Most successful people can cite one or two key individuals who guided and helped them early on, and from whom they learned so much.  Mentors can be a significant part of our success.  People who have good mentors are lucky, right?  Luck is where preparedness meets opportunity.  We need to proactively seek mentors, and cultivate relationships with them, not wait for them to stumble upon us (although be open and ready for that if it happens!)

Anyone can benefit from a mentor.  An aspiring book writer of any age could certainly benefit from knowing successful published authors.  Someone seeking a career transition can connect and develop a relationship with someone who had succeeded in that newly targeted profession.  If I just want an attitude adjustment, if I want to know how to be more at ease and not stressed, I could find someone who is successful, but always embodies equilibrium and balance.

Especially if you are at the early end of your career, you want to find a mentor.

How does one connect with a potential mentor?  Look at the relationships you already have.  Who has their act together, and displays openness and friendship to you.  Who shows an interest in you?  Who seems to genuinely care about you, your accomplishments, your self-actualization?  This is an ideal prospect.  Spend more time with that person.  Ask them things you don’t usually think to ask.  Pick their brains!  You will be surprised how simple it is to cultivate a mentor relationship.  Most people are flattered and happy to be of value to someone else.

If there is no one in your own personal circle of contacts, consider a professional organization or society you already belong to, or could easily join.

If you have already “been there, done that”, and are successful, seek out opportunities to be a mentor.  Pay it forward.  Offer to chat more with less experienced people in your own organization, or even the children of your colleagues.   Engage in Netweaving, and introduce people to someone else who can be of value to them.  Good mentors don’t really tell their mentee what to do – they help them discover solutions on their own – they empower the mentee.

The world is just one big community, and it takes a village to succeed at many things.  Make sure your village is populated with special people who are ready willing and able to help you.

Tags: mentee, mentor

Whether you are actively looking for a job or hunkered down working hard and not interested in a change for now, it pays to have an optimized LinkedIn profile.  LinkedIn has become the number one way that recruiters find candidates.  If you are looking, obviously this will help you to be found.  Even if you aren’t looking, you can chip away at improvements, so that when you are open to a change, you can be found easily, right away.

Here are the key areas:

Connections: Increase these!  As a “LION” (LinkedIn Open Networker), my 1950 1^st level connections give me a total personal reach of over 17 million within the 4 degrees of separation principle that LI uses.  People who are more than 4 connection levels away from you, can’t see your name.  To increase your connections, use the “add connections” function on the Contacts tab.  Let LI look at your Outlook address book by exporting your address book in a comma delimited file (easier than it might sound), and importing this into LI.  You probably have hundreds of contacts that are already in LI, but not yet connected to you.  With a few clicks, you can send them all individual invitations, and double or triple your connections overnight.

Content: Upload your resume so that your profile becomes more “keyword-rich”.   There is now a skills and experience section where you can put even more keywords that best describe you.

Links: If you have a website, if you blog, if you are on Twitter, you can cross link all these together within LI.  You can have your blog automatically update your LI profile, each time you put up a new post.

Groups: You are permitted to belong to 50 groups on LI.  Strive to hit 30-40.  Search for groups by key factors that identify you:  Colleges, Professional Societies, your regional area, your profession, your skills, etc.  When you search for groups, they will come up in descending size order, with the largest groups first.  Pick several large groups (at least 1000 members).  Watch the content, and contribute a posting once in a while.  If you don’t like the group, or don’t feel it fits you, leave the group and find others.  Recruiters look for people in groups, and regularly post their job opportunities.

Activity: Do stuff on LI!  Post the business book you’re reading, the trade show trip you took, the article you read, as long as it is professionally relevant. Don’t use LI the same as Facebook – keep your personal stuff personal.  When you meet new people, connect with them right away (before you forget).  This will also show up on your profile as activity.  Start a poll, post your reading list.  Go to the More tab, and look at Get More Applications.

Picture: Unless you look awful or much older than you really are, include a good, professional photo.  It enables people to connect with who you are.

Allow Contact: Don’t block people from connecting or contacting you.

Recommendations: I’m going to go against the grain here, and say I don’t think these matter that much, because everyone understands it is a game, and you will only ask your friends, and you control what is seen.

Tags: Linkedin, optimizing profile

Just a couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how companies are invading your privacy by inquiring about Facebook, asking people to log in during interviews etc.  We spotted this wonderful infographic about how Social Media can get you fired, and we wanted to share it with you.

How’s your memory?  Would you like to know how memory champions increase their skills?  It is important for recruiters and HR managers to remember people, so this is a subject near and dear for us.  And yes, there really are memory competitions, and the champions have to do things like recreate the order of a deck of cards, reel off long lists of numbers, etc.  Most of these champions can walk through a large auditorium and name each attendee, after only meeting them once.

How do they do it?  It turns out that most modern day memory champs use the principle of loci – based on places – a technique that may go back to ancient Greece and Rome.  You create pictures and anchor them to locations, then take a “walk” through the locations, and the pictures you recall unlock the number, card, name, etc.

Take a look at this excellent article published last week in the Wall Street Journal, which outlines how this works!  Fascinating!

An article called 6 Reasons Why You Should Never Retire by Phillip Moeller of US News & World Report appeared last week in Yahoo Finance.  I was alerted to it by a post in one of my LinkedIn Groups.  What surprised me what not so much the content – and I’ll get back to that in a minute – but the reaction.  The post on Yahoo Finance got over 3500 comments in one week, with most of the ones I read being on the negative side of the topic.  Lots of anger.  Some people responded that they’d been forced out of jobs prematurely in their late 50’s, couldn’t get another job, and sort of learned to live with retirement.  Others said  they’d retired in their late 50’s and were loving it, and that writers who advocate not retiring are just so wrong, etc.

The points made by Moeller are similar to most arguments made for continuing to work:  no physical need to retire; continuing to work will make you happier, healthier; older people are valuable for their knowledge and experience and mentoring capability; we need older workers because there aren’t enough younger workers to replace them; and older workers need and like the money they earn, and don’t want to fall short of money in retirement.

As a Boomer who is theoretically approaching retirement, I think it is a very personal decision.  My dad worked until he was 86, and said it “kept him alive.”  But, he had no hobbies, outside interests or skills that could be leveraged differently.  I love my work, and I do like earning a nice living.  But I also love spending time with my grandkids (who live nearby), I want to write several books, and there are consulting and coaching skills I’d like to apply.  So, I may never really retire, and I may even continue to work in my company.  What I really want is the freedom to choose – how I apply my skills, energy, and time.  Then, working doesn’t feel like a requirement, it feels like a choice I’ve made.

A lot of retirees lack choices today.  The recession, combined with lower return on investments, has made it difficult if not impossible to rely on savings to continue the lifestyle most retirees expect.  Many people have been so devoted to their jobs and families that they (like my dad) wouldn’t know what to do with themselves, especially if their kids and grandkids don’t live close by.  They fear that retirement will lead to a rapid decline.

I don’t think there is one answer.   Obviously, the 3500 people who weighed in on this agree!

It is a matter of looking forward in a positive way.  If an individual wants to work, and is fortunate enough to be employed by a company that values older workers, I say they should go for it, and continue working.  I am a strong advocate for companies working with older employees to give them flexible schedules, more vacation (even if unpaid), so that people can have their cake (stay employed) and eat it too (enjoy life).

For those who have ambitions and passions they look forward to in retirement, as long as they can afford it, they should go for it too.

Being at retirement age is our life test of empowerment.  Have we done enough to be financially secure?  Do we have interests we look forward to devoting time to?  Do we have the freedom to choose what we will be doing?  If we can answer yes to these questions, we are empowered to enjoy our senior years in the manner we wish – working or not!

Tags: retirement