What are some of your daily delicious habits?  I’d love to hear.  Comment below.

Part 2 of this interview series is all about the blocks that stop us from even taking the time to find our passion-filled work and what to do about it.  I hope you enjoy it!

Dance with Joy,

Leanna Fredrich

Life Coach

“The great tragedy of life is not death, but what dies inside of us while we live.”
— Norman Cousins

“And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful then the risk it took to blossom.”
— Anais Nin

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild
and precious life?”
– Mary Oliver

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” Alan Cohen

Thinking it Through…

Have you ever noticed how often people over forty talk about old age? When I really started listening, old-age conversations were everywhere! For example, I was at my son’s Taekwondo school talking to one of the mom’s. She told me that she had always wanted to take Taekwando but now she was too old. Had she ever noticed the couple attending the same school , in their 70′s, enthusiastically earning their black-belts? She had not, because her beliefs about what you can and can’t do after age forty were blinding her. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that someone was too old to start a business or a new career I would be a very rich woman. I was completely shocked as I had a conversation with a healthy, 40ish woman who said that although she would love to travel she was too old to take those kinds of risks! I’ve heard all kinds of “too old” beliefs… I’m too old to fall in love, enjoy amusement parks, learn a new sport, exercise, go back to school… the list goes on. How sad. It is like dieing before you’re dead!

The truth is as a generation we are living longer. Many of us will live to be well into our 90′s. Do we really want to start playing it small and safe when we have fifty more years of life to go?! The way some people are headed by the time they are in their 60′s they won’t leave their houses. I think it is past time to take a look at our beliefs about aging and get clear on how we wish to use the next 50 years. It is so sad to see people shrink and play it safe at the very time when their lives are full of such potential. Usually during the second half of our lives we have more freedom. Our families are almost raised and on their own, we have a wealth of life experience, we know more about ourselves and the world. This is the time to really come into our own and play big. We need to have adventures, take risks that are meaningful to us, and grow, grow, grow. Live while you’re alive!

Challenge:

1. Where in your life are you playing small?

2. What are your beliefs about getting older?

3. Are your beliefs growing or shrinking you?

4. What new beliefs do you need to adopt in order to live a big, meaningful life ?

Dance with Joy,
Leanna Fredrich
Life Coach

Job-seekers want to know: How do I price myself in this erratic job market? If I set my sights too high in the compensation department, I’ll lose out on opportunities. If I price myself too modestly, I could leave money on the table—and worse, I could lose credibility with employers who won’t value my skills any more highly than I value them myself.

The most common mistake job-seekers make is to price their skills based on their current or most recent comp level. If you’re in a high-paying industry or company, your past or current salary could be the perfect measure of what you’re worth in the market. But if you’re not—if you’ve come from or are still working in one of the many companies paying below-market salaries—you’d be shooting yourself in the foot by relying on your past employer’s assessment of your value. You can do a better job of pricing yourself, than that.

Homeowners use the Web site Zillow.com to gain intelligence about their house’s value. Zillow uses tax records and home-sale data to arrive at house-by-house pricing estimates (called “Zestimates”) that help homeowners make a value argument when nearby comparables are hard to come by. What’s great about Zillow is that the longer the database continues to be populated with new datapoints, the more accurate it becomes.
Where to Look

Job-seekers need a Zillow of their own, to price their skills against the market and leave behind the tired “what my last company paid me” measure. Here are few tools to help the comp-befuddled get a sturdy comp number to guide them in their job-search travels:

• GLASSDOOR.COM is something like Zillow for working people. It uses real-person input to arrive at salary estimates for various jobs as well as reviews of specific employers.

• PAYSCALE.COM is another terrific source for job-by-job salary information, factoring into details such as your location, the school you graduated from, and how long you’ve been on the job. To receive your free report, you’ll have to wade through a spammy page or two hawking online degree programs, but the information is good to have, whether you’re job-seeking or just checking your market rate.

• SALARY.COM is the hoariest of the online salary-data sites, with good information based on Zip Code and job title.

To supplement the online pay-level data you collect, it’s a great idea to check in with a local headhunter or two to make sure your numbers fit the market and those of other candidates with similar backgrounds to yours.

Once you’ve got a number you are comfortable with, you can start to talk confidently with employers about your salary expectations. And you must: Don’t plow through the interview process without having a brass-tacks compensation chat by the end of your second interview round. You’ve got something to sell, and you’ve got to share its cost, the same way your Realtor posts the listing price of your home on the multiple listing service. When you’re selling a house, you can’t take a buyer through the place, chat about the neighborhood, and then ask “What do you think it’s worth?” You’ve got to name your price up front. It’s the same way in a job search—coyness about compensation is not part of the deal.

Often, caught up in the “they like me!” vortex of a fast-moving interview stream, candidates think this way: “I really like what I’m learning about the job; I just hope it pays enough. I won’t bring it up until they do, so that I don’t seem too greedy.” This is a bad way to proceed, because it sets you up to take a job that doesn’t pay your rate. Once you’ve invested time and emotional energy in the selection process, you’re at risk of making a bad decision rather than walking away. That’s bad for your long-term earnings as well as your credibility.
Don’t Play Cat-and-Mouse

Since you’ve taken the time to determine your market value, you’ve to state it—proclaim it, in fact—when you and a potential employer begin to discuss a job offer in earnest.

Some job-seekers play hard-to-get with their salary expectations, waiting for an employer to name its target pay range for a position. They do this so that in case their target pay requirement is $110K and the company has budgeted $115K for the position, once the company lays out its pay scale the candidate can position himself to collect every dime of it—forestalling the risk that the “extra” $5K will be left on the table.

In my view as a former HR exec, this is silly. The odds that your well-researched salary level is far off the mark are low, and the odds that it’s off the mark on the low side are even lower. And besides, if you ask for $110K and get it, what’s to be unhappy about? If your employer is the sort that values talent, all the better for you—there should be promotions and bonuses in your future. Rather than play cat-and-mouse with an employer over the issue of “who speaks first,” I’d advise a job-seeker to say, at the second interview or the phone call inviting him to the second interview, “Shall we talk about comp ranges now? I’d hate to waste your time or mine if we’re not in the ballpark with respect to the salary level.”

With that entree, ninety-nine and a half out of 100 company reps will ask you, “So, how much are you looking for?” You’ll name your number, and let the recruiter or hiring manager react. If you’ve done your homework, you shouldn’t be far out of line from the company’s own expectations. And if you’re too rich for their blood, you wouldn’t want to work there anyway.

Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive. www.lizryan.com

“Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.” JC Hare and A.W. Hare

“Each person has an aptitude born with them. Do your work.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thinking it Through…

One of the things I love to do in my Coaching practice is to help people find their strengths…those unique ways of thinking and creating that they were born with. I have been reading a book called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. One of the concepts in this book that I had not thought much about was the importance of finding your tribe. When you are with your tribe you feel inspired to create, take chances and most of all you feel “at home.” Even if your passion requires a certain amount of solitude you still need a tribe. Martha Beck, a self-help author, has a wonderful group of women writers who she meets with on a regular basis. Freeman Dyson, the physicist says that when he is writing he needs to be alone but when he is actually doing science he welcomes interaction with others. “Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.”

Perhaps you can even discover your passion by looking for the people you love to be around. By noticing their interests and strengths it will be a sign pointing to your own strengths and passions. Watch for the people and activities that fill you with energy and life. So here’s to filling your life with your passions and strengths and having a tribe to keep you inspired!

Challenge:

1. Who belongs to your tribe? What are their characteristics and passions?

2. What are the activities you do where you feel most like yourself?

3. When did you last lose track of time during an activity?

Dance with Joy,
Leanna Fredrich
Life Coach
www.AmazingMondays.com

Here are five reasons to feel better about your job search and shove some of the hype to the back burner:

Earnings Are Over

Lots of companies had to shed workers to improve their fourth-quarter earnings, but plenty of them are finding that they can’t serve customers without bodies on board. Look for more job openings to crop up during the spring.

Training Pays Off

Athletes train for weeks or months before seeing a change in their
results, and then one day hit a new personal best — coaches call it
the Invisible Power Curve. Job-seekers can experience the same thing. The more experience we get interviewing, writing customized cover letters, and researching employers, the better we get at all these things. If we’re learning, then our chance of getting a job improves for each successive position we pursue.

All Job-Seekers Are Not Equal

I look at resumes all day long, and I’m sorry to say that tons of
them are studded with typos and misspellings. That’s a shame for
those candidates, but good for you if you’re the person who watches those picky and critical details.

Your Network Is Growing

If you’re letting old and new friends know about your job search,
your network is growing (even as you sleep!). The more people who know about your job search (and specifically what you’re looking for), the better. It’s frustrating to sit by as weeks and months elapse in your job search, but if you’re cultivating your network,the passing time also builds your cadre of new-job ambassadors.

You Are More Than Your Resume

If the most common refrain of late ’08 was, “Oh no, I’m getting laid
off,” then the second-most-common one has got to be “But I didn’t
love that job, anyway.” A job search is a great way to home in on
what you’re good at and love to do. When you get clear about those two items, you’ll have built the first two legs of your job-search stool. The third leg is the answer to the question “Which of the things I love to do and am good at will employers pay for?”

There’s a lot more to the working world than what’s on your resume already. This is a great time to think about new outlets for your talents. You deserve to have a next job that will do more than pay the bills — don’t you?

by Liz Ryan
lizinboulder@grouply.com