I received a complimentary copy of “Advance Your Image” by Lori Bumgarner for review and wanted to share it with you because it is a good find and a timely topic. I received no other compensation for this review.
It is clear in this ebook that Lori is divinely inspired and on a mission to propel people forward with poise and self-confidence and to bring the beauty within each person out in the best possible light.
As a career adviser to college students turned image consultant to musicians, Lori has an excellent take on the big picture for how personal image plays into career development planning. She points out the nuances of why and how to strategically manage your image for the desired result of connecting with the audience be it a potential employer or your network of supporters. She champions work you can do to improve your image as a fast-track to improved self-confidence which then leads to making better first impressions and being received better by others…a win-win!
Lori also weaves together your in-person appearance with your job search marketing materials and online presence in a practical and easy to understand way. She also outlined a helpful rule that I had never heard of before called the Rule of 12 within her powerful strategies for making a good first impression.
Learn more about Lori on her website, paNASHstyle.com and find the ebook here or for your Kindle on Amazon.com.
Volunteering provides many benefits to the volunteer in addition to the organization and individuals receiving the help. And it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Just an hour a week or a Saturday every three months can do wonders for example. Here are some benefits to the volunteer.
- You improve your problem solving skills.
- You can increase your personal network.
- You help strengthen your community and set an example.
- You can use volunteer time to increase your skill level.
- Volunteering can help you heal and/or stay healthy.
- You get really good at noticing the bright side of things.
- You gain a sense of achievement that increases your own self-confidence.
#1 Take Ownership
- Your career is yours and yours alone. You have the power to create it and live it as an expression of your unique talents and energy.
- Forget what other people think of your choices. Even though people often mean well, you will be the one putting in the hours so be selfish enough to do something you enjoy and to have fun with it!
- Being yourself in your work gives power, creativity, and freedom. You are off track if you feel insecure or like an pretender at work.
#2 Look Inside Yourself, You Know the Answers
- Take note when you find yourself fully engaged in a work activity. If it feels like you are in the zone, or plugged in and energized, or connected to something larger than yourself: Pay special attention.
- Then describe it further…what are you liking about what you are doing? Is it this? Is it that? Keep asking yourself and you’ll know when you hit the answer that feels right.
- Start general then get more specific in your description of what you like about what you are doing. For example, is it the communication or connection? Is it the performing or beautifying? Is it the helping or healing? Is it the organizing or administrating? Then add more detail by asking why.
#3 Respect the Career Development Process
- The beauty of a great career is in the way it unfolds.
- Enjoy the present moment. Each small step adds up until you are for sure ready for more.
- Appreciate then forget when you felt lost or frustrated in your career. Through those times you learned more about what you DO want.
#4 Understand the Power of People
- People can be powerful and brilliant in sharing their connections with others. Use strategy in maintaining your 150 or so top connections to tap into the power.
- Accept that people can be dark, egotistical, and negative but this is nothing compared to an individual in harmony with self. Recognize the negative as the weaker power and stay beyond it.
- See and applaud the strengths of others as you do for yourself. Be a builder-upper who is generous with knowledge, info, and positive energy.
#5 Be an Opportunity Bulldog
- Take your individual strengths and mesh them into your public identity and no one can take your place.
- Research and understand the opportunities that exist because of the challenges in your field of expertise.
- Present a passion for being or finding the solution and be unafraid of asking for the opportunity.
Career assessments can open doors to important insights regarding your career development. Assessments can enable you to better verbalize your career desires and can assist you in describing yourself in a concise yet thorough manner.
The power of the MBTI®, specifically, is in its ability to assist in focusing you on language and key ideas to help you target your job search, prepare your resumes, and ace the interview.
As an added perk of the MBTI®, many people begin a fun journey of self-discovery as a result of using the assessment. In fact, many people describe the opportunity as life changing!
Here is a link for more information about the theory and background of the MBTI®. And here is a link to providers of the assessment.
Remember this — at times when you feel like you have no choice or like you’re being forced to do something, you’ve lost touch with your own personal power. Find your way back.
Here are a few suggestions.
- Ask yourself…who or what can I appreciate right now?
- Ask yourself…who appreciates me?
- Ask yourself…what am I thankful for?
- Think of something nice someone did for you.
- Think about a time when you felt powerful and let your body and your mind feel it.
- Be appreciative of how far you’ve come.
Its not easy to let go of the way you’ve been thinking but if you want different results its worth the effort. Often changing your own outlook and attitude makes all the difference…much more is good than is not good…keep your mind on the good.
Nothing puts your self-esteem on the line faster than a job search. You face rejection and self-doubt daily. It takes a good deal of internal motivation to keep moving at all, much less to keep the correct frame of mind needed to win interviews.
A single day of beggar mentality (“Please, somebody give me a job.”) is a whole day wasted. One interview done with self-doubt could mean losing the opportunity of a lifetime. Hiring-decision-makers hire positive, cheerful, high-self-esteem people who are confident (but not arrogant) about their value.
Your motivation must be jealously guarded, protected, renewed, and nourished when you are job hunting. Take some steps to eliminate self-doubt:
- Take special care to ensure your proper motivation.
- Periodically ground yourself with your value by reading your resume and remembering your successes.
- Schedule a weekly contact with culture—a play, an inspirational movie, a work of art—as a reminder that whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
- Avoid negative newspaper stories, TV news, sitcoms, and negative people. People tend to come away with a general depiction of life as boring, tragic, and inane. This is something you cannot afford while job hunting. Do keep up-to-date on important news, particularly developments in business that may alert you to opportunities and help you present yourself as an informed candidate while networking.
- Use motivational tapes and books as well as nurturing times with spouse and friends.
- Attend networking groups, but only the ones that create a positive mental attitude. If you feel burdened, flat, etc. after a network meeting then you’ve just attended a “Pity Party.”
Person-to-person job searching is the hands-down preferred method. It’s just that most people think networking works all by itself. They’ll go to association meetings and ask about vacancies or openings. They’ll collect business cards and wish they had some realistic good reason to talk to those people. They’ll haphazardly pass out resumes. They hope they’ll be remembered when a vacancy or opening turns up.
To avoid this random, billiard-ball-style networking, you need a written and re-searched plan of whom you want to talk to, how you can make or save them a bundle, what’s going on in their industry that you can key into, and a thought-out rationale and method to get in to see them face to face. You need a clear agenda for each meeting including knowing how to ask for further contacts to continue your networking plan.
Consider this too, poor networking is worse than no networking. Meeting people is one thing; making the correct impression is another. That you can meet a lot of people and have them talk with you doesn’t mean you’re getting closer to a new job. If people aren’t impressed, if they think you’re too arrogant, too pushy, too meek, too timid, too uninformed, not committed enough, too confused, too anything, all that a hundred networking contacts will do is generate a hundred poor impressions.
So, be thoughtful in creating your network and tapping into it for job search help. Most importantly, study success and know what you want.
Just added a free Myers Briggs personality test worksheet to the sample area. Enjoy!