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A Clip from “It’s Your Career, After All” with Douglas E. Welch from the Career Opportunities Podcast
Douglas E. Welch (http://douglasewelch.com) presents to the class Career Development – Theories and Techniques at Pepperdine Graduate School of Education & Psychology taught by fellow CareerCamp Co-Chair, Danielle Gruen
Transcript:
Well, I was having trouble in my career because my career does not follow the normal pattern of the stair step. You just move up to the corporate stair step and that’s the way careers work, right? Well, it doesn’t. Someone like Yo Yo Ma, he’s a cellist and all he’s done is simply got better at being a cellist. That’s what he does. He has that very fine focus. She explained to me that my career was the most troublesome. My path pattern was the most troublesome because you can’t tell what your career is until about 20 years out. Because all the jobs don’t appear to be associated in any way. They’re — they seem, randomly scattered. Until you kind of draw a spiral connecting them all and ,all of a sudden, you realize “Oh, there is a pattern there.” For me, it was discovering that no matter what I did — whether it was high-tech, speaking to groups like this, writing, whatever — everything I do has something to do with education. I’m a teacher. I just don’t teach in the classroom, but everything, from personal consulting, from my IT work, from speaking to my writing, my photography, whatever — it’s all about educating someone about something. And boy once I figured that out, it was like “Oh my god! Ok, I’m not crazy. I’m not worthless. There is a pattern to this. I just didn’t see it.” That really changed my life for the better and I have seen her give that talk at our CareerCamp unconferences and have that exact same dramatic effect on the people gives it to there. Too many of us get caught in that — we don’t fit into the particular molds that are common and we think we’re broken in some way, because we don’t fit them mold. But, in fact, no, no, we’re just a little different. You’re just a little different. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible for your to be successful. You’ve just got to do things in a slightly different way.
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