06.05.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:57 pm by Jackie Jones
Make Work.
Those used to be two of the worst words any employee ever wanted to hear. They meant work that was not meaningful but kept you busy and out of your boss’ hair.
Make Work was for people who had no future within the company. Make Work was for people hanging on until retirement.
With the unemployment inching up from 9.0 to 9.1 percent in May and reports suggesting the longer one is out of work the harder it gets to find work, it is time to give Make Work a new meaning.
As the child of Depression era parents, my folks could always find a way to come up with some extra cash. There was always some chore people were willing to pay you for, some skill that you could perform at a reduced rate.
Surely, some of you know a mechanic who works on cars in his yard on the weekends and charges less than the gas station or the dealership, or the house painter who comes in his off hours and may take a week to paint something that could normally be painted in a day – but you can’t turn down the price.
You may not have to resort to hard labor, but there are things you can do for a small fee that will give you some extra gas money or cover the monthly cable bill – or maybe even result in a new career for you.
It may not be a Eureka! moment, but the things you wish existed to make life more convenient or services you wish your employer or some other company provided could well be the incentive you need to take the lead and figure out how to make them happen and execute them.
Even if you are securely employed at the moment, it never hurts to think about the Next Big Thing and how you could have a piece of it, instead of watching or reading about it in the news and saying to yourself: “Now, why didn’t I think of that?”
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05.19.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:59 pm by Jackie Jones
When I keep hearing the same message from different sources, in different ways or in some seemingly coincidental way, I know it’s time to pay attention.
I was speaking with my coach last week – yes, coaches have coaches – and she encouraged me to keep setting up the kind of live events that I love doing, whether there are only five people or 50 people in attendance.
At my prosperity class last night, the speaker’s message was to decide what it is you want to do, then just keep working to make it happen and things will come together to assist you.
When I got home, I listened to an encore webinar and what did the speaker say? Do what you love. Don’t worry about the how; don’t worry about the money; just get busy.
Okaaaaay. Is the universe sending me a clear message about what I need to do next?
This morning was the clincher. I flipped the page on my Wayne Dyer “The Power of Intention” calendar and the day’s message was: “Love what you do and do what you love. It’s that simple.”
Fortunately, I was already on track. I’ve got two forums coming and more to come. I love what I do and nothing makes me happier than to see people get their careers on track.
I like to bring resources together to help people get the help they need to get started and to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses. It’s easy and natural to me, so why wouldn’t I keep doing it? I am doing what I love.
But before I started doing what I loved, I had to learn to love what I was doing beforehand. Journalism has been good to me. It helped me develop as a writer, to become a discerning reporter, to develop my management skills. I still may have become a career coach without being a journalist first, but it was because I immersed myself in the field and studied the craft that I honed the skills that have translated into making me a successful coach.
So if you’re not doing what you love right now, learn to love it. Figure out what that job is teaching you that can help you on the next step of your journey. Show your workplace some love and it will start loving you back. Really. Dedicate yourself to being the best you can be and watch how much more comfortable you are at the task at hand, how it can lead to other responsibilities and how you can build your resume.
When you move to the next step you’ll feel smarter, more confident and better able to draw the roadmap that will take you where you want to go.
If you love what you do, you will do what you love.
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If you’re in the D.C. area, you may be interested in this upcoming event:
NAIL YOUR WINNING LOOK
When: Thursday, June 2, 3-6 p.m.
Where: Halcyon Salon – 1326 Eighth Street NW, Washington, DC 20001
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Your look, your resume, social media profiles and networking skills speak volumes about you as a professional. Make sure you are the total package from your hair to your resume when you go for your next job, promotion or small business start-up loan.
Join Halcyon Salon and Jones Coaching for afternoon tea, and learn a knockout strategy. You have nothing to lose, yet everything to gain by attending!
SPEAKERS:
Jackie Jones – The director of Jones Coaching shows you how to make your resume and cover letter stand out, translate the hidden meaning behind tricky interview questions and how to best use networking events that get recruiters and employers to pursue you.
James Walker – The founder of Walker PR Prescriptions says everyone needs a digital strategy, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn , a blog or a newsletter – but probably not all of them. Identify the right media strategy and expand your employment options.
Rev. Charlette Manning – Your resume may say fit and energetic, but does the person who walks into an employer’s office look as good in person as on paper? Employers say you needn’t be young, but you must be youthful. Let your spirit guide you into action.
Krista Riddley – Find out what a personal trainer can do for you. Riddley, founder of Imagine Me Fitness and a competitive figure posing athlete, explains the benefits of exercise and training for health as well as good looks.
Space is limited. Refer someone or register today.
Registration: Only $40 per person. Call Halcyon Salon at (202) 483-1326 or at www.jonescoaching.net. Just go to the registration page and look for Nail Your Professional Look.
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05.13.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:49 am by Jackie Jones
When I bought my home 14 years ago, I remember the negotiations with the sellers. The house had been on the market for close to a year with no takers and it was priced higher than other homes in the area, although it was a nice place that would need some work.
When my agent submitted the counter-offer to the couple, the wife was offended. She was adamant she would not lower the price.
That’s fine, my agent told her, pointing out how long the house had been on the market.
“If six months from now this house still hasn’t moved, will you be able to say it was worth it not to come down on price?”
That couple needed to sell. They were building another house and needed the money from the sale. The thought of another six months and possibly carrying two mortgages through much of it finally pushed them into negotiating.
It is in those moments when you dig in your heels and refuse to budge or are on the verge of making a major investment when you suddenly freeze up that you have to take a deep breath and ask yourself how you will feel in six months if you don’t take action today.
It’s all too easy to not spend money on training or to avoid taking on added responsibility or talk yourself out of applying for a promotion. You want a new car, or a much-deserved vacation. That class is just getting in the way of what you’re feeling.
But it’s all about priorities. Six months from now, when the new car smell is gone and the glow of the vacation has worn off, will you feel better about not being any closer to what you want to do with your career?
Whatever you decide to do, just be sure you can live with the consequences.
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04.27.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:01 pm by Jackie Jones
Somewhere, early in our school careers, we became fearful of asking the stupid question.
Somewhere we found out that even though teachers, bosses, friends would say, “there is no such thing as a stupid question,” there really was and the person who asked it suffered complete humiliation.
So we only ask questions in a safe environment, suffer in silence because we don’t want anyone to hear our doubts, lack of confidence or the question we fear may be stupid because we think everyone else knows the answer except us.
It doesn’t have to be that hard.
With more than 30 years of journalism under my belt, I had to get past the fear of asking the stupid question. When a source implied I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room, my reply would be: I may not get it, but I’m not likely to be the only one and if I can’t understand it I can’t get it down accurately. Would you like to be misrepresented?
If your company is undergoing change, ask why. Ask what it will mean to you and your colleagues. Ask what it will mean to the company’s bottom line. Ask why the change and why now. After all, it is your career. You have a right to know.
If you feel you are being passed over for consideration for a position you have long worked toward, ask why. Ask if you can submit a pitch?
In fact, before that day comes, ask your superiors what attributes they want from someone in that position. Ask who are the people who succeed in that job and throughout the company.
Maybe you will find that this isn’t the job/company/career for you. Maybe you will find out that the image you thought you were projecting to your bosses is not the one they received. Maybe you will find out that they were completely unaware of your interests. If that’s the case, ask how that could have happened and what you can do to make sure they know in what direction you would like to take your career.
As one of my granddaughters told my son when he was having trouble in a store finding Sruncis and barrettes for her hair, “It’s not that hard, Daddy. Ask somebody.”
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04.14.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:26 pm by Jackie Jones
Knowing when to leave
Go while the going is good
Knowing when to leave can be the smartest thing anyone can learn
Go!
(“Knowing When to Leave,” comp. Burt Bacharach)
Whenever it’s time to bail out of a situation, my mind gets flooded with good-bye songs.
When my clients tell me they are bored, feel stuck, don’t-really-hate-but-don’t-really-like their jobs, I very nearly burst into song – which would be really bad for business.
But I digress.
You don’t have to be completely miserable to know that it’s time to leave a job.
In a feature on Oprah.com (http://bit.ly/ebjQzt), Ronna Lichtenberg lists six signs that it is time to move on:
1) It’s not the pay; no amount of money could make the job worthwhile.
2) You feel your contribution is not valued.
3) You could do this job in your sleep and are not learning anything new.
4) Your bosses don’t seem to see you as someone with a future at the company.
5) You hate your boss, but can’t stop thinking about him or the job.
6) Who you are at work bears no resemblance to who you are outside of it.
The universe hears your misery and, sooner or later, a solution emerges. In this economy, though, it often comes with a buyout package or a layoff notice before you are ready to make the shift.
If your job is not the right one, start making a plan to either make it a better job by figuring out changes that can make what you do more enjoyable; put yourself at a competitive advantage for a yourself for a more desirable position, or identify what it is you really want to do – even if it is outside of the company – and build a strategy to go after it.
The conventional wisdom has always been that it is easier to find a job if you have one. Being employed demonstrates experience, reliability, responsibility and commitment. Now all an employer wants to know is if you can do all that for her.
And look at leaving as a gift to someone else. You may be tired of the job you have right now, but there is somebody out there who would love to have it. Preparing yourself for the next move also gives you an opportunity to pay it forward by creating an opening for someone who could flourish in the job you’ve outgrown.
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03.30.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:32 pm by Jackie Jones
I am usually not one to agree with Phyllis Schlafly, but in an interview on Michel Martin’s “Tell Me More” (http://n.pr/iihjBp), the anti-feminist icon said a few things that made me sit up and take notice.
My primary beef with Schlafly had always been that while she attacked the feminist movement, which sought equality in the workplace, she was living a life of which many feminists dreamed. When Schlafly argued the movement tried to make men “irrelevant” and that women ought to be home taking care of the children, she in fact had a solid marriage and a career outside the home.
In the interview with Martin, Schlafly said she never sought to tell anyone how to live her life and acknowledged that she had had a delightfully rich life in pretty much every sense of the word. She just didn’t try to do it all at once.
“I am a sequential woman,” Schlafly said.
At 86, Schlafly has written more than 20 books, earned master’s and law degrees, run for political office and been a conservative darling for her anti-feminist stance.
So she is proof positive that one can have it all. She just didn’t try to have it all at once. She went to school; she got married; she worked; she had children and stayed home to raise them; she went back to school; she had a working life once her kids were off to college, and she continues to be active and vibrant.
Rather than feeling she had to make a choice between a domestic life or a professional one, Schlafly says she managed to have both by not embracing what she contends is the feminist notion that marriage and child-rearing are oppressive and fail to make the best use of women’s talent.
“Feminists have been led to believe this is not a desirable life,” Schlafly said.
I never quite took that away from the feminist movement’s message. I chose to see it as having choice to do whatever one wished, whenever one was ready to do it. I suspect Schlafly wouldn’t disagree with that, only that you need a movement to do it.
“I think it’s made women unhappy, believing that we live in a discriminatory society and they should look to government to solve all their problems.”
What has most likely made women – and men, by extension – unhappy is the notion that we should try to do and have it all at once. Some of that is fostered by workplace rules that make it hard for women to return to work after having children -especially if they stayed at home for any significiant amount of time.
Schlafly found a way to make it work and her suggestion is that any of us could find a more fulfilling life if we kept our own counsel and forged ahead, not influenced by any particular person, group or movement.
To that extent, she and I are in agreement. It is easy to let yourself be pulled down by a naysayer or find someone to blame for your inability to move or make a decision.
The only real question is, how are you going to map out your strategy for each stage of your life and order your priorities?
Being “sequential,” may indeed be the way to have it all.
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03.21.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:27 pm by Jackie Jones
I teach a media writing class at Howard University. Today, I invited a speaker to help the students set up blogs, which will be used the rest of the semester to help students learn how to embed audio and video and design a message that will attract readers.
One late-comer came in and saw her classmates gathered around a computer, as the speaker led them through the steps to set up a blog. The late student looked panicked.
“Do we have to use Tumblr?” she asked. “I gave up Tumblr for Lent.”
Oh well, there’s always WordPress.
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03.17.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:48 am by Jackie Jones
I recently engaged in conversation on one of my many listserves about whether it is impossible to turn off all the electronic, digital, social media elements of my life for vacation – or even a day.
The hardest part, I noted, is all the stuff you have to wade through and clean up upon your return. You almost need a day after vacation to weed through it. And it’s not the fear of missing something as much as it is the fear that there will be way too much junk to toss.
It’s like raking leaves. Do you wait until all the leaves have fallen to get them up or just do a little every week through the season?
I signed up for one of those filtering services that supposedly separate good from bad e-mails. Now I just have another folder to sift through because it doesn’t always obey the “always allow this sender” comand.
And a lot of people don’t even read the e-mail “away” notice or listen to the phone message that says I am gone and will not be checking messages. If I had a dollar for every time someone left a message that started, “I know you said you’re not checking messages, but just in case…,” I could afford to take more vacations.
There have been some studies that say people like me are simply addicted. One poster on the list said he read a study that said some people continue to hear or feel their cellphones vibrate, even when they are not carrying them.
Now that’s system overload.
Still – it’s good to take a break, even if just for a few hours.
I no longer keep my laptop in my bedroom. I don’t carry my cell phone around in the house. I use the landline. I have reserved Sunday as the day that I do not take client calls.
So it’s possible to let it go. Business is important and we are in an age of constant contact, 24-7 news cycles and all kinds of intriguing information online – not to mention catching up with multiple friends simultaneously through Facebook and Twitter. But sometimes you just have to shut it down.
Kindles are wonderful if you’re traveling, but there is something soothing about sitting and turning pages in a book. Reading a real newspaper while having my morning coffee is a habit I am not ready to surrender.
No matter how long or short, those quiet moments when I don’t need electronics create a space for calm and reflection.
What would happen if you decided to turn everything off and let it go?
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03.06.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:24 am by Jackie Jones
I was at the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters’ annual awards dinner on Friday and got a birdseye view of what can happen when you follow your heart instead of the script.
Comedian Sherri Shepherd was the program’s emcee and she was delightfully funny, witty and wicked. Just before the honorees were awarded, the entertainment portion began. This year, three R&B divas hit the stage with mini-sets of three songs each.
First up was Regina Belle, who can still wow the crowd. She was followed by Chrisette Michele, who has belting range that is just beginning to be tapped.
That was enough to make the audience happy – at least until Fantasia Barrino came out.
The band started playing, Fantasia thanked the crowd and opened her mouth to sing. Then she stopped and told the band: “I’m sorry. I’m not going to do that one. I’m changing up.”
What happened next was like being in a sportscar that went from a dead stop to 60 in a matter of seconds.
“All right,” Fantasia told the crowd. “Y’all know what time it is.”
She exhorted the crowd, which had been sitting, dining and talking for nearly two hours, to get up and work it out with her and launched the band into “Rock Steady (What It Is),” a song made famous by Aretha Franklin.
Fantasia kicked off her shoes, ran down the steps from the stage and waded out into the audience and urged people to get up, dance and sing and they obliged her.
Fantasia sang with a sense of urgency, dancing, sweating, shouting like no one was watching. Music, she told the crowd, is what gets her through the tough times, makes the daily grind more manageable. She took “Purple Rain” and made it her own.
She could have eased into the set, cooed and wooed the audience, teased them with a taste of good music, a hint of her vocal power, but Fantasia opted to go full tilt.
Her gamble paid off. The crowd was up groovin’ and singing along right down to the high register “Oooooh. Ooo. Ooo. Ooo. Ooo,” of “Purple Rain.”
Sometimes you just have to go with what you know. Fantasia turned the sedate, black-tie audience into an enthusiastic party crowd, but I was struck more by her ability to seize the moment and go with what she knew worked.
The mark of success is knowing what people want, what they need and delivering it, quickly and efficiently.
Those who work that well increase their value to their companies and/or create opportunities for themselves. Of course, you weigh your options before taking the plunge, but a bold move may be just the jump start you’re looking for.
Next time your gut is steering you away from a project or into a different way of proceeding with a plan, go for it. It’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
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02.25.11
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:26 am by Jackie Jones
Spritual adviser Wayne Dyer always says – and I paraphrase here – if you change the way you look at the world, the world you look at changes.
I just got back from a trip to the University of Mississippi. It was my first trip to the university and to the state and it taught me a lot about resisting the urge to blame a book by its cover.
Ole Miss is coming up on the 50th anniversary next year of the admission of James Meredith, the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, and the resistance by the governor and many residents to keep it from happening.
The university and the state have a history marred by problematic race relations, to put it very mildly, and some people continue to see them both as illustrative of racial intolerance.
But Ole Miss has changed and so, too, has Mississippi.
African Americans and other people of color have held elective office and high positions in commerce and academia throughout the state. The editor in chief of the Jackson Clarion Ledger newspaper is a black man. The flaghsip university’s former chancellor was Lebanese.
Students are afraid neither of the university’s past nor for its future.
“What I like about Ole Miss,” one student told me, “is it isn’t afraid to talk about its past.”
“We can show the world that Ole Miss is different now,” another student said.
Journalism students at the university no longer see the world in black and white, and armed with the understanding of the past they can look at the state’s present and project its future.
Guided by a former newspaper editor and other faculty members, a group of students spent a semester looking at the state’s Delta region and some of its persistent problems and what is being done to address them. The Delta project (http://bit.ly/eSJOCy) has won high praise from academics and professionals alike.
What may be more important, however, is that the students learned, and their readers by extension, is that no matter how dismal a situation seems, it can always get better through highlighting the problem, identifying problem-solvers or just provoking discussion.
We don’t have to be stuck unless we choose to be. We don’t have to be defined by the way others see us. We can chart our own course and be true to the way we wish to be (re)defined. That doesn’t mean we ignore problems and challenges. It just means we can control them instead of letting them control us.
Ole Miss once stood for racial intolerance. Now it stands for what can be accomplished through cooperation.
If it can change course, so can you.
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