The Career and Business Cobbler
By now, most everyone knows that retirement from one company in which you start, work your way up, and end up retired with the Golden Parachute no longer exists. Besides, if you’re an ADDer like me, you would not have the patience to stick with anything that long – at least working for someone else.
Now working for myself, that’s another story.
Today, many of us are “cobbling” our careers together with skills and talents that we joyfully love to use in a field that rings our bell or that we are fascinated with. If we are successful, it’s because we not only love it and have done our homework, we have also found a niche where our cobbled together business or career is of value to others – preferably a lot of others.
Someone said to me once, “Shell, you have to keep reinventing yourself to keep from getting bored.” WOW, how true is that? For me reinventing myself, means always considering the possibility that I have something new to offer of value. Then it is about having the confidence to actually offer that service or use a skill that I suddenly realized I’m great at and get a kick out of using. Like being an interviewer!! Why hide? So I continue to cobble.
Getting to the point where we can cobble a career together means acknowledging that there are only a few skills we love to use frequently because they are fun to use at any given time. Then we rearrange them so the skill that is the most fun at any given time is being utilized the most during our day.
For me now it is communicating via coaching – uplifting – motivating others – using humor to help others make a shift – using my creativity at every turn, brainstorming, researching and, of course, writing… you get the idea.
It also means taking a little of this and a little of that from my background and having the confidence to use what I love in my work and to say “NO” to the rest. Oh, and I’m about to enter a new “field” of fascination – the healing arts, which is truly an extension of what I’ve been doing all along.
The first step to cobbling a career is to be clear about what you love, no matter how disjointed your various talents/skills may seem to be. What I’ve found over the years is that they always, almost magically come together to form a service or career that someone (or a lot of someones) need.
So as the Focus Blueprint promises – once you have it, you have the foundation – a true foundation from which to cobble.
If you are interested in chatting more about laying that foundation for yourself, simply send an email to shell.mendelson@gmail.com or go to www.shellmendelson.com and use the pop up to schedule a convenient time for you.