"When do I have to decide by?" is a very important question.

1. Mike Clare asked this question in his blog in this post on 12/1/08.
   

Mike started his conversation by asking "What do I want to do with my life?" then concluded that "... the best place to start would not be investigating possible career paths, but to instead lay out the things that I am interested in, believe in, enjoy doing, and the things I am not interested in."

He then made those lists -albeit very short.

That was a good start - more than most people will do. But he and we can only discover the true answer to these questions by digging a little deeper, reviewing, reflecting and revising often, and compl.

Mike's approach matches that of the extremely important first and second step in the accepted six-step career planning process which are Become aware and engage yourself in the need to make a choice and Know yourself.

Buried within the "Know yourself" step is my recommendation that one Create and develop your "My LifeWork Portal" post to aggregate the many posts you will create about yourself and your plans. (This is a variant of Dick Bolles admonition to "Put everything you know about yourself on one piece of paper".) As an example, here is my "My LifeWork Portal". Mike, you are welcome to COPY and make it your own.

I recommend that you also read these books.

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$19K is what a job search could possibly cost an unemployed person looking to make a $50K salary…… $77K is what it could possibly cost an unemployed person looking to make a $100K salary.

(Read the rest of the article in Job Search - What Does Unemployment Really Cost? - TheResumeBridge.com 11/17/08)

You can order CCC on-line at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon, Target, and eBay.

Click here for a Google search on"Creating Careers with Confidence".

Click here to return to my welcome message to this community.

tba

Text on CourseSmart link to Pete's post table of contents

Welcome to LifeWork Planning Services (LWPS) .

The LWPS Team seeded this - your personal - blog with this post so that you could see it when you clicked on "Your Blog" in the far upper left corner of this webpage.

Please read this post about "Why is creating lifework/career planning posts in my personal blog so important?".

To create another post, just click the "Post a new entry" link in the upper left corner of this post above the iconic silhouetted image with the question mark "?". (More about creating posts.)

Please COPY this post to your personal blog and tell us how you found LWPS and what you hope to get out of it.

This is your post to do with as you please or to leave it as it is. When you are ready, just click the "Edit" link below and make any changes you wish.

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Click Getting started with your LWPS account. here or in your Brief Description box to the right.

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 (Here is the original source for this post. Here is a list of all seeds. Check back, it may have changed.)

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Ed Colozzi's book "Creating Careers with Confidence" has many written exercises.

Click here to view a Table of Contents of the book.

In addition to or rather than writing in your book, create a post in your personal LWPS blog for each of those exercises, then create a summary page - like "My LifeWork Portal" - to collect all those posts in one place.

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CourseSmart offers to its subscribers a digital version of Ed's book "Creating Careers with Confidence".

Below is the CourseSmart Table of Contents for Ed's book. If you are not a CourseSmart subscriber, you will only see a few paragraphs of the top of each section.

You can read random samples of full chapters on this CourseSmart webpage.

Table of Contents

Copyright

A Personal Letter to You from Me

Table of Exercises

About the Author

Acknowledgments

The Choice

Introduction and Overview

Your Beginning ... Reflections

My Reflections

Part I. Self-Knowledge: Learning More About Yourself

The Banyan Tree

The Five-Minute Rainbow Connection: Adult Daydreaming

Banyan Branches—My Interests

Banyan Branches—My Skills

Banyan Branches—My Values

Banyan Branches Summary Codes

My Self-Knowledge Δ Code

Review, Reflect, Reconnect: The Holland Connection

Part II. Key Concepts for Making Successful Career-Life Decisions

The Reflective-Intuitive Decision-Making Process

“The Ice Cream Cone”: Applying the Reflective-Intuitive Process

How Reflective-Intuitive Decision Making Works

The Career-Life Concept

Evaluating My Present Career-Life Roles R

My Personal Career-Life Rainbow

Personality–Environment Matches

A Framework for Improved Career-Life Directions

Part III. The World-of-Work: Where the Jobs Are!

The World-of-Work Map

My Work Task Preferences

My World-of-Work Regions Preference

Examining the World-of-Work Map

A World-of-Work Map Mini-Quiz

Part IV. Matching You with the World-of-Work

Using My Holland Code to Match World-of-Work Regions and Career Areas

My Two-Step Safety Net

Part V. Learning More About the Occupations That Match You

Information Resources for Exploration

Occupational Research

The Informational Interview

Part VI. Your Future Career-Life Situation

Self-Knowledge and the Learning Process

The Golden Coconut R

Part VII. Creating Your Rainbow

Your Best Next Step

Appendix 1. Career-Life Themes

Appendix 2. Ideal Career Scenario

Appendix 3. Personal Portfolio

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The "What you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) visual editor we use on LWPS has many "edit icons" above the "Post body" which greatly improves your "edit experience". However, some MAC users do not see them.

This post will contain (potential) fixes to resolve that problem.

I use the Firefox (FF) browser. Perhaps if you install FF on your MAC, the "edit icons" might become visible.

Go to this site to download FF. It is 7.1 megs.

If the fix works, please add a comment to this post.

If you use a MAC and not FF, and you see teh edit icons, please add a comment with details about your MAC and browser.

Welcome to LifeWork Planning Services (LWPS) .

The LWPS Team seeded this - your personal - blog with this post so that you could see it when you clicked on "Your Blog" in the far upper left corner of this webpage.

Please read this post about "Why is creating lifework/career planning posts in my personal blog so important?".

To create another post, just click the "Post a new entry" link in the upper left corner of this post above the iconic silhouetted image with the question mark "?". (More about creating posts.)

Please COPY this post to your personal blog and tell us how you found LWPS and what you hope to get out of it.

This is your post to do with as you please or to leave it as it is. When you are ready, just click the "Edit" link below and make any changes you wish.

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Click Getting started with your LWPS account. here or in your Brief Description box to the right.

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 (Here is the original source for this post. Here is a list of all seeds. Check back, it may have changed.)

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