Is a ‘safe’ career choice preventing your miracles?

These tumultuous times have everyone on edge. High unemployment, companies having to restrict their growth, and fewer opportunities may have a career seeker looking for safe passage to their retirement. That job offer that comes along in the nick of time may convince us we are making the right choice because, quite frankly, it is the only choice at that moment. Hey, we’ve all gotta’ eat and sometimes have to do what we have to but making a habit of choosing careers based solely on being ‘safe’ means you could miss out on the real miracles.

This point was driven home again last night after catching the last 30 minutes of Spike Lee’s 2008 movie, Miracle at St. Anna. I’ve seen the movie before but am always moved by one line that occurs toward the very end and wait for it every time. And here it is:

“Safety is the greatest risk of all, because safety leaves no room for miracles and miracles are the only sure thing in life.”

What could I possibly add to this?

Get prospective employers to see what you’re all about in one click

Half the battle in finding the right employer is cutting through the clutter of other job candidates so hiring companies can see what makes you so darn amazing.

But first you must understand human nature. You know those emails your friends and colleagues send you with a link to a funny video, joke, or something altogether different? The first thing most of us do is -- click on the link. Why? Well, for a few reasons but mostly because we’re curious about what is behind the “curtain”. Want to see for yourself? Then CLICK HERE SO I CAN PROVE IT.

For those of you who were not all that curious or concerned where the link leads, I will just go ahead and make my point. After reading what follows here you’ll be hitting that link in no time.

Consider you are the perfect candidate for a job. You send an email to the hiring company and attach your resume and write something powerful in the text area of the email to compel the hiring manager/human resources to go one step further and open your resume file. They’re busy, distracted, or annoyed they have to go through this process in the first place and are getting pretty tired of reading resumes. How do you spark their interest to read about you?

Imagine that you embed a link, like the one I encouraged you to click on, in your opening line, inviting the recipient to view your profile where, not so coincidentally, your resume is also parked for viewing (at some point you will have to have one of these things). Do candidates get any savvier than you? But more importantly, LinkedIn allows you to showcase what makes you special right from the start.

How do you do it? First thing is to set-up a LinkedIn account. Complete the profile, write about the amazing things you have accomplished, who you’ve worked for in the past, how well-educated you are, and, basically, take advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer. Now, to get to your personal web link, on your ‘Profile’ page you are assigned a “public URL”. That’s the web address to your personal profile. Copy that URL into a Word document. For example, type: www.linkedin.com. Right click on the link and then select ‘Edit Hyperlink’. At the top of the pop-up box, it says: ‘Text to display’. Type in whatever you want. So, www.linkedin.com becomes LinkedIn.

Why you should do this or the problem with resumes.

It’s funny how there are professional resume writers – as a bona fide profession, where skill, talent, and know-how is required – yet the majority of us think we are adept at writing our own resumes without any of the training or skills possessed by, you guessed it, professional resume writers. And that would be OK and perfectly sensible to accept the premise that you may not be the most appropriate person to write your resume except, and here is the problem, many prospective employers expect you to be or, at the minimum, will evaluate you on the quality of your resume when your special skill set may be capping bottles, selling airplanes, or paving driveways. However, having a LinkedIn profile gives you the opportunity to tell someone right upfront that you are the Midwest’s 2009 bottle capping champion or are the person responsible for having sold all of Boeing’s 747 inventory without them even thinking about how well you can write a resume. You can even put your smiling face right there at the top.

Does it get any better or easier than that?

1 simple thought that will change your life

Something strange happened on the way to giving a motivational talk. I was back in my hometown of Southern California and getting ready to deliver a talk to a group of de-motivated salespeople. Their company had suffered some bad press and the sales staff was, to say the least, devastated. And it showed in their performance.

So, there I was, in my hotel room, with the television on in the background as I went over the talk in my head. Something on TV caught my attention. It was a commercial for the annual fair at the Pomona, California fairgrounds. As a kid in elementary school, at the start of each school year, the children were given a free ticket to the fair. Listening to the commercial took me back to that time and I recalled how I couldn't contain my excitement. It then struck me how, from just the mere mention of the fair, my body was actually responding as though I was, once again, 7 or 8 years old and anticipating going to the fair.

By the time I got to where I was delivering the talk, I realized I needed to take a different approach other than what I had originally planned. I began the talk by asking everyone to close their eyes and recall the first time they had fallen in love; be it with another person, puppy, or goldfish. For the following few minutes, the faces of the people in the audience began to soften and lighten. Some even smiled. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that their minds could not tell the difference between something that happened at another time or the present moment. Their entire physiology changed just at the thought of something wonderful.

This can go another way as well. Think of when something terrible happened and it will be as though you are experiencing that all over again.

We all have memories of when we were completely brilliant, such as writing a flawless report, giving an inspiring presentation, or making something with our own two hands that was sheer perfection. Admittedly, for some (a lot?) of us, these moments may be few and far between. I think what happens though, especially when we are uncertain about what we want or feel there is strong competition, we conjure those memories from the past where things did not go well. This is a real problem because then your mind and body will start mimicking the past. The body language, the searching for the right words, the mind-freeze, or whatever else that took place that made things turn out not so great reemerges.

If you had the choice, and you do, to cement in your mind those moments where everything you did as though they had been written in the stars or the times when you struggled, stumbled, or even fell, as a way to produce the feelings you need to take hold of your career or do your best work, is there any reason to choose the latter?

The following year after that talk in So Cal, I ran into one of the people who had been in attendance. She told me that prior to the session, she had perceived that prospective customers were aware of the troubles of her company. Her sales presentations had been full of apologies and offering things she wouldn’t ordinarily give away just to get the sale but even that wasn’t working. After the talk, she realized she was projecting insecurity to prospects that she felt as a result of the company’s rather public troubles. She learned that in the majority of cases, many prospects weren’t even aware of the company troubles. She told me that applying what I taught her had changed her life.

Though that particular company's sales staff was contending with real some hurdles, it is not unlike what many people go through on a regular basis. We tell ourselves we can’t possibly get the career we want because we don’t have enough education, the right skill set, connections, too old, too young, too experienced, not enough experience, it’s too hard … a million things that chatter on endlessly in our heads but – and this is a biggie – when you do this, your body, in response, will not disappoint and will put each and every one of your felt emotions on display for the entire world to see.

So, do yourself a favor and choose only the good thoughts.