resources into career coaching. 

I got an article published on reputation restoration in the influential Odwyerpr.com. You bet, it's an effective promotional piece.

Clients referred other clients. 

And there is the extreme satisfaction of helping professionals who had been stuck more stuck and most stuck. 

In a world full of uncertainty, I am certain of one thing: Career change begins in our head. It's the ability to envision a different path, one full of abundance. 

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates (sliding scale). Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com) Download IntroducingYourCareerCoachJaneGenova

August 30, 2020 - Happy 90th Birthday, Warren Buffett

A steady diet of ice cream from Daily Queen and a daily Cola-Cola might be Warren Buffett's secret for longevity. Tomorrow, he celebrates his 90th birthday.

Along with piling up the years, Buffett has also accumulated great wealth. He also gave his investors access to gains beyond their wildest dreams.

As a career coach, I have a hunch that all this resulted from Buffett's core of extreme self-confidence. The goodies that life can bring begin in one's head. Those who hammer themselves with harsh inner self-talk are bound to be trapped in the abyss of self-defeat. 

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates (sliding scale). Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)

You Asked for It ...

Clients and prospects over-50 have been requesting: Do you have a detailed description of what you're about?

Well, here it is. The extended Introduction to Jane Genova's Career Coaching Services Download IntroducingYourCareerCoachJaneGenova.

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates (sliding scale). Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)

Think about Work Like Your Parents

There was that bit of euphoria among businesses. The COVID-19 shutdowns were ending. Pent-up demand was bursting out. Some were even calling what was happening a "recovery." Employers called back workers they had furloughed.

That was then.

Now, as The Wall Street Journal reports, businesses are absorbing the reality that the COVID-19 fallout on the global and U.S. economy will be long term. 

A sign of that are all the new layoffs, ranging from American Airlines to Coca-Cola. In addition, corporations are assessing how much manpower they will really need. The meme is to do more (lots more) with less.

What does that mean for you?

Obviously, you have to be prepared to lose your job, likely several times. Also, you will have more of challenge landing work of any kind - full-time, part-time, gig and through operating your own enterprise.

As a career coach, here are the 5  things I am advising clients:

• Shift from approaching your job as a career to how to earn money. The new game, since it's so fragmented, is about bringing in income. If more income comes from being a trader on Robinhood versus going to a job everyday, then maybe that's what you should do. Yes, careers may have become pre-COVID. The mindset returns to that of our parents' generation. They were focused on making ends meet.
• Create a hedge. Ask yourself everyday, "How else can I make a living?" That gets you, for instance, thinking along the lines of multiple forms of income. In addition to that shaky job as project manager at Company X you deliver pizza on the weekends or start an ecommerce site selling used clothes. In addition, be prepared for a career change. Your whole industry could collapse. What skills and experience can be reconfigured for that? 
• Consider retraining. There are low cost, quick to get certificate programs in everything from producing online content via Zoom to being an addiction counselor. Another option is the community college. There you can pick up in two years an associate degree that's marketable. 
• Go beyond your job description. Look for opportunities to make yourself a star. For example, use your contacts with Organization BCA to help pitch for new business for your employer. But, first ask permission to do that. You could become the type of employee who survives all reductions in force.
• Pay off debt. That's what gives you extreme flexibility when you pursue your Next in how to earn a buck.

If you are reeling and need assistance wrapping your head around the emerging financial realities, coaching might be useful. 

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates (sliding scale). Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)

Laid Off? Maybe You Should Tell Yourself, "Hey, I Gotta Do a Career Change"

Darkness is again falling fast on the labor market.

The job recovery, after the COVID-19 shutdowns, is over. Yes, it was brief.

Today, The Wall Street Journal reports that MGM Resorts International is laying off 18,000.

The layoff situation will worsen even more if there is a second round of the virus.

But, even if things just stay the way they are now, so many of the positions cut in industries ranging from hospitality to travel aren't coming back. At least not any time soon. The same applies to all those jobs in media which have been eliminated. In just the newspaper niche, 11,000 have been sacked during the first half of 2020.

That's why, right from the get-go in the complimentary session with those laid off, I ask: Are you telling yourself you might have to change career paths? 

If those involved in those massive reductions in forces don't introduce that narrative into their search for work they could be permanently unemployed. 

Sure, make it your business to hunt in familiar territory. You excel in the leisure industry or are a brandname journalist. 

But, you must hedge with a systematic investigation of how you can leverage your skills, experience and education to other fields. 

Where to begin?

Key in "Craigslist - sites." If you are based in Arizona, go to that part of the help-wanted platform. Click on every category of work. Read what's required. Then ask yourself: Can I force-fit my background to apply for any of those. 

Next, experiment with creating resumes and cover letters for the actual applications. Role play how the interviews might go. And, about those, remember that a job interview is really a sales call. You are not presenting a laundry list of attributes. Instead you are hammering that you are the solution to the employer's problem or need.

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates (sliding scale). Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)

Job Descriptions: Those Don't Factor in Initiative

Long gone is the employee push-back: That's not my job.

With the mandate of learning to do more with less, job functions have been spilling over the usual boundaries. 

An example of that in the legal sector is how the General Counsel of Xylem - Claudia Toussaint - has added the title of Chief Sustainability Officer. That focus is increasingly important, reports Law.com, because investors assess the corporation's impact on the environment. 

But even before your job expands, officially or unofficially, it can give you the edge to signal that you are open to what used to be called in corporate as "stretch" tasks.

For example, the leadership in professional services firms need "insider information" about a prospect. That would make their pitch more aligned to the corporation's developing business challenges. 

You have solid contacts at the prospect. Ask the brass if they want you to dig around on a casual, confidential basis about what's really going on. Soon enough, you could be the go-to person for oddball needs-to-get-done.

In my career coaching, all too often I hear that professionals essentially have been terminated for not having initiative. That translates into not noticing how they can enhance results by just reaching beyond their own little job box. 

Caution: Always request permission to take a stretch.

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates. Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)

The Rise, Fall and Comeback of (aging) Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld

Media outlets have been busy bees chronicling the fall of Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld.

But that's today.

If he lays low for a while, then soon enough he can conjure up the magic of reputation restoration.

As a career coach, so many have been asking me if Rubenfeld is "comeback material."

In response, I have published this article in Odwyerpr.com.

With the growing number of strategies and tactics in public relations, no one has to be stuck more stuck most stuck. There are Nexts. 

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates. Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)

You Need a New Career Path - That Means Ditching the Old Network

Pre-COVID, young people journeyed from their hometowns to college campuses.

Before they left, parents gently warned them they would be "leaving the old friends behind." A key part of college was developing new networks. The classmate in Economics would become the buddy to help you prepare to apply to law school. The one in computer class would flag you about a part-time job. 

That was then for youth. Now, many are stuck more stuck most stuck in their hometowns, in the loop with friends who are not useful to the next step in their careers. 

But, that reality of necessary endings is even more the case for those already in the labor force - or who are struggling to return to working or operating a successful business. 

COVID has accelerated the mandate for career pivots.

With advertising on life support, for example, if you had been employed there you probably aren't any more. You can't wait until the industry recovers to get back in. That could be years. Or never. Some industries will never return to their former selves.

You need a fresh direction now. So, you have to figure out how to make a good living doing something else.

Maybe you will sign up for a certification program for technical jobs in manufacturing.

Maybe you will enroll in the community college for an associate degree in nursing.

You could just retrofit your experience, skills and education for jobs you could parachute into without additional training. The journalist can pull that off for jobs in public relations. 

Whatever form that takes, it entails looping out of your former networks. In his iconic book "Necessary Endings," executive coach Henry Cloud hammers how difficult it is to let go of a support system that used to be so important to your success. But is now out of date.

Why do you have to loop out? 

Energy is finite. You can't be nurturing professional relationships which no longer move you forward on a career path.

Any vestige of the past can keep you stuck more stuck and most stuck. The nostalgic pull back to your glory days in advertising and grudges you have nursed are hazardous to focusing on the Next.

Those who haven't recognized they also have to find a new direction may discourage you from embracing the ordeal of your transition.

How to loop out?

Here are the 4 recommendations I make to those I coach:

• Be gentle. Like you, everyone else is in inner turmoil. With deep concern about others' feelings explain how resetting your career is absorbing all your time. Once you're settled into your new career the two of you can get together for lunch or a bicycle ride.
• Don't ask "permission." This is your career. You are in charge. It's simple insecurity to have the need to "ask" those from the past anything about the choices you are making in the present. So, you bet, avoid chatter about this pivot. Be generic in any conversations.
• Avoid advice-giving. Most others are unknowable. It's downright arrogant to assume that your new direction will also be a fit for anyone else.
• Make it your business to figure out who on your current path you would benefit from having on your network. 

Networks are necessary platforms to pivots. You have to invest in the new ones. 

The answers about your professional life are inside you. You will learn through coaching how to open yourself up to them. And get unstuck. Soon enough you will be your own coach. Affordable rates. Make an appointment for complimentary consultation (janegenova374@gmail.com)

Tragic Example of Aging Star Held Hostage to Past: Bette Midler

It used to be that we confronted the nasty with the phrase: You must be in so much pain to be so hostile.

But that's over.

Now, we're thinking in terms of stuck.

As in

Stuck

More Stuck

And, Most Stuck.

By her oddball attacks on Melania Trump, Bette Midler proved she fits in the category of Most Stuck.

What that glue consists of is her past success. Sure, right now she has 1.9 million followers on Twitter. But, like, so? She is no longer the babe who belted out:

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy

Wind Beneath My Wings

From  a Distance.

Unlike Clint Eastwood, she didn't have a second coming. He transported himself from B-grade films (which, yes, were very successful) to the artistry of Million Dollar Baby.

If Midler came to me for coaching, I would ask her: What would it take for you to let go of the past?

Her past triumphs are preventing her from leaping into a new dimension.

Comic and former talk show host David Letterman let go of all that. He is now a professional signer, that is, does sign language in public forums.

Readers: Send (jangenova374@gmail.com) recommendations about how Midler can become Unstuck. The best will be published here. Submit them with your identity or anonymously. 

The answers are within you. Get unstuck and open to that insight. Intuitive Career Readings (intuitivereadings123@gmail.com) invites you to a 5-minute complimentary session.

Meanwhile, ask yourself: What stories are you telling yourself and the world about your career?

COVID-19: Rug Pulled from Under Those Near Retirement

"The pandemic has left many people at or near retirement age out of work and unexpectedly living on a shoestring budget. They’re cutting their high-speed internet and life-insurance premiums. Frills like subscriptions are gone." - Clare Ansberry, The Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2020. 

COVID-19 took their jobs. As ProPublica documents, even if they land another one, there's only a 10% chance it will pay what the previous one did. So, they are in a financial pickle most of them didn't anticipate being in. Sure they probably get unemployment and some other kinds of government help as well as free products and services from charities. But the nightmare is embedded in the reality that they are too young for Social Security and Medicare. 

The advice financial coaches give is essentially this: Embrace radical frugality. Some are calling that The Baby Boomer Version of Minimalism. 

That allows them to make ends meet on whatever during a period of economic uncertainty that could last two years. It is well known that this particular downturn has hit the aging especially hard. COVID-19 gives employers an excuse to rid the organization of highly paid manpower. The aging worker is often "guilty" of that. Here is MarketWatch on such a pattern.

But there is reason to hope for a regular stream of income from working. It just likely won't be the kinds of work Baby Boomers had been doing on a career path. Instead, it's just "work" in the old-fashioned sense of what human beings do for the funds to support themselves. 

Before the ethos of the more education the better became standard, parents would make it their business to push their offspring into work. That could be as simple as babysitting or delivering newspapers. Or, as complex as pitching in with the family enterprises. 

The good news is that many of us Ok, Boomers were of that generation which worked at a young age. Even in college we held jobs. There was no angst that such would damage our grades. 

Therefore, we are wired to hustling. In this book, which is free to read, I explain how probable it is to continue to bring in money from all kinds of work situations Download Outwitting ageism. Some of those I coached found it fun to exit all the oughts about what work is acceptable for a career path. They played in whole different kinds of sandboxes like handymen in residential complexes. 

There are also those who can't take that leap out of the past. Here, also free to read, is my book on breaking free of comfort zones. Yes, they could and should get unstuck. If they don't they will be the sources for the next round of articles in The Wall Street Journal about the members of this generation who couldn't make ends meet. 

All the answers are within you. Get unstuck to gain access to that insight. Intuitive Career Readings (intuitivereadings123@gmail.com) invites you to a 5-minute complimentary session.

Meanwhile, ask yourself: What stories are you telling yourself and the world about your financial situation?