Transition with Me, Step by Step - Day 01

Transition with Me, Step by Step
by Nahid Casazza – Day One

Putting yourself through a big professional change is pretty scary, and it’s always easier to come up with “great ideas”, “great leads”, and “great advice” for someone else, than to actually translate those ideas into productive results for yourself. That’s why, in the name of practicing what I preach as a transition coach, I’ve decided to put myself through one of the most difficult, yet effective, processes that can help someone in job transition get the ideal job, and someone in business get exactly the clients they want. It’s not an easy process, and I might fail at it myself, but I believe if I’m willing to take the same steps I challenge you to take, if we are in this together, then through the power of synergy, it will increase all of our chances of success.

One commitment I am making is to be as raw as possible about the emotions, insecurities, and inner turmoil that happen during transition. They happen to the best of us, they have happened every time I’ve transitioned, and at least some of it will probably happen to you. Most people try to keep their best face forward and hide all this from the public, as they must when showing their professional face. But here it’s not going to do us any good to “show a good face”. You need to know that someone “gets” what happens behind the scenes.

So let’s start with my goal. I’ve been a coach, working mainly with people in career transition and small business owners for about eight years now. Every once in awhile I get a chance to work with executives on leadership, and I’ve really enjoyed it. Ideally, I would like to add this work more firmly to my portfolio and have it compliment the rest of my work. However, because it seems to me that “everybody” in the coaching world calls themselves a leadership coach, I haven’t been able to see a unique opening where I can distinguish myself and reach potential clients in that space. My situation is very similar to that of someone in career transition who wants to get a job that is different from the last job, and wonders how in the world to compete with everyone else wanting that same job with the “right” experience or contacts.

My goal is to get five “leadership” clients within the next three months. They can be five individuals who hire me as a leadership coach, or it can be a group of five or more within one company.

So when I have a client in transition, I walk them through a five step process that goes something like this:

1. Internal-discovery – find your unique talents and strengths
2. External discovery - Identify potential jobs and choose a target
3. Needs Identification - Learn a lot about your target job so you know the two or three things that are most important to the people who have the power to hire you
4. Strategize – Come up with a communication plan that “bridges” you to your target and make sure your message is consistent over a long enough period of time to be heard by enough people to give you a chance.
5. Execute – Action, action, action, learn from your results, adapt or change the action, and action, action, action some more. Continue this cycle until you get what you want or you’re satisfied that you have turned over every single pebble and it’s time to come up with a different target.

Most people who have a vague idea of what they want, feel compelled to jump to steps 4 and 5 right away. And there are others who like hanging out in steps 1 through 3 forever; every time they get to step 4, some compelling reason comes up that convinces them they need to start over at step 1.

I admit I’m feeling BOTH of these pulls right now. A part of me is saying, “OK – you already know what you want, and if you start at step one you are going to be wasting time. Plus, knowing you, you’ll never get to step five.” Then another part of me is saying, “You know, there are valuable exercises you haven’t done in phases one through three, and if you do them, you may end up with a much more effective execution strategy”

When my clients struggle with this inner conflict, (and most of them do) we usually follow a “short term opportunity / long term opportunity” time-management strategy. What that means is to spend the first part of every day addressing short term opportunities – sending resumes out to current openings, following up with people who may have leads now – that sort of thing. Then, once you’ve spent at least two hours working on short term stuff, then you work on longer term stuff like doing research and self-discovery exercises.

So I have a short term opportunity – and that is an accelerated transition program I recently started. It’s a great program for people who want a strong support system to keep them focused and productive while they are in transition. I have already made a commitment to consistently tell people about it until we have a nice group of six to eight. (By the way, if you are interested in learning more about this program you can go to my website, http://www.aspyrre.com/ATProgram.htm and I would LOVE it if you would tell everyone YOU know about it as well)

So every work day, priority one is “executing” by telling people about my accelerated transition program, and priority two is working through this new transition, step by step.

Step One

The first exercise in the Aspyrre transition process is called “My Twenty Proudest Moments”. It is simply a brainstormed list of times you were really proud of yourself in a work setting. The moment you are proud of can be truly just a “moment” – perhaps a two minute interaction where you were able to influence people you didn’t think you could influence. Or it could be a longer term project, like getting an MBA or working on a team completing a complicated project at work. The “Twenty Proudest Moments” exercise is extremely useful. First you’ll use it to identify your strengths, which are the skills you see come up over and over again in your moments. But these moments can also be a basis for accomplishment statements on your resume and examples you can provide for behavioral interviewing questions.

My first commitment is to complete the 20 proudest moments exercise, and in my next entry, show you how to translate this into key strengths and also more clarity about your target client or employer.