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Going Live in 3, 2 . . .

marie deveaux career coach image during September IG live @urahightide on Instagram with a few comments in the thread to the right of the imageYesterday September 27, 2017 I hosted my first live event and sweepstakes. I went live on Instagram for about 45 minutes to engage in some live Q and A. We talked about career planning, coaching, entrepreneurship and all things work life related! IG only hosts these bad boys for 24 hours and we went live at 3pm so if you are working a 9 to 5 and couldn’t book that conference room in time to catch me. . . here go the High Notes!!

Shout out to @frannycrooks, @lovesujeiry, @jodie.s.watson, @kabwrab and everyone else who silently watched the broadcast.

Scroll to see the full list of resources mentioned in the Notes and make sure to comment on what you want to hear more about in my next live session!

The Highs

Q. What’s the best way to gain support from a significant other while pursuing entrepreneurship?
A. Three things you need when starting a new business:

  1. Start up capital
  2. A plan/vision for what you want to do and how you want to create impact for others (product or services)
  3. Support

One of the key ways to gain support for your business through your significant other is to start making money. That first client, or first sale is key to showing your success along the way.

A great way to fund an entrepreneurship venture is to keep a FT job. Think of it as your primary funding source, or venture capitalist, as you build your business If your paycheck were an investor, how would you conduct yourself to make sure you were making returns on that investment?

Q. What is career coaching?
A. Coaching, in general, is a modality for working through changes in your life. The difference between therapy and coaching is a therapist works with you on dealing with what has happened in your past, and how you are going to deal/are dealing with it in the present. Coaching helps you address what is going on in your present and what you are going to do right now to start impacting your future. It is a future looking modality.

Career coaching focuses specifically on your professional growth in your business, career, professional transitions, professional growth, and performance.

Life coaching in general helps people with all aspects of life: relationships, career, work life balance, time management, stress management — all things in the universe of being human. Career coaching focuses specifically on your professional growth in your business, career, professional transitions, professional growth and performance. It focuses on what is happening in your career and what you WANT to happen in your career. A coach holds you accountable to make those steps towards your goals.

More articles about career coaching and professional growth can be found on the High Tides website. Also check the coaching tab for details on getting time to speak with me directly about your specific career situation.

Q. I’m thinking of leaving my job, what should I do?
A. People ask this one a lot after I teach a workshop or group coaching session, usually because they are bored or unfulfilled in their current role. This is a loaded question and is different for everyone, so first some introspection:

  • Do you want to transition (quit your job, change industries, start a business, getting fired)?
    OR
  • Do you want to grow in place (I love what I’m doing but I really want more responsibility, authority, autonomy, a title, and some where down the line more money)?

image of frustrated worker from mariedeveaux.com

Primarily when we are talking about growing in place, think about agnostic of money, what do you want out of your next role or your next position. That’s a good indicator of what’s going to be a good fit for you.

Q. How do I find my passion?
A. This requires a lot of introspection because your passion is usually the thing you would do for the rest of life even if you didn’t get paid for it. It’s like if your favorite thing is hanging out at the beach, how can you get paid to hang out at the beach? What do you love so much that you would do it for free, and then how do you monetize it?

Q. How do you focus on one?
A. Good question. A lot of us are talented and interested in a lot of things so how do you narrow it down? The good thing, is that you don’t have to. People are realizing, and we see this more and more on LinkedIn, that people are not monolithic in their careers. And that’s a good thing. You can bring something completely unique to your audience and find a niche in what you bring to the table.

image of beautiful black bride with natural hair is the icon on @luxeleblanc on Instagram a great example that Marie Deveaux career coach shares about utrning multiple passions into a viable business during her September Self Improvement live session on IG

Image from @luxeleblanc profile on Instagram: instagram.com/luxeleblanc/

One blogger I know @luxeleblanc is passionate about fashion and hair and so she writes and blogs about style, she is a fashion and hair stylist and a model.

My husband is passionate about technology and public health. So he focuses on how we leverage technology to inform the public about their health.

There are always ways that you can bring various passions together to create something new and that’s where your unique value proposition, your brand, comes from.

Q. Should I quit my job?
A. This is a big transition, so don’t go into it lightly, and make sure you are doing it for good reason. Some good reasons for leaving a job are:

  1. Your dream job is calling – If you are someone who has a lot of passions and all of your passions have aligned in another role and that opportunity is calling. If you are someone who loves motivational speaking and cooking and someone offers you a talk show host role that’s food based and caters to inspire women all over the world, you should stop what you are doing and go do that
  2. Your morals are at risk and you are being asked to do things on a regular basis (or at all) that makes you feel uncomfortable. That’s whether it is legal or not because just because it’s legal, doesn’t make it right or ethical
  3. You have completely lost interest and are no longer growing in your work. Whatever you are doing in your career should stimulate your mind and grow your brain or else you are wasting your time. If you are the smartest woman in the room, it’s time to change rooms. Think of your job as that room.
  4. Life priorities are out of balance – This is when a woman goes on leave to have a baby and discovers ” Hey I want to hang out with this baby way more than my coworkers”. Yeah, that’s a good reason to leave your job. In Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, she writes at length about this struggle for women. Women, way more than men, are assigned the role of caregiver,and no one in their right mind would choose their job over their family or loved ones.
  5. Marie Deveaux ,Career Coach shares about reasons to quit your job citing the book Lean In as a great resource around work life balance and keeping your priorities in checkToxic environment – that could be an immature boss, a lack of respect or any number of different things. As far as disrespect goes, if it has gotten to a point where it is beyond reprieve, HR is not backing you up, no one is coming in to rectify the situation, you gota go. I love being the change you want to see in the world but you are not going to go into a 10,000 person org and change it in one day. If you are in an environment where you are fighting the culture on your own all the time, it is going to wear you down faster than you are going to wear it down. Don’t take that on. Take your talents elsewhere.

Q. How do you turn your passions into coins?
A. Everyone has a platform now and because of the internet you can reach an audience without a formal marketing company or a big advertising budget. That’s why YouTubers can get rich and people can work remotely and travel the world. But building a platform doesn’t always transition into money.

Image on Marie Deveaux career coach site of stacks of silber and godl coins in foreground and clock inthe back groudn to illustrate how to turn your passions into a viable business "coins"

There are some great masterminds and Facebook Groups that focus on this area especially for the solopreneur. And there are groups out there for every niche available. There is a great resource, Intrepid Entrepreneurs that focuses solely on travel bloggers. They share ideas on ways to promote your IG, getting traffic to your site, how to work with affiliates, and other ways to generate income. Another group that I belong to is focused on coaches and service based businesses and helps people figure how to increase income and scale your business even when you run out of hours in a day.

The goal behind a lot of these are how to work smarter and not harder. How can I make money while I sleep? That’s using technology, duplicating yourself, and building a team to help you grow and scale your business.

Q. Where can I get business classes in New York?
A. Some great resources around business topics :

  • The American Management Association has a great suite of courses across business topics.
  • Dale Carnegie teaches some great courses around communication.
  • When it comes to marketing, it’s how to reach more people. Check out Lynda.com for resources specific to marketing, listbuilding, and click funnels. And make sure your Mailchimp or email marketing platform is working. Lynda.com is free through the public library or with a premium LinkedIn account.
  • Specific to marketing, Hubspot.com is a free platform for Client Relationship Management (CRM) and they have a lot of free certification classes through their site. (I am inbound marketing certified and it’s awesome) to help you attract your ideal customer.

Q. Is LinkedIn pro worth it?
A. I have a standard LinkedIn account largely because LinkedIn,until very recently,offered a lot of their tools and resources for free without the premium membership. You can search Linkedin for people, organizations and opportunities for free. And if your profile is up to date, you can set LI to ping your for jobs that align with your skills. If you have a goal for leveraging LinkedIn Pro, I would say to make sure that the end goal is worth the cost of the premium membership.

Getting active on LinkedIn is key. Please subscribe to High Tides alerts if you are interested in an upcoming LinkedIn Mastery workshop or for more details on optimizing your profile and using LinkedIn resources.

A great way to stay active on LinkedIn is to check the daily rundown and comment/repost on some of those goings on. Also if you have the LinkedIn app on your phone, you can just go in there and send “Happy Birthday or “Congratulations on your work anniversary” in a very easy way.

If you have an area of expertise, posting your content on LinkedIn as an article is a great way to position your authority in your industry.

Bloggers this is an easy way for you to stay active, by re-purposing your posts and dual publishing on the LI platform. You can put a disclaimer at the top that it was originally posted to your blog, and then link back to your site.

Marie Deveaux, Career Coach shares about using LInkedIn to grow and position your brand and how to make it part of your marketing calendar through reposting blog posts and leveraging the Hootlet plug in fro ChromeOther easy ways to stay visible on LinkedIn is to post, grow your network, recommend others and ask others for recommendations.

If you are using multiple platforms to share content, I recommend installing the Hootlet Plugin on Chrome. It enables you to share content across multiple platforms at once as you are surfing the internet.

 

 

 

Q. How do I look older or more experienced than I am?
A. The key here is to GO SLOWER. This is getting into the realm of executive presence and comes up a lot when I teach communications skills. Slow everything down:

  1. Your thinking: spend more time thinking than speaking by taking longer pauses.
  2. Slow down and digest what others have said via active listening. And use silence to your advantage. This will take a while to build. But, if you leverage and pull your pauses it becomes part of your brand. People will start to expect it and will wait for you to respond with your next brilliant idea.
  3. Also, slow down your desire to be in the spotlight. When you think of some of the best leaders or managers in your career it is usually the ones who stepped back and let you shine. Their job is to make sure everyone around the table is active and engaged. Nobody goes to work to go to 12 meetings and not say anything. Great leaders let other people come up with the solutions. They offer ideas and they ask questions to draw people out into the spotlight.

Q. Any opinions about raising money on kickstarter and the like
A. Kickstarter is a great way to crowdsource viral ideas and get funding for small business ideas. If you have an idea that is ready to go out to the world, kickstarter is a great way to get funded. It is often a lot easier than the traditional route of going to a bank or a VC firm. And microfinancing platforms are also a great way internationally for businesses to get started.

 

Resources From This Live Session

Sites To Learn More

Mastermind Groups

Good Reads

 

This IG live session was super fun and as you can see from the Notes, full of resources. Let me know if you end up using any of the above in your career navigating and please let me know when you would like me to host another live Q and A!

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