Feedback: the most valuable gift any professional can get. It goes without saying that any feedback should be positive and meaningful in order to be constructive. But to me, feedback is mostly based on something else: our attitude and our willingness to listen.  In fact, the feedback is not that rare a gift. I just believe that in most cases we just hear but we do not listen and we just look without actually seeing anything. First and foremost, the most important feedback comes from the inside. We all know what we do very well and what not. What is the r...

This is the one million dollar question. In fact, the answer to it is worth a lot more for each and everyone of us. Happy, successful careerists have done nothing more that giving an answer to this question. An answer that comes straight from their hearts and gives them purpose.  Most of us, build and care for our careers aiming "not to.." Basing all our activity, thought and energy to prevent something from happening, we run out of energy to make something actually happen. Is there anyone amongst us who wishes to think back in his/her career and say "Well, I did very well spending a...

The cover letter is one of these documents that alongside with the CV, are considered the most difficult to tackle in career management. The most frequent question I get  is whether a cover letter is  necessary. My answer is, yes. A cover letter is necessary because it balances out a CV which is by definition loaded with achievements and short, to the point sentences. The cover letter allows us to address the employer on a more emotional level: we can write longer sentences and we can be a tad more personable. Even if there is no need to write an actual cover letter it...

The quickest answer to this question is: These career tools have one thing in common, our personal brand.Let''s see why: The aim of our CV is to get us an interview (and not a job). The aim of a website is to get the prospective client to contact us to enquire about our services. It is always good to have a clear aim. Therefore, before getting started on our CVs or websites we need to be clear that we aim at the right audience and that we will provide this audience with an answer to the need they have.  Both our CV and our website are not for everybody. But if we are unsure abou...

I keep noticing lately that many of the careerists that reach out to me for career care, suffer at work because "they can trust noone". Research has proven that we all are extremely subjective when it comes to assessing ourselves. For example* when 1.000.000 students were asked how they would rate themsleves in terms of how good they were at getting along with others 85% rated themselves above the median and 25% rated themselves at top score, which was just impossible.  This is exactly what happens with trust: trust is one of those brand attributes we all believe we possess (we are trustw...