Maximize Career Discovery - The Verb Window List Assessment

Another inexpensive assessment is the “Verb Window”. Verbs are action words which might help us recall activities that could be strengths. Go through the list with a pen and star all the words that give you a positive emotional lift or cause you to recall an activity that once made you feel strong. Go back through each verb that you starred and place a noun next to it that really generates enthusiasm. “Achieving what?” “Acting in what?’ “Adapting what” and so forth. Now go back through again and put a second star in front of the ones that you believe represent a real talent.



Achieving Acting Adapting Addressing Administering Advising Analyzing Anticipating Arbitrating Arranging

Ascertaining Assembling Assessing Attaining Auditing Balancing Brainstorming Budgeting Building

Calculating Charting Checking Classifying Coaching Collecting Communicating Compiling Composing

Computing Conceptualizing Conducting Conserving Consolidating Constructing Controlling Coordinating

Copying Counseling Creating Deciding Defining Delivering Designing Detailing Detecting Determining

Developing Devising Diagnosing Digging Directing Discovering Dispensing Displaying Disproving Dissecting

Distributing Diverting Dramatizing Drawing Driving Editing Eliminating Empathizing Enforcing Establishing

Estimating Evaluating Examining Expanding Experimenting Explaining Expressing Extracting Filing

Financing Fixing Following Formulating Founding Gathering Generating Getting Giving Guiding Handling

Having Responsibility Heading Helping Hypothesizing Identifying Illustrating Imagining Implementing

Improving Improvising Increasing Influencing Informing Initiating Innovating Inspecting Inspiring

Installing Instituting Instructing Integrating Interpreting Interviewing Intuiting Inventing Inventorying

Investigating Judging Keeping Leading Learning Lecturing Lifting Listening Logging Maintaining Making

Managing Manipulating Mediating Meeting Memorizing Mentoring Modeling Monitoring Motivating

Navigating Negotiating Observing Obtaining Offering Operating Ordering Organizing Originating

Overseeing Painting Perceiving Performing Persuading Photographing Piloting Planning Playing Predicting

Preparing Prescribing Presenting Printing Problem Solving Processing Producing Programming Projecting

Promoting Proof Reading Protecting Providing Proving Publicizing Purchasing Questioning Raising

Reading Realizing Reasoning Receiving Recommending Reconciling Recording Recruiting Reducing

Referring Rehabilitating Relating Remembering Rendering Repairing Reporting Representing Researching

Resolving Responding Restoring Retrieving Reviewing Risking Scheduling Selecting Selling Sensing

Separating Serving Setting Setting Up Sewing Shaping Sharing Showing Singing Sketching Solving

Sorting Speaking Studying Summarizing Supervising Supplying Symbolizing Synergizing Synthesizing

Systemizing Taking Instructions Talking Teaching Team Building Telling Tending Testing Training

Transcribing Translating Traveling Treating Trouble Shooting Tutoring Typing Umpiring Understanding

Understanding Undertaking Unifying Uniting Upgrading Using Utilizing Verbalizing Washing Weighing

Winning Working Writing

Career Discovery Assessment Review - Bernard Haldane's DSAP

Today I'm beginning a process of reviewing a number of different career discovery assessment tools.  I will start with the simple ones first.  They are free and can be completed in your notebook.  Because they are both simple and free don't assume they don't have great value.  For any given person, one of these may be just as effective as an instrument that costs hundreds of dollars.

The late Dr. Bernard Haldane founded Bernard Haldane Associates, Inc. in 1947 and now hundreds of professional counselors apply his systems in hundreds of major-city offices worldwide. Dr. Haldane is the author of several books including Career Satisfaction and Success, How to Make a Habit of Success, Young Adult Career Planning, Job Power Now! Through a culmination of experiences, and with the assistance of his wife, Dr. Jean Haldane, Dr. Haldane evolved the idea of marketing one's strengths and potential in everyday life with a focus on helping children and the poor build their self-esteem. This idea was the seed that blossomed into the Dependable Strengths Articulation Process, a process that has since spread worldwide.

http://www.dependablestrengths.org/about.htm

Overview: The Dependable Strengths Articulation Process (DSAP)

Step 1: Remember
Think back and identify your Good Experiences. These are events that you did well, you enjoyed doing, and feel proud of.

Step 2: Prioritize
Using your own criteria, select and prioritize your most important Good Experiences.

Step 3: Describe
Describe in detail your Good Experiences to identify how you made them happen.

Step 4: Uncover
With the help of a team or support group, uncover and prioritize the skills you've used repeatedly. These few skills could be your Dependable Strengths!

Step 5: Reality Test
Share proof of your Dependable Strengths with your team or support group and draft a special REPORT that provides evidence of their effectiveness and your worth and growth.

Maximize Career Discovery - What Are Your Rapid Learning and Synaptical Super Highways?

The technology is advancing quickly and we may one day be able to send you in for a quick brain scan to discern where your learning super highways are. In the mean time the best approach is to pay a lot of attention to the topics where you learn rapidly. If you’re struggling to learn something it may be a clue that you’re going down a narrow synaptical country road instead of a synaptical super highway with regard to your brain design. You actually have a few choices:

1. Ditch the country road quickly. This may involve something as radical as dropping a class at school, quitting a job, or asking for a departmental transfer.

2.  Drive slow. Grind it out. Get a tutor. Invest the extra time and effort to shore up a weakness.  In my area we sometimes have to drive in the fog.  We don't like to... but sometimes we have to.

3.  Delegate. Find someone else to learn it or do it for you. Collaborate with someone.

4.  Do what comes easier. Stanford University Professor Michael Ray has a whole chapter on this in his book Creativity in Business. He writes that we live in a world that often tries to impose a credo of difficult, distasteful, and depressing but suggests that we spend more of our time on what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable. Ironically, Ray suggests this actually requires a fair amount of discipline.

The main thing is that you figure out ways to stay on the Super Highways most of the time. Pay attention to the things you learn quickly. What were your favorite subjects in school?  I liked English in High School. It wasn’t a super highway but it was at least a major thorough fare. Even though I got a 3.6 grade point average in High School it wasn’t until College that I found a couple of roads that could really travel fast. Psychology was fast. Some counseling classes came very easy. In High School, math and science were country roads with big pot holes for me. Intuitively I got off them as quick as I could. I did high school biology and geometry and called it a day.

This is quite counter-cultural actually on two points. One… we are taught to not give up. Even Billy Ocean tells us “When Going Gets Tough… The Tough Get Going”. There is a definite place for this but I think it makes more sense to push yourself very hard in area of strength.  Secondly, hardly a week goes by that I don’t read a newspaper article declaring that we as a country need to get our math and science scores up. Here’s a news flash!  If we want to get our math and science scores up, how about we focus on teaching those who are already gifted in those subjects and help the others discover and develop their unique strengths.

Get Out Your Notebook and make a list of the subjects you have learned quickly in your life:

Re-Charge Day

Maximize Career Discovery - Things That Make You Say "Y.E.S."

What are the things that elicit an enthusiastic verbal “YES” response in your life. If it's combined with a fist pump...so much the better.  Or maybe with you it's some other physical response.  My wife Susy breaks out in this adoreable little dance.... She "busts a move" in todays language.  Why is that?  Let’s look a little deeper. Each letter in Y.E.S. actually is a prompt to look toward one of the three time frames.

Yearnings - What do you look forward to? What are your “I can hardly wait” moments? Your yearnings and desires for the future are powerful clues.  In my case I yearn to have time and the resources for “Input” and "Ideas". I love to read and research. I also yearn to write just like I’m doing this very moment.

Engagement - What activities cause you to lose track of time?  When do you become so enthralled with an activity that time just flies by?  Mihály Csíkszentmihályi is a Hungarian psychology professor, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22. Now he is at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California and is the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College. He is noted for his work in the study of happiness, creativity, subjective well-being, and fun, but is best known as the architect of the notion of flow, and for his years of research and writing on the topic. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, described Csikszentmihalyi as the world's leading researcher on positive psychology.

In his seminal work, 'Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience', Csíkszentmihályi outlines his theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow— a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. The idea of flow is identical to the feeling of being in the zone or in the groove. Flow is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where a person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. This is a feeling everyone has at times, characterized by a feeling of great freedom, enjoyment, fulfillment, and skill—and during which temporal concerns (time, food, ego-self, etc.) are typically ignored.
In an interview with Wired magazine, Csíkszentmihályi described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost. Csíkszentmihályi also refers to this as auto-telic activity or activity for it’s own sake as opposed to some future reward.

The activities of “Input” and "Ideation" which I described above fit in here too. I can research and write like this for hours and the time just flies by.

Satisfaction - What activities, when they are complete, give you a deep sense of satisfaction? Which activities leave a warm after glow.

Nothing has changed. Thinking, Research and Writing about things that I believe can make a difference in someone’s life feels great afterward. I feel just awesome after a few hours of writing.

What makes you say "Y.E.S."?  What brings out the fist pump?  Or if you're like my Susy... What makes you bust a move?

Maximize Career Discovery - Childhood Dreams... Continued

In the event you found yesterdays post with stories of Bill Gates, Stephen Spielberg, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffet a little bit other worldly… after all, you can’t go back to age 14… I offer you the Story of Anne. Parachute author Richard Bolles tells it in his Newsletter dating back to December 2004. Here is the link if you prefer to read it there:  http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/articles/article.php?art_item=010

Childhood Dreams Come Back To Save Us
“Many of us take a job early in life that seems to offer everything we could want in a job: it puts bread on the table, clothes on our back, a car in the garage, and an interesting group of people to work with.
But an increasing number of us find, as we move toward mid-life, that we grow restless, like a caged tiger pacing back and forth within its cage. And eventually, we realize that our work is the problem. We weigh it in the balance, and find it wanting. It feeds our body, but not our soul.

Long forgotten questions resurface in our mind, such as "Why am I here on earth? What was I put here to do? What is it I want to accomplish with my life, before I die?" We want to feel passionate about our work, so we search for clues. And, strangely enough, we often find the best clues back in our childhood.
Something about that period – our childhood – that made us see things more clearly than we knew, for we were innocents, and our business was to play. It is in our childhood play that the clues most often are found.

It was also our business as a child to daydream. And the phrase we often hear, today – "Find the job of your dreams" – hearkens back to our childhood dreams, when dreaming was what we did best.

The Story of Anne

All of this is perfectly summarized in the true story of Anne. She is a woman who tried to make her living, for many years, as, first, a musician, and then, as owner of her own small business. But neither satisfied her. After twenty years of this, someone told her she needed to go after her passion – and said it in a way that she could hear. She went to a career counselor, who had her write seven achievements of which she was proud, and then search for the skills they all used, in common "The common theme," she discovered, "was that I live for data. I like to gather it, analyze it, look at it, reproduce it, organize it and dream about it."

For insight as to "What kind of data?" the counselor examined with her each of her seven achievements. But let her tell her own story: "The one which jumped out at the career counselor was the fact that I had taught myself genetics in my childhood. He encouraged me to talk about what I'd done in genetics, particularly in sixth grade. After listening, he pointed out that most sixth graders do not invent races of people and then think about how all the racial characteristics would be inherited, or spend hours drawing out the predicted results of every kind of cross imaginable between my race and all the others."

So that was it. Her favorite skills were with data, and her favorite data was genetics. "I finally came to understand that I was a geneticist, whether or not I made my living that way." And this passion had manifested itself in her childhood, as early as sixth grade.
She knew she had to do something about that childhood dream, even though the idea was daunting for two reasons. One was that she was 39. The other was that she is legally blind.

Anne found the strength by pressing into service the delighted child that she once was.
"The thought of working in the lab to transfer 50 50-microliter aliquots of liquid from one flask to another was maddening to me at age 39. But the six year old Anne who filled her grandmother's drawer with tiny bottles and longed desperately for a way to transfer liquid accurately between them, found the experience absolutely delightful."

Anne also pressed into service from childhood the skills she'd learned from being blind:
"I knew, because I'd had to do it in my daily life how to infer physical location from numerical data. I could, from the very beginning, look at a set of mapping data and 'see' the map. The process of inference so essential to genetics had been a part of my life for years – because of my vision impairment, not in spite of it."
And so, from the memories of her childhood, Anne found all the clues she needed, to identify her passion, her skills, her special interests, and her mission in life.

When we are at that place in life ourselves, where restlessness grows apace, it is to our childhood we must go, in memory, and search to find again what once was very plain to us, and now has grown obscure: our passion in life. Or, as Anne puts it, "I wish I could make people understand that everything which delighted them as a child still truly matters."“

I was so struck by the line, "I finally came to understand that I was a geneticist, whether or not I made my living that way."

So here is my question…. Regardless of how you now make your living… What are you? What is the work trying to get out? What is the work you have to do, lest you violate the design God so carefully wove into the very fabric of your being?

Maximize Career Discovery - What Were You Doing At Age 14?

Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Age 13) at LakesideHigh, using a teletype to connect to a mainframe.

I call this the Magic Age Question! There seems to be something special about the age of 14 or at least the age range around ages 12 to 14. Many extremely successful people dialed in there life’s work in this age range. What is unique about these people is that they locked on to goal or talent area and didn’t let go. In some cases it was actually much earlier than 14.

At age 12 , Stephen Spielberg decided he wanted to be a movie director. At age 13, he made a war movie, Escape To Nowhere, with paper-mache sets his father helped him make. At 16, he wrote and directed a 140 minute science fiction adventure, called Firelight. It was shown at a local movie theater. At 17 he visited Universal Studios and ducked out of the tour to find a real movie being made. The next day, Spielberg, who looked mature for his age, put on a suit, loaded his dad’s brief case with two candy bars and a sandwich, and marched boldly through the gate into Universal Studios. He found a deserted trailer and wrote “Stephen Spielberg, Director” on the door. He became a regular on the lot, hanging out with directors, producers, writers, and editors as he began to learn the business.

Apple founder, Steve Jobs was frequenting Mountain View are flea markets looking for electronics parts. He attended evening lectures by Hewlett-Packard engineers and even got Bill Hewlett on the phone once requesting parts. He managed to get the parts and a summer job.

Bill Gates got to do real computer programming in eighth grade. By High School he was sneaking out of the house at 3 am so he could get down to the nearby University of Washington and use the computer during the down time between 3 and 6. Gates mom says, “We always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning?”

My wife Susy and I love to eat at the Chipotle Mexican Grills. Chipotle founder Steve Ells says, “as a kid I liked to be in the kitchen cooking with my mom. I remember watching all the cooking shows—with the Galloping Gourmet, Julia Child—instead of the cartoons.

At age 10, actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, already close friends, were holding meetings in the school cafeteria to discuss their latest acting projects.

Mozart had written his first symphony by age 12. At age 5, superstar architect Frank Gehry was already using wood scraps to make intricate models on the living room floor. At 13, Picasso was already enrolled in art school for adults.

The odds are good you are much past the age 14 benchmark. But you may have children or grandchildren approaching that age range. Pay attention. You might very well help then get into the very work they were designed for.

In your case, you might look for ideas and clues that will help you become much more proficient at your current job or make some mid life adjustments. In my case, I saw myself writing and speaking when I was in this age range. I still remember a motivational speaker coming to our church. I asked my dad to set it up so that I could go with a pilot friend and pick him up in Southern California. By age 22, I was able to get a job selling books, audio, and video tapes from the Zig Ziglar organization. The traces and threads were definitely present.  This indicator isn’t infallible but look back at this stage of your life. What were you daydreaming about? What did you love doing?

In How To Find The Work You Love, Laurence Boldt writes, “One of the great keys to discovering the work you love is to ask the simple question: What did I want to give the world when I was young and fresh, innocent and filled with wonder? Some of you will be able to recall right away. Others will first have to peel away the layers of hurt and defense that block your remembrance. You will first have to reintegrate your inner child. When you were a child, you saw things simply. Your world was full of magic, wonder, and promise. The possibilities seemed limitless. You wanted to give you love and live in beauty, joy, and simplicity. You felt you could do or be anything. Perhaps grow ups couldn’t understand this world of yours, a world of endless whys, a world of magic and possibilities, a world that had yet to hear the word compromise. Though perhaps not in so many words, you were told to compromise: compromise your dreams, compromise your ideals, compromise you sense of what’s right for what would help you get along. Give in to the nothingness, the emptiness. Give in to becoming hollow and phony, a shell of a man, a mask of a woman. Hold up your masks, a different one for every scene. Show them what they want to see. But who is this actor? Has she no real life? Has he no story of his own? Where is the integrity and joy in the masquerade life?”

Was that uncomfortable to read? Did it ring a little to true? If so, it’s not too late for you. You can still reconnect to that childlike nature. You can re-set what my friend Alex Reeder calls your "factory settings". You can start from where you are.

Warren Buffet is arguably the most successful investor of all-time. When did he start? Buffet purchased his first stock at age 11 and says, “Everything he did up until then was a complete waste of time.” Probably not. Listen to some of the things Buffet’s biographer, Alice Schroeder writes about him in Snowball: Warren Buffet and The Business of Life:

“By the time Warren entered kindergarten, his hobbies and interests revolved around numbers. Around age 6, he became fascinated by the precision of measuring time in seconds, and desperately wanted a stopwatch… Warren thought about numbers all the time and everywhere, even in church. He liked the sermons, he was bored by the rest of the service; he passed the time by calculating the life span of hymn composers from their birth and death dates in the hymnals.”

Schroeder tells us that his favorite possession was a nickel plated money changer he received as a gift from his Aunt Alice and that he collected soda bottle caps from the wells below ice chests at gas stations, calculating which brands were the most popular. School bored him for the most part but he would play math games in his head.

He started making money at age 6, going door to door selling packs of Wrigley’s chewing gum for two cents profit. He sold Coca-Cola door to door on summer nights where he netted a five cents for every six bottles he sold. He also sold magazine subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post and Liberty.

At age 7 Warren asked Santa for what was to become his first favorite book on Bonds, Townsend’s Bond Salesmanship. At age 10, Warren’s father took him on a trip to the East Coast and New York City. At that early age, he asked his Dad to take him to see the New York Stock Exchange.

One day at the library he got his hands on a book titled, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. It was about this time that he began to get his young mind around the idea of compounding. He started to understand that if he started with a thousand dollars and it grew at ten percent a year:
In five years, $1,000 became more than $1,600.
In ten years, it became almost $2,600.
In twenty five years, it became more than $10,800.

He could picture the numbers compounding as vividly as the way a snowball grew when he rolled it across the lawn.

In 1942, he bought 3 shares of Cities Service Preferred for $114.75.
Warren held down multiple paper routes but he also sold calendars to his newspaper customers. But it didn’t stop there. He asked all his customers for their old magazines as scrap paper for the war effort. Then he would check the labels on the magazines to figure out when the subscriptions were expiring, using a code book he had gotten from Moore-Cottrell, the publishing powerhouse that had hired him as an agent to sell magazines. He had made a card file of subscribers, and before their subscriptions expired, Warren would be knocking at their door, selling them a new magazine.

Here is the magic age…. At age fourteen, Warren had fulfilled the promise laid out in his favorite book, One Thousand Ways to Make $1000... His savings now totaled around a thousand dollars.
Many extreme examples of success like Buffet have similar stories. They follow their passions early and with extreme focus. You can’t turn back the clock. That’s not an option. But you can look back, learn what you can from your childhood and start from where you are.

Get out your notebook and make a list of your childhood interests, achievements, etc..  Does one or two stand out as something that is core to who you still are?  Start writing...