TIPS and TECHNIQUES…                                    
                                          PROFESSIONAL to PROFESSIONAL 

By Helen Harkness, PhD

As career advisors and consultants today, our major responsibility is to teach our adult clients how to deal with change and the subsequent chaos and complexity that will only increase in the next decade.

We are all quite aware that our traditional, mid-life clients grew up in a world valuing stability, material success – the typical "up the corporate ladder," womb to tomb paradigm which has crashed with the bang and the whimper of massive downsizing, mergers acquisition. Most older adults, reared on stories of the Great Depression, fear real change and would probably remain passively and seemingly trapped in meaningless Sisyphesian jobs that give them no real pleasure except a paycheck.

This does not include most of the Generation Xers and Generation Y. However, avoiding change is becoming less an option as organizations increasingly downsize and as the younger generation enter the workforce. What can we as career consultants teach our mid-life clients who stand fearful in a Twilight Zone of rapidly changing career paradigms? 

These are three of my tips on techniques used with clients in career transitions. The career process I help my clients through is really very simple, yet totally complex.

They must:

1.       Know what they can and want to do: This is based on looking inward at themselves, and looking outward researching and exploring what is happening outside their former occupational life.

2.       Ask for it assertively and effectively. Develop a working plan and communicate with those who can help them. While they must do it themselves, they are not by themselves

3.       Know they deserve what they are asking for.

This is a sense of self-esteem, built on the knowledge and self-assurance that they can and will succeed in their focused area.

So, our job is to help our clients know what they want based on themselves and the reality of the environment and to teach them to ask for it effectively and know they deserve it!

As I have moved adults through this career change and enhancement process for 25 years, I am always amazed at how assertive and creative they can become.  Once they get a real image of what they can become in their future and become passionate about their purpose.

They must also learn a new way to tell time. When I have mid-life clients, paralyzed and stuck, one of my most effective techniques is to pose the following simple question:

            "What would you do if you were 20 years younger?"

I have found that very frequently they can respond very quickly. Their ready answer provides some very real insight to the options they may be closing out because of the mindless myths of chronological aging. There is absolutely no research proving that mental, physical, psychological and creative decline are automatic functions of the number of days we have breathed. Let's teach ourselves and our mid-life clients to focus on functional age: forget chronological years.