Richard Maun

Author: moderncareers

  • Yes – You Can Get A Job!

    Keep going... to get a gold medal and a job!
    Keep going… to get a gold medal and a job!

    All it requires is for you to be persistent, have faith (that you will succeed) and get some quality support. Too many people rely on luck and this week I was reminded about the difference support can make.

    A client of mine called Paul secured a new job. Big hooray for Paul… he’s a star performer and proves the case that there is a job out there if you really want it.

    Paul made sure he was targeting jobs that matched his CV, he worked hard preparing for interviews and he always asked for feedback. He was also big enough to accept the feedback and act on it, which was a crucial step to being successful.

    After one particular interview he was given a piece of feedback that didn’t make sense so he called me and we worked through it and it turned out that a worry ‘out of his awareness’ was creeping in to affect his language and posture.

    Although the effect was subtle the outcome for the interviewer was to feel uncomfortable…and of course Paul then didn’t get the job.

    We contracted for coaching time and used Skype to ‘meet up’ …and after a few sessions had nailed the problem (using some nifty insights from Transactional Analysis) and in consequence Paul’s interview performance soared.

    Is there a ‘moral’ here?

    Well, I’m always amazed by people who trust to luck to get a job. In my view they’re just kidding themselves and causing undue stress to their family. (Many don’t really want a job and prefer to stay stuck).

    I’m also sure that there’s a job out there for us all… if we can be bothered to work hard enough to get it.

    Paul has been chasing work for several months and his success didn’t some quickly – but it did come.

    And it came because he was able to accept feedback and work with a professional coach to help fine tune his performance.

    What I learned was that Skype is an excellent way to get coaching support and so it doesn’t matter where you are in the world… you can get ahead with a coach.

    If you really want a job or have a problem that needs solving I’m now only a mouse click away. And I like that… as it’s a very cost effective, time efficient way to support people.

  • Five Time Management Tips

    You can play first and work second. It's human nature!
    You can play first and work second. It's human nature!

    I taught a lively group of post-grads the other week and the theme of the lecture was ‘time management’. This is of course nonsense, as we can no more ‘manage time’ than we can knit soap.

    We can make use of time, we can fritter it away, or we can use it to drink sherry in. But we can’t manage it… what we have to do is manage ourselves.

    At the end of the work I offered my top five tips to manage ourselves more productively and here they are again, in all their sparkly glory:

    1) Notice when you work best and make sure you’re productive during those hours. For example, I work best towards the end of the day so I make sure I do all my ‘bitty’ admin tasks at the start of the day and big projects at the end, when I’m more settled and can think clearly.

    2) Don’t fight your kid. If the excitable little child inside you wants to go and play then let him/her our for some fresh air. Often if we force ourselves to work when we want to play we just fritter the time anyway, or work more slowly. (This is called ‘being rebellious’ and we all do it).

    3) Say ‘not at this time’ or ‘not yet’ if you’re asked to do something for someone else and you’re busy. That’s easier than a blank ‘no’, which people can find hard to say.

    4) Less is more! Write a short to-do list which you can achieve in the next four hours. Stick to it and then pull something forward from tomorrow, if you have time at the end. That’s more satisfying that always pushing things back, like a snow plough.

    5) Write it all down. Keeping things in your head just fills an already crowded space. Have a list of lists if you like. I favour Post-It notes and keep a pile of scribbly actions on my desk. I don’t mind that they’re messy. All I mind is that they’re there! Writing things down saves memory and means we can organise and shuffle and reorder the things we need to do. That’s much harder to achieve when they’re all in our head and as the old adage runs; if you can see it, you can sort it.

    Life doesn’t have to be complicated and making effective use of time is built on having a methodical process for organising our day… and the self awareness to know when we’re productive and when we’re fooling ourselves.

    What do you need to do differently this week, in order to make better use of your time?