Choosing a career path.

Nov 28th, 2013 | By | Category: abundance, aptitude, Career advice, career challenges, career choice, career choices, career coach, challenges, choosing a career, confidence, natural talent, opportunity, passion, professional image, self confidence, skills, strategy, success, tactics, will to win

What career should you choose? The reality is that there is more to any job than just the part you may like. How do you balance everything to choose a career you will like, make a good salary, and stay employed?
There is a lot written about pursuing your passion in the job market. Like to draw become an artist or a graphic designer; like numbers become an engineer or accountant; like to talk to strangers go into sales or marketing. The advice makes it all sound so simple.

Choosing a career to fit our personality, talents and skills is not an easy task. The first hurtle is figuring out what your personality is and what talents and skills you have. Most of us have a perception our personality traits, but our perceptions are often wrong or skewed by the opinions of others. For example, most of us go through a phase where we think we would like to be famous, perhaps President of the United States; Movie Star; Pro Athlete; Rock Star; or perhaps follow the captains of industry like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffet. Most of would have no problem living a life of luxury: living in a mansion; having a staff to tend to all our needs; vacationing in the best stops; staying at the nicest resorts and hotels; eating the best food and driving or be chauffeured in an expensive car. What a life!

So how do you choose a career path that will get you into the top 1% of the nations wealthiest people? It does seem the ranks of millionaires and billionaires are growing everyday. You may ask yourself, if they can do it why can’t I? This question may be worth some serious thought and analysis. Don’t take it to seriously or beat yourself up over some of the thoughts that flash through your mind, just make a quick list without thinking. Let’s start small and just do the first 5 that pops into your mind. I’ write mine here, you keep yours secret for now.

Why can’t I become rich and famous?
1Not smart enough.
2 Don’t even know how to start.
3 No great ideas.
4 No special skills or talents.
5 No money to get started.
Your list may have some of the same elements or may have none of them. This exercise gives some clues to your limiting beliefs. The goal is not to dwell on the reasons you think you can’t succeed, but to identify what you consider obstacles to achieving your goal. If you do this exercise a couple of times and keep the results so you decide which elements you consider the biggest challenges, then you can start working on eliminating them from the list.
How do you eliminate items from the list? First you have to be honest with yourself. Most of us do not like to think of ourselves as not being smart. However, I’ve learned over the years that I am about average when it comes to intelligence. Since most of the people in the 1% group are of average intelligence, this should not preclude me from my goal of becoming rich and famous.
Figuring out where to start is a real challenge for me. I have tried a few different paths, but never really worked out. For example, I thought that I could parley rental properties into an empire. I started small with one house. It rented right away and the renter was great, paid the rent on time, and took care of the house. This was going to be easy. I was saving for the down payment on the second rental when my renter gave notice and moved. The second renter was not as good and I spent the money I saved for the second house to repair the first one, after a lengthy and costly eviction process. The third renter was also a problem, and I sold the house at loss. My experience has kept me out of the real estate business ever since. I often think of flipping houses, or trying rental again, but my experience always gives cold feet. The message here is I may be risk adverse.
No great ideas? It seems like the path to instant wealth these days is trough technology. Facebook made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire. Bill Gates made his fortune from Microsoft and developing software, and the list goes on. How do these guys do it? Where do these ideas come from? How do you effectively market and idea if you ever do come up with one? Although I have read several success stories, it still seems like there is a lot of luck that goes with the hard work. I am developing the PracticaL Mentor, and am struggling to keep it going.
No special skills or talents. Most of those in the 1% club have a special skill or talent. It may be business sense, acting skills, athletic skills, technology skills, etc. Steve Jobs had the ability to take others ideas and transform them into industry leading products. Oprah seemed to captivate the daytime talk show market. Magic Johnson is still flying high, and Zuckerberg is a living legend. What makes the difference? How do you acquire the magic to transform average skills into superior expertise? When I compare my career advice to my competitors mine seems to be better, more thorough, and comprehensive. What am I missing?
No money to get started. It takes money to make money, is a tried and true statement. There are few paths to riches that do not involve raising money or attracting investors. Most start ups depend on wooing venture capitalist to carry them until the product reaches critical market mass where the company can be sold for a huge profit or leveraged through an IPO. First you need and idea, second you need to start a company, and then you find a venture capitalist. Ok- how do I accomplish that?
My example is to demonstrate some of things we throw in our own way as obstacles to achieving out career goals. Do these matter? Are they real? If you build it will they come? While it is good to really know yourself and your limitations, it is counter productive to analyze yourself into hopeless corner. There are a millions of reasons why it is impossible for you do accomplish your goals, and million of dollars waiting if you do. If others can overcome their challenges so can you.

Which Marketing Job Suits Your Personality Best?
By Sam Wright | Business 2 Community
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/marketing-job-suits-personality-best-031716465.html

Finding the right job for you is about more than merely having the right qualifications and experience. Crucially, being a good fit for your job means having the right temperament. This where personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs come in. Measuring you on four axis, namely extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling and judging/perception, they separate people out into various personality types. Your personality type can have a huge impact on your relationships, your life and of course, your career.

So if you’re interested in a specific area (for instance, marketing) it’s worth using Myers-Briggs to determine exactly which job in that sector is the best fit for you. In this article, we’ll take a look at a number of jobs in the marketing sector with David Richter, Marketing Manager of HR specialists Octopus, to see how they fit the various personality types.
Advertising and Promotions Manager
The Advertising and Promotions Manager is in charge of directing an organisations marketing campaigns. You could end up working in-house for a particular employer, for an agency that handles a number of different clients or for a company that sells advertising space or time.
As you can imagine, because this job involves directing numerous other people, as well as regular interactions with clients, this is a job that is especially suited to extroverts. By the same token, because advertising campaigns can move so quickly, intuitive personality types tend to fair better here, rather than those who take time to weigh things up. You will often have to improvise on the fly, so “perception” rather than “judgement” personality types tend to fair best here.
“However, none of these rules are cut and dry,” says Richter. “INTJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judgement) personality types are almost the exact opposite of most profiles that would fit this position, but their original minds and strong drive make them adept at putting ideas into action, a valuable skill in this job.”
Advertising Sales Agent
Advertising Sales Agents, or account executives, or advertising sales representatives, this job has many titles, but its function is the same. Your employer will be a media outlet such as a newspaper, radio station, website or TV channel, and your job is to get people to buy advertising space.
“As with an advertising and promotions manager, being an extravert is crucial here. Your working day will consist of talking to complete strangers and persuading them that they want to buy what you’re selling – wallflowers need not apply. However, unlike those tasked with managing and implementing campaigns, sales agents tend to be more “Sense” than “Intuition” style personalities.”
“This job is a lot more nuts and bolts, and so an ability to grasp the concrete information available becomes much more important than making intuitive leaps.”
Marketing Manager
Marketing Manager might sound like an interchangeable title with Advertising and Promotions Manager, but it uses a very different set of skills. Rather than coming up with the campaign, you are responsible for examining the information gathered by market research to assess the level of demand for your products, spot potential problems, and even evaluate factors such as the price of your product.
“However, as with advertising and promotions manager you’ll find that an extroverted and intuitive personality will be a strong asset in this position, but a more analytical mind is needed. You won’t find many Feelers vs. Thinkers in this position. Your job is to evaluate information quickly and draw the correct conclusions from it.”
Designer
Not all marketing jobs require an extroverted personality, although in such a people centred area of work you will find a lot of them. However, every advert, piece of packaging and promotional website needs designing, and most of this work is done by people who are happy spending hours on end in their own company.
One thing that is absolutely essential here, however, is a strong intuition, while being a thinker rather than a feeler helps to. You need to be creative while also having the ability to analyse those ideas constructively.
Market Research
Market Research is exactly what it sounds like. Your job is to gather information on what people think, helping companies understand what their customers want, what they think of current products and what new products could be successful. This involves gathering and analysing statistics, seeing what you competitors are doing, and looking closely at sales figures and customer feedback.
“It doesn’t really matter whether you’re an Introvert or Extrovert for this job, but Intuitive Thinkers are high in demand, and strong analytical minds are essential for this kind of work. The important thing is that you enjoy getting neck deep in data and drawing useful conclusions from it, as well as being able to present that data in such a way as to be clearly understood by

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