Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachelle J. Canter, PhD, has a doctorate in psychology and is President of RJC Associates, a consulting firm that provides career, executive, and team development services to corporations, professional service firms, and other organizations. She has spoken and written widely on career, executive, and organizational development issues.

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Praise for Make The Right Career Move

"Make the Right Career Move is a wonderful guide for the new age professional. This book will help you execute one of the most important decisions in your life and includes practical tips that you will use for the rest of your career."
―Marshall Goldsmith, bestselling author of The Leader of the Future and What Got You Here Won't Get You There

"This great new book will help thousands of businesspeople find not only a new job, but a satisfying career. This book is filled with practical tools and exercises that will help the reader identify what they really want from their career, write a winning resume, and, most important of all, position themselves for the job."
―Victoria Husted Medvec, Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management and Organizations Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University Executive Director of the Center for Executive Women

"This is the book that all busy executives need―an indispensable guide to finding your ideal job and getting it―all in a short, action-oriented package. I highly recommend this book."
―Les Guliasi, Director, Governmental Relations, Pacific Gas & Electric Company

"I have been waiting for a comprehensive and relevant guide to careers that I can recommend to my clients, candidates, and colleagues. Make the Right Career Move provides an up-to-date approach to navigating careers in our ever-changing and challenging workplace."
―Eunice Azzani, Senior Client Partner, Korn/Ferry International

"In my many years working in the career field, here is the first book that guides attorneys and executives on making the right move to their next job, career, or board position. It's action-oriented, quick-to-read, and it's not bogged down with theory. It provides tested, practical tools to help readers get their dream job."
―Martha Fay Africa, Managing Director and cofounder, Major, Lindsey & Africa

Aus dem Klappentext

Successful but not satisfied? Displaced? Outplaced? Downsized? Bored? Starting out and not sure where to go? Make the Right Career Move shows you how to identify, find, and land your dream job. This all-in-one career guide shares secrets, tips, and branding and positioning tools taken from a leading career coach's two decades spent helping executives, attorneys, professionals, and other job-seekers find their dream jobs. Long on practical tools and short on theory, this action-oriented guide can be read in less than a single cross-country plane trip.

The ability to use strategic marketing and positioning tactics to leverage your experience and other professional assets is an elusive but essential skill for finding your dream job. Make the Right Career Move provides job seekers with the skills they need to beat the competition, including:

• A step-by-step method for creating the perfect resume
• Tools to help you create competitive advantages
• Case studies of real executives' job searches
• An action plan for getting the right interview with the right organization

Written for people with little time who need to make a big impact, this book provides techniques for creating a powerful, accomplishment-oriented resume, organizing a successful job search, and getting the most from your network. This book demonstrates new ways to use traditional and new job search tools, including the Internet and online networking, to increase job search effectiveness and efficiency.

Everyone should love what they do for a living and if they don't they should make a change. This practical, prescriptive guide shows you how to find a job that will be rewarding. Make the Right Career Move covers all the job search essentials in one volume that's perfect for the busy lifestyle and time pressure that job seekers face each day. Follow this fast-track curriculum to find your dream job in record time.

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Make the Right Career Move

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Secret: The major obstacle to your dream job is in your head.

The primary obstacle to a successful job search lies within, in limited and limiting self-perceptions about your career. A positive mind-set about your career possibilities is essential to finding a top job. Most executives perceive job search obstacles as external: a poor economy, the resistance of employers and search consultants to putting an executive into a different job or industry, an underdeveloped network. This is wrong. The biggest obstacle to a successful career move is internal-a failure of imagination. Change your beliefs to change your future.

How do you go from the top to more? First, dispense with the idea that the process begins with "doing," at least in the traditional sense of taking action. Finding inspiration and passion is a psychological and spiritual journey. It requires getting rid of the primary obstacles that block us from achieving our dreams. Those obstacles are in the most unexpected place: the stories we tell.

Collective Explanations

Sometimes, limiting stories are widely shared. Have you ever noticed that when people say "The truth is ..." what follows is always some kind of limitation or obstacle? "The truth is" restricts what is or could be. "The truth is ... there are just no opportunities for advertising executives these days." "The truth is ... the only way to get ahead in high tech is to be utterly ruthless and use others to advance your own career." "The truth is ... good guys finish last."

Evidence for this limiting point of view abounds. Dramatic stories about people losing jobs and finding nothing to replace them sell newspapers. Horror stories about bad bosses and bad markets fill magazines and talk shows. An embittered friend, neighbor, or relative eagerly shares the scars of a particularly bad work experience. A burned-out colleague opts for early retirement and quits the game altogether. Self-help books use scare tactics to sell the one right way to avoid career disaster.

The point is that these "truth"-ful explanations are collective versions of stories about limitations and obstacles. They have the effect of discouraging effort and preventing achievement and success.

Individual Success and Failure Stories

The stories that limit us are both individual and collective: Stories about the way the world is are one form of limiting belief; stories about our own successes and failures are another.

The stories we tell can empower or disempower us. People who attribute their successes to their own efforts or abilities-things they can control-strive harder and longer, feel greater pride in their achievements, and find greater success. Those who attribute their failures (or successes) to outside influences such as luck or the situation have a diminished sense of power and less motivation to strive or persist because things that dictate successful and unsuccessful outcomes are beyond their control.

The empowering and disempowering stories we tell are an appropriate place to begin the journey to find a dream job. We drag around our pasts in the form of justifications, excuses, and baggage that explains how we got where we are and why we cannot go further, be more, or enjoy more than we do. When our future is limited by our past and its stories, it can be no bigger or richer than the limited possibilities of that past.

Listen to a story about a client of mine whose experiences illustrate this.

The Pre-CEO Story: The Story of George

I knew within 10 minutes of meeting George that he had all the makings of the CEO he aspired to be. He was smart, articulate, optimistic, polished, driven but calm. He had excellent interpersonal skills and well-honed financial and operating expertise. He had a great sense of humor. His complaint? He was 44 and had not been CEO.

As George saw it, he had made choices in favor of his family, not his career. He had chosen to raise his children in a small town. He had selected a position that required minimal commute time. And most important, he had chosen to spend time with his wife and young children. He was glad for the time he had spent with his family but worried that his greatest career ambitions had been thwarted.

Halfway through our meeting, George began to reiterate the reasons he hadn't been a CEO yet, when I interrupted him, saying, "Drop the story, George. You had good reasons for the decisions you made. You won't have that time again with your wife and kids. Now you're ready to make new decisions. Drop the story. It isn't serving you."

My words startled him, but he instantly knew that repeating this story was actually sapping his energy and focus and keeping him from realizing his dreams.

Dropping the story and focusing on how to identify and find his dream job put him very quickly into a new industry he longed to join and on a fast track to the CEO he has now become.

Prior success may create its own limiting story. George's success led him to conclude that the best of his career was behind him, that he had had his one big shot at success and missed it. His story about how his focus on his family had cost him the chance to realize his career dreams threatened to keep his dreams permanently out of reach. These stories supported inaction and were in danger of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.

Identify Your Stories

Many highly successful executive clients seek help, feeling dispirited, burned out, fed up, trapped. Their sights are limited and their energy and enthusiasm sapped. Many doubt their considerable abilities.

The prospect of fulfilling and enjoyable work seems remote. Inspiring work seems unattainable. They'd settle for work that isn't, as they've variously described it, "soulless," "mind-numbing," or "gut-wrenching." That's not good enough, and that's not what this book is about.

You cannot go straight from despair or dissatisfaction to inspiration. Finding your dream job is a process, similar to clearing a site before laying the foundation. You must clear the mental underbrush of limiting stories about your career before you can envision your own possibilities.

What stories do you tell yourself and others about your own successes and failures? How do these interpretations of the past limit your aspirations, inspirations, and efforts? Do you have a story about not being good enough to succeed, so that eventually and inevitably you screw things up after an initial success? Do you have a story about your being a plodder whose success is entirely due to working harder than anyone else? Is your story about how you peaked at 16, in a haze of student leadership and popularity contests? What are you getting out of these stories? What are the stories costing you?

Behavior is controlled by its consequences. You wouldn't continue to tell your stories if they weren't eliciting some positive results, even if you are not consciously aware of those results. What positive outcomes are provided by telling the stories? Sympathy or admiration for your struggles? A way to avoid the risks or efforts necessary to pursue your dreams? A sense of...