Career Coaching & Mentorship
Running On All Cylinders – Doing What You Were Always Meant To Do
Our founder has always loved reading. It is one of his great passions. As a child he would enter competitions over the summer to see who could read the most books. This passion includes spending many years reading history, news, biographies, success, business, self help, websites, and other non-fiction sources. This includes books about finding one’s purpose in life, career guidance books and websites. This is also discussed in detail on the Leadership Expertise page. The video for the book below Do What You Are: Discover The Perfect Career For You Through The Secrets of Personality Type speaks about finally finding what you were always meant to do which uses all your talents, strengths and abilities.
What Color Is Your Parachute – The Flower Exercise
The best exercise he has ever found is called The Flower Exercise from the book What Color Is Your Parachute. It is particularly helpful because it looks at all aspects and implications of one’s chosen career or business and not just one singular area. The official website for the book is parachutebook.com.
What Color Is Your Parachute? is the world’s most popular job-hunting guide. This completely updated edition features the latest resources, strategies, and perspectives on today’s job market, revealing surprising advice on what works—and what doesn’t—so you can focus your efforts on tactics that yield results.
At its core is Richard N. Bolles’s famed Flower Exercise, a unique self-inventory that helps you design your career—and your life—around your key passions, transferable skills, traits, and more.
This practical manual also provides essential tips for writing impressive resumes and cover letters, networking effectively, interviewing with confidence, and negotiating the best salary possible.
Whether you’re searching for your first job, were recently laid off, or are dreaming of a career change, What Color Is Your Parachute? will guide you toward a fulfilling and prosperous life’s work.
Do What You Are
Another favorite is Do What You Are: Discover The Perfect Career For You Through The Secrets of Personality Type.
Do What You Are—the bestselling classic that has helped more than a million people find truly satisfying work—is now updated for the modern workforce. With the global economy’s ups and downs, the advent of astonishing new technology, the migration to online work and study, and the ascendancy of mobile communication, so much has changed in the American workplace since this book’s fifth edition was published in 2014.
What hasn’t changed is the power of Personality Type to help people achieve job satisfaction. This updated edition, featuring 30% new material, is especially useful for millennials and baby boomers who are experiencing midlife career switches, and even those looking for fulfillment in retirement. This book will lead you through the step-by-step process of determining and verifying your Personality Type. Then you’ll learn which occupations are popular with each Type, discover helpful case studies, and get a full rundown of your Type’s work-related strengths and weaknesses.
Focusing on each Type’s strengths, Do What You Are uses workbook exercises to help you customize your job search, get the most out of your current career, obtain leadership positions, and ensure that you achieve the best results in the shortest period of time.
Now Discover Your Strengths
Now Discover Your Strengths is also a very useful book in order to discover one’s strengths.
The original publication of Now, Discover Your Strengths in 2001 launched a worldwide strengths revolution. To date, more than 20 million people have discovered their strengths, and tens of thousands more are discovering theirs every week. Gallup Press has published numerous strengths-based books, and Gallup Strengths Center has become a worldwide destination for strengths-based development.
Since the book’s release, Gallup has continued to dedicate countless hours to developing our strengths science, the brainchild of the late Dr. Donald O. Clifton, who was named Father of Strengths-Based Psychology by the American Psychological Association. Part of that investment resulted in Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 — a refined upgrade of the original assessment for discovering your strengths.
To ensure that you have the best possible experience in discovering and developing your strengths, we have made Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 available to those who purchase the 20th anniversary edition of Now, Discover Your Strengths.
The updated assessment includes new reports and resources, including the Strengths Insight and Action-Planning Guide. This guide goes far beyond the standardized reports of the older assessment by providing you with personalized insight statements unique to your specific combination of strengths.
These highly customized Strengths Insights are an in-depth analysis of your top five strengths. They describe who you are in astonishing detail and provide you with a comprehensive understanding of yourself, your strengths and what makes you stand out.
These updated resources, in combination with the 20th anniversary edition of Now, Discover Your Strengths, give you the best opportunity to soar with your strengths — at work and in your life.
Leading By Example
The summer 2022 blockbuster movie Top Gun Maverick is a story about using one's experience to mentor the next generation and overcoming one's fears and shortcomings while leading by example. See Serfdome Mission page.
Movie Synopsys: “After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy’s top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick’s late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose”. Facing an uncertain future and confronting the ghosts of his past, Maverick is drawn into a confrontation with his own deepest fears, culminating in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those who will be chosen to fly it.”