The principles of improvisational theatre and the skills needed to keep the action going on the stage will also help you to keep the action going in your life. Improvisational theatre is a great tool for today’s world, and it makes life a lot more fun too.

Improvisational skills will help you to:

1. Create momentum in your life and career
2. Connect you with others
3. Teach you to take risks
4. Help you overcome a fear of failure
5. Learn how be in the present
6. Let opportunity help shape your journey
7. Exude a ‘YES, and!’ attitude

Interestingly enough, in true improv the emphasis is not on the performance or trying to be funny, it is on letting the narrative unfold and keeping the energy flowing on stage. It’s about making the other guy look good. These are also desirable elements for your own life narrative.

Here are two fun clips that can give you a sense of what improv can look like. These professionals are simply applying the techniques of improv to produce these results. Learning and practicing these techniques is what improvisational theatre groups do. See if there is one located near you and sign up!

Mission Improv (Vancouver, Canada)

The technique in this clip is great for learning more about yourself in a team, listening, being in the moment and making the other guy look good. See how the ‘mistake’ adds to the enjoyment and fun. You can also see when they are not being in the moment as effectively and what happens then.

Whose Line is It Anyway? (USA, with Robin Williams)

This clip demonstrates how far you can go with these skills, although since it is for TV they often tend to use elements that will get a quick laugh. Here you will see making the other guy look good, being in the moment, advancing the offer and more. You will also see what happens when someone gets a little bit distracted and isn’t in the moment.

Come to the Connecting Women meeting in the Hague on Monday, May 7, 2012.  I will be facilitating a session to introduce you to the principles of improv and let you experience them for yourself. You are guaranteed to laugh and go home feeling energized. I hope to see you there.

I came across this film clip today and wanted to share it with you. It is a 17 minute talk by Simon Sinek called ‘start with why’. His ‘golden circle’ elegantly explains this concept.

He also explains how this circle expresses the brain’s natural functioning and gives insight into your own decision making. Knowing your own ‘why’ is a critical piece for doing what you do meaningfully and authentically. Being able to communicate your why is also something that convinces hiring managers that you are the person they cannot do without, in addition to your skills and competenties. Your why will keep you going in times when the going is difficult. It can give you focus and purpose. It will also help you say no when you need to.

My own why is empowering people to make personally meaningful career choices. In other words, I want to help others connect with their why and find ways to live that out in their life and career. Let me know how I can help you.

Do I say that I took a break to raise my kids?

There is no clear answer to the question, although if you look at it from the big picture of what a career is, there are insights to be gained.

There are a number of perspectives from which to view your life-work (career) and that impacts how you communicate it to others. If you are a trailing spouse, you have found yourself in a unique situation which will impact your sense of self and identity. I look at career from a holistic perspective that includes all elements of your life (work, learning, leisure, life roles). This allows you the freedom to express your own unique self and find your own personally meaningful way in the world, including that of paid employment if required or if you choose. It also allows you to incorporate expat experiences, paid or unpaid. When you define career this way, then including your role as a mother becomes an essential part of your career story and something to include in your profile.

Perhaps though you want to include some elements of your career story on your Facebook timeline and keep LinkedIn just for what you would consider professional roles. I understand the urge to provide the complete story and fill in the professional ‘gaps’ that people worry will undermine their chances. Just as with a resume, if the elements of the story you do provide are compelling and convincing, then people will be interested in knowing more. Take the time to understand your story to date; be convinced yourself that you have valuable skills and experience and trust that those you include in your LinkedIn profile will be enough to open the conversations that will lead you to the fulfilling opportunities you seek.

If you do not get the responses you are hoping for then, just like with a resume, continue to revise your profile until you do. Again, just as in a resume, prepare your LinkedIn profile with a focus and purpose. For example, if you work with youth, perhaps having children yourself is an experience that adds credibility to your professional training and experience and thus it makes more sense for you to include it than for people in other lines of work. The book Career Management via LinkedIn suggests a simple title like ‘time out to raise children’. In the case of the youth worker example, using a more specific sentence which profiles the personal experience and makes it professionally relevant may be appropriate. As an alternative, this information could be included in a carefully worded LinkedIn profile summary. For example a more personally specific version of, ‘Over 10 years of professional and personal experience with youth issues’ could be used.

A final tip is to join the LinkedIn groups relevant to your profession and career path and take a look at other member’s profiles. Learn from what others are doing and what you think communicates most concisely and effectively for you. You can update your LinkedIn profile every few weeks so don’t feel you have to get it 100% right the first time. The key is to make a start and be visible on LinkedIn. By contributing actively to LinkedIn groups you will be able to demonstrate your competence in your area of expertise and a gap in your experience will become less of an issue to those viewing your profile.

Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address used the metaphor of Connecting the Dots to tell graduates that, in life “you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards… Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference..” Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford University Commencement Address. Steve Jobs followed his heart in his course selection at college and took a calligraphy course. If he hadn’t done that it’s quite possible that an appreciation for fonts and how words look would not have been part of our personal computer experience for as long as it has. He certainly had no idea when he chose to take that course that he would apply the learning from that course when creating a personal computer!

Trust that your dots will connect and follow your heart!

A ‘career crisis’, as this could be termed, is often a lack of imagination or the ability to see a different future than the one currently in front of you. It could also be the inability to connect current activities with what’s really important to you in life. The career development process is one that assists people to gain the insights needed to get unstuck; to set goals, dream new dreams, learn more about themselves and find and create new opportunities.  Spring is just the time to get started on growing new things. The days are longer and often this is accompanied with new energy to plant seeds and nuture dreams.

As a way to nurture the desire for something new, go for a walk outside and pay attention to all the spring changes you see. New shoots poking out of the ground. Buds on the trees with just a hint of green starting to poke out. Birds sitting in their nests keeping their eggs warm. Let go of your own worries and desire for changes and appreciate all the changes you see happening right in front of you.  After having had this experience you may find that you have created a little mental space for yourself to start dreaming something new or rediscovering an idea that was planted long ago. You may have a different way to create this space for yourself, but whatever you do do not get hung up on exactly how you are going to make it happen. The momentum you create by opening yourself up and dreaming your dream again will help you discover the next step. You will also no longer feel like you are stuck anymore.

If you would like assistance getting ‘unstuck’, please contact me for a free information session. As a client recently said, it makes things so much clearer just to be able to talk about them.

When you think about your career it can be useful to use a metaphor to see how you are approaching your life’s work. I really love the traveller and tourist metaphor. In this metaphor, a tourist uses a plan, schedules everything and knows exactly what will happen and where they will be at what time. In contrast, a traveller is there to experience and connect with their journey.  Not so much is preplanned and scheduled, leaving room for serendipity and adventures. Travellers are the ones sitting in the marketplace having conversations with the locals and learning about the place firsthand, instead of through a guidebook.

I aspire to be a traveller in my career and life journey. When I learned about www.travbuddy.com and that you could make your own personalized travel map for free and see how much of the world you had already experienced, I couldn’t resist. I’m still focussed on the journey and I’m not wanting to just go somewhere and get the t-shirt, but it is fun to quantify what has happened so far!

I was telling a colleague that I had just finished the book and her opinion is that the book is a fun read however too many people are now just following Elizabeth’s adventure instead of being authentic to finding their own adventure. I completely agree. Where I disagree with my colleague is that she doesn’t believe that Elizabeth had decided to go on the trip and then told her publisher and then found out that she would be funded. She thinks that she was given the offer to go and so she went. I do believe that Elizabeth had the gumption or inner drive to take this trip and that that gumption is what inspired the publisher to fund her. I have said this many times to people I coach and train: people cannot pay you enough money to create that kind of energy if you don’t already have it yourself. So if you follow your heart or passion or inner voice and let it out, you create the possibility for people to be inspired by your passion and support it in one way or other. These kind of things do happen.

After talking to my colleague I proceeded to my next meeting where I was doing just that: putting my passion out there and giving it a chance. When I moved to the Netherlands 5 years ago I thought to myself, “maybe I’ll end up writing a book about the experience and then I can travel about speaking to groups on the topic”. So here I was talking to book publisher and author’s mentor Jo Parfitt about the fact that I wanted to write a book even though I had not yet chosen a specific topic. And lo and behold, the best imaginable possibility for me emerged during that meeting. Something I couldn’t have imagined myself that is a very complete realization of what I would love to do and yet much simpler. I rode the tram home vibrating with anticipation and excitement. Who knows what will come next on my very own career adventure? Stay tuned and believe in your own dream!

P.S. If you would like to receive a motivational note that connects with these themes, then I recommend joining The Adventurer’s Club. You can receive a free “note from the universe” that will help inspire you to stay true to your dream before its manifestation.

This website has also just undergone a cycle of renewal and has some new threads woven in, one of which is this blog. I am looking forward to sharing ideas, aha moments, information and other good things that come across my path through this medium. I hope that it will be an interactive dialogue and look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for being here and being a part of this blog.