CareerSherpas: Climbing the Mountain

Peter Fitzgerald is chronicling his process of navigating from losing his job to a new and brighter tomorrow. To read other posts from the series, see “Job Transition: A CareerSherpas’ Odyssey”.

Day 1

A side-effect of having so many people interested in helping is being really, really busy. This is a good thing.

Day 1 included responding to emails and calls, making more calls and sending more emails to new leads and generally trying to keep my head above water. The time flew by and the activity kept my spirits up. By the time I ended my day (a little early due to a school open house) I had somewhere in the realms of two dozen contacts sent and around a dozen connections made with people I didn’t know two days before.

I got to talking with my brother in the evening who made the observation that I was as busy out of work as I had been with the high workloads I’d been under in the days before.

Lessons from Day 1:

• Keep up with communications: The prioritized list you were working from is still your friend, but you’ll likely be adding to it rapidly.
• All leads are good leads: No matter how strange a possibility may look, it’s work pursuing.

(Since I’m a little behind, Day 2 will be arriving shortly.)

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, looking for a new day job, connecting individuals with ideas and opportunities, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.

Sadly chaotic life events, exceptional workloads and strange stresses have kept me from writing for a while. Thankfully things seem to be starting to balance out, giving me a chance to catch up where I left off!

New posts are right around the corner, including a new post shortly today!

As always, please keep the comments coming!

So far this year I’ve looked at a couple of habits that make sense to form, but how about we take a break and talk about some ideas on how to form those habits?

Forming long-term habits is not an easy task, and there are many ways in which your hard-won gains can be derailed. At the same time, forming a habit is just another goal that you’re setting yourself. There are a couple of really consistent goal setting techniques that help to kick start your habit forming campaign:

• Make sure you have some way to track progress: Without some kind of progress chart it’s easy to lose sight of how far you’ve come or how far you need to go. There are lots of options, from the mundane to the esoteric. You can go from something as simple as a calendar or notepad with tally marks to something more complicated like a goals management program or checklist like my personal favorite Joe’s Goals.
• Make your commitment known to someone: Whether you’re posting your new habit forming goal to a blog or a community, talking about it with a friend, co-worker or spouse, or standing on a street corner yelling it to the sky, sharing makes you accountable to someone else. Sharing with someone who’ll check in on your habit forming activities or call out when you’re slipping works best, but even if the person doesn’t care you get some psychological prodding from seeing that person (or place) on a regular basis.

So prepare yourself for success and set in motion a plan to take on at least one new, positive habit for the year.

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, conducting high-level business analysis, connecting individuals with ideas and opportunities, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.