Maybe your career is stagnant; you feel stuck in neutral. You may feel bored, unmotivated, or you don’t see opportunities for growth or advancement.

Here’s one way to shake things up and inject some life into a “ho-hum” job or career: Deliberately, intentionally, choose a way to stretch beyond your comfort zone.

Choosing to move beyond your comfort zone is distinct from stretching by necessity. Instead of being in a reactive mode to whatever your job requires, you determine a facet of your work life you want to explore or improve. You are in charge.

This issue features excerpts (with permission) from an email I received recently. “Carl” and I met early last year for a Career Action Planning (CAP) session after he was laid off from a managerial position at a large financial services firm. In his recent email update, Carl described his active, thorough, and ultimately-successful search: applying online, working with recruiters, and tapping into his network in a focused, professional manner. Carl concluded his update with the…

Most of us want secure jobs we can count on. Unfortunately, many of us think we can find security by hanging onto what seems like a secure job–even when the job doesn’t fit us.

Despite the articles and books warning that there is no security in today’s job market, many people still think that hanging on is more stable than moving.

Trusting in a company or job is the wrong focus for career security. The key to security is your reputation: your skills, contributions, work style, attitude, integrity, and motivations. The old adage is true even now: it’s not so much what or who you know; it’s who knows and believes in you.

1. Alex faced a tough decision: whether to continue his ascent up the corporate ladder at a major food company by moving to Chicago.

Although accepting the promotion would mean more of what he’d always aspired to—responsibility and leadership opportunities—it would uproot his wife and daughters and mean even more stress from travel and near-24/7 communication via phone, email, and text.

If he turned the offer down in order to stay in St. Louis, however, his 15-year career with the company would end, and he’d have to figure out what to do next.

Great careers (and meaningful lives) are built on more than degrees, experience, and thriving industries. Just as important, even more so in the long run, are the people we associate with. We can’t have too many good people in our lives. Connecting and maintaining contact with good people (however you define “good”) not only makes life worth living, it makes work worth loving. And on the way, we bolster our career security.
–Brian has lunch with Corita twice a year because he feels inspired when he hears how she’s pursuing her love of music.
–Julie’s crazy about Basset Hounds and belongs to a Basset Hound owners’ group. She enjoys the opportunity to be with others who share her enthusiasm.

A common belief about the job search is that keeping your “options open” gives you more opportunities; or conversely, that being very specific about what you want to do will limit you.

Believing that if we present ourselves as job chameleons who can fit in almost anywhere, we hope that employers will consider us for more jobs–maybe even jobs we have not thought of ourselves.

The “I’m-open-to-options” belief persists, especially when the job market is tough. This thinking goes beyond the resume and permeates the whole job search; and it can make finding a good job difficult. Here are four reasons why it is important to have a focused approach.

Remember the school playground bullies who terrorized the smaller kids? Some of those bullies have climbed corporate ladders and continue terrorizing others, but on bigger playgrounds–workplaces.

Now they use more subtle psychological weapons; and unlike their days on the playground, they often have the support of the organizational hierarchy.

We all hear that networking is the key to finding a (good) job. Yet it often doesn’t work. Upon closer look, however, the problem is not that networking itself doesn’t work; it’s that it’s done ineptly.

Networking does NOT mean: Imposing on others. Acting like a beggar. Accepting a friend’s offer to “circulate” your resume. Going to meetings you’d normally shun just to give out your resume and collect business cards. Asking family and friends if they know of openings. Requesting a meeting to pick someone’s brain.

Spring’s arrival signals growth and renewal; this newsletter’s topic addresses career growth, renewal, and advancement. Whether it’s getting re-employed, promoted, or moving in a new career direction, apply this stealth approach: pursue a learning agenda.

I don’t mean the regimented, highly-structured, formal classroom, high-tuition, graded, stress-inducing graduate degree type that may first come to mind. It’s the learning that YOU CHOOSE: new or refined skills and new or refined content.