Gold Nugget Coaching

Recently, almost simultaneously, two of my coaching clients had a similar kind of challenge arise. Both of them came up against middlesence career issues—where to go next in their well-established and successful careers. When you’re “stuck” in the middle of an issue like this, the way out often just looks like a nebulous blur. But with some work, the nebulous blur begins to take shape and a solution begins to form. Of course, in retrospect—after the problem is solved, we often realize that the answer was staring us in the face but we couldn’t see it. So how do you go from a “nebulous blur” to seeing a solid solution? One of the primary keys is by creating “distinctions.” Since distinctions are such a critical component to getting “unstuck,” I thought it would be valuable to spend some time here talking about them.

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Finally! A name for a largely unacknowledged, but very real, issue that many mid-career workers are currently in the throes of.

In fact, tens of millions of workers are “feeling burned-out, bottle-neck, and bored,” according to a breakthrough article in the March 2006 Harvard Business Review entitled “Managing Middlescence” by Robert Morison, Tamara Erickson, and Ken Dyctwald.  They coined the term middlescence (like “adolescence”) to characterize this newly recognized phenomenon. 

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Welcome to the sixth and final part of this series on how to take better control of your life and career through the art of making powerful offers.

With just a bit more work, you can bring forth an offer that makes sense to your listener. Even beyond making sense, you have the opportunity to craft an offer that is productive AND tempting to them.

So now let’s take this through the final steps  . . .

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Welcome to Part 5 of this six–part series on how to take better control of your life and career through the art of making powerful offers.

The previous parts of this series laid the groundwork for what we’re going to examine this week and then complete next week: designing real-world powerful offers that you can make, and optimizing your chances that the offers are accepted. 

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Welcome to Part 4 of this six–part series on how to take better control of your life and career through the art of making powerful offers.

In the previous parts, I showed how you can construct offers that connect to the needs and concerns of the people to whom you make your offers—the “listener.” Then I showed you how to practice beforehand so that you don’t shoot yourself in the foot.

This week, I want to talk about something that’s easy to overlook, but is a cornerstone of every successful professional’s career: trust. It’s easy to take this for granted. But there is a subtlety to trust and, if you don’t pay attention to it, you may find your career stalled, while you sit at your desk confused about why things aren’t going your way.

My point is simple: For your career to thrive, you have to be someone in whom others are willing to invest their trust. For your offers to be consistently accepted, you must have a reputation for being trustworthy. You might be thinking, Well that’s easy. I don’t rob banks, I pay my taxes on time, I don’t “borrow” supplies from the office. But are these the kinds of things people use to make assessments about whether or not you’re trustworthy? I say, not entirely.

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