Melissa Wells – Career Consultant

My first trip in a canopy crane!!!

Two videos here – from the ground and secondly, ecologist Mark Moffett talking about the canopy layers as we move through them.

Cranes are used to access all layers of the forest. There are  only a few ways to get into tall trees and explore a forest – one is using ropes to climb up, another is a canopy raft (the French are very skilled at this  and are sure to bring wine along) , tree bicycle, canopy boom (like a tetter totter).

The scariest part of the canopy crane is the initial ascent. The cable winch “wwhhhrrrr” noise is high pitched, there is nothing to shield the view beneath you. The canopy “box” you ride up in is open slats for a floor, mesh sides halfway up, the upper have is open to the sky. We had the responsibility of hooking up our own box. That’s right, we had to connect the large hook and 2 cables to our own box.

The crane operator scampers up a ladder to a platform and then enters the crane control area – a small seat with controls for lifting, rotating and extending us along the crane. I was to learn that our crane was small at only 50 meters tall and 50 meters long.

Once you ascend a layer or two in the canopy you see the branches and creatures hidden from our usual on the ground perspective. There are corridors that birds use as highways to fly through. The dragonflies come out in numbers, basking in the sun. The dark understory is cool. The very top of the canopy is blazing hot from the sun and filled with flowers, fruits and leaves, all competing for some of the sun’s energy.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.
At one corner of the forest was a pair of sloths – the three-toed kind. A male with an orange and black pattern on its back was climbing up to a female, sleeping nestled in the branches.

I thought I knew a little bit about forests. The view from the ground does not compare. The canopy is astounding.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video. Yes, the video shows my face in front of tons of bees!

Not something I do on every trip. These bees are special. Like most bees, they create a uniqe entrance to their nest that allows them to protect the colony from invaders, and have easy access.

These bees create a waxy cheese straw that they zip in and out of all day!

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video. The unexpected makes travel exhilirating. Just when I had waited around stingless bee hives long enough, watching, waiting for something to occur, I had the chance to get inside one.

Friend and bee expert, David Roubik, transferred a large bee hive from a too small (but very heavy log) to a clean and large house. After taking two different chain saws to the log I saw what was inside. The bees had used the majority of space for trash and waste. A very small area in the log was used to store pollen and nectar. The bee “residence” was a grey-black mass the size of a rugby ball, layered with paper-thin material.

These bees don’t create the layers of “combs” that honey bees do.

But these bees make something that tastes even better. The nectar and pollen is stored in waxy resin containers. These vessels are the size and shape of small gourds. The honey inside is an elixir that tastes like a sauterne wine! Layered with citrus and flowers, the wine is sweet, and about the same thickness as a sauterne.

I don’t know that I’ll ever taste that complex, delicious honey again.

Want a close up? – play the video.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.Have you ever seen anything like this?

I ran into this creature unexpectedly. I wasn’t sure what it was at first because it was so large and I saw it fly. When did they start flying? I had never seen a grasshopper fly before.  Grasshoppers are part of the locust family. I couldn’t help but think about Biblical references to “plagues of locusts”. A swarm of these creatures could block the sun and eat all the vegetation in sight.

Beautiful red and black wings – they show up clearly on the video.

“What?!”  That was my reaction last night at dinner to Matt’s story.  A new friend, Matt, landed the perfect position by NOT following the advice of the outplacement firm assigned to “help” him.

The background: Matt is a senior level executive able to command a considerable salary in the tech field. He has a rolodex as big as many New York City kitchens. Most importantly, Matt’s found every job through his network and knew that this time would be no different.

So what does an outplacement firm suggest? Get this. The outplacement firm suggested Matt create a one-page marketing sheet, listing the jobs he wanted and the companies he’d like to connect with.  For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, the logic is that by handing someone a list, she will more quickly and easily think of you when an opportunity comes along.  Sounds simple enough, right?  I’ve heard about this strategy before, and never suggest it to my clients. On the surface it seems harmless enough, but it backfires.

One Page Marketing Sheets Fail Because:

• It’s All About You.
  
• You Appear Lazy. Use LinkedIn to find out who is in your extended network. Use networking to determine the needs of the person, company, industry; and build relationships. If you need to show someone what you can do, send a professionally created resume – that’s what it’s for! A marketing sheet as hand-out comes across as though you expect someone else to do your homework for you.
• It’s Impersonal. Make yourself memorable by being personal. A straightforward e-mail and solid resume do more to communicate who you are than a list.

How do you tell good advice from bad? What’s the worst career advice you’ve heard?

Pula! (with a soft ‘P’) is said with glasses raised. Pula is also the name for Botswana’s currency.

I’ve been saying Pula as much as possible since returning from Botswana. Pula translates to “prosperity and abundance”.  The hippos, elephants, warthogs, giraffes, and high-water flow from Angola’s rivers are the obvious examples of Botswana’s abundance.

What if we associated prosperity and abundance with money and with the joy of close relationships and transformative experience?

Simple question.

In our culture money is money and more money is better. Huh.

I’d rather have prosperity and abundance.

Feedback?! Ha! Job seekers receive next to none. In the past, you knew that your resume and cover letter were good enough because you landed the interview. No longer.

As a measure of quality, getting the interview is useful only if, well, you get the interview. But what if you don’t? What do you need to do differently?

All resumes I see, and from very talented, well-educated, experienced professionals are still entirely too task-based, and dry. This isn’t a question of format. They lack energy!

Ever pick up your own to read casually? Which pile would you put it in?

A resume acts as your ambassador to a future relationship with an employer. It gets between 2.5 and 30 seconds (if you’re lucky) of attention.

Questions to ask yourself about your resume:

• Are you excited about the person reflected on the page?
• How does it show who you want to be in your next position?
• Does it express your energy?

Answer “No” to any of the above? Then don’t expect an employer to perceive what you can’t.

Job seekers, I know you can do it yourself (I don’t advise it).  In fact, leave a comment and I’ll send you an effective resume template.

But why are you asking yourself to find even more time and enthusiasm to create a compelling resume? Isn’t the job search draining enough?

An energized resume can impress and boost your confidence.

There’s plenty of info on resume formats, “do’s and don’ts”. Frankly, if I see another Tweet linking to another post about chronological vs functional I’ll scream. If there’s no enthusiasm or creativity or specific words that clearly describe what you offer, then the format doesn’t matter. It will come off as bland or competent, but sterile.

And that’s not who you are.

Know that your resume is great if:

1. It reflects you. In the future. You look at your new resume and are excited about the person you see. You can’t help but say you love your resume.
2. You hand it to a recruiter, preferably one with an old copy of your resume, and hear, “Wow! I never knew you had this kind of experience, and I know exactly the position I want for you.”
3. An interviewer says, “I can see that you’ve only worked for companies with the best reputation. I’m flattered that we’re interviewing you.”

The last two are real-life experiences from my clients.

I started revising resumes because clients asked me to. I listen to them, and get a clear, specific picture of what they’ve done and want to do. I see the vision they have for themselves and their career. Then I put that on paper.

How does your resume reflect you?

As you notice from the post title, I have gone for understatement. This is the start of the down and dirty for your business. The guidance is directed towards coaches because I am a coach frustrated with the lack of thorough, usable, business-based guidance for coaches. Yet, what you will read here is applicable to psychotherapists and service-based solopreneurs.

I’m not selling magic, or positive thinking, or anything, come to think of it. All the guidance and tools in this series are free, to legal extent.

I’m teaching you to get your coaching business off the ground, how to measure its progress, identify pitfalls, show you the tools you need, when you need them, and what you do not need. I’ll borrow and share what I admire from the web, books or personal advice. If I really want or need something that doesn’t exist, I’ll create it myself. No reinventing the wheel. In fact, it is so crucial to manage your time well, I’ll often say “good enough”. Perfect is not the goal. A thriving business based on your insights and creativity is.

Why a ‘Brave’ business? Simple. Because that’s who you are.

It took bravery to return for an MSW or take coach training, and the call does not end there. Maggie Craddock, successful coach, consultant and all-around decent human recently said, “In the past it was enough to be smart and work hard. Now, to have a great career, you need to be brave.”

You, like my career coaching clients, want a great career. You recognized in yourself a desire to help others make change and have experienced the powerful sense of satisfaction as reward. Now you’re considering starting your own business, which according to Seth Godin is the new hard work.

How do we start?

1. The fastest way for me to cut through the noise out there is to talk to people who have been coaching for 1, 3, 5, 10 years and ask about their experiences. The results will be posted here.
2. At the same time, I’ll post to “Build a Brave Business”. The posts will cover stages of business, diagnostic questions to allow you to identify where you are, the tools most needed for that stage, and questions to prod yourself forward.

What questions do you want answered most by coaches and solo-preneurs? What kinds of tools perplex the most? Comment with your questions and I’ll go get answers.

This post is inspired by a conversation with my coach, whom I admire, Jeannette Maw, Law of Attraction Master. Thank you, Jeannette!

Hey coaches! Are you sick of all the “make more money” talk not grounded in your experience or the reality of business?

I believe that we, the coaching industry, are creating anxiety and misperception about the earning capabilities of coaches. How many of our conversations are about money? I’m proposing we change that.

Here is a sample of the e-mails I receive from other coaches touting their wares, “Join the Six Figure Club”, “Are You an Underearner?”, “Special Issue on Money”. You would think that all coaches are starving or close to it.

I’m a bit concerned and irritated, quite frankly, when the industry that puts itself out there to help people with problems like money can’t come up with a better money story. It just doesn’t add up.

So I’m asking myself and you readers, “What is the story with the coaching industry and money?!”

Here’s where I think our ability to be effective about money in our coaching business fails:

1. Shallow Cheerleading. We are overly enthusiastic about the flocks of folks becoming coaches that we don’t want to “burst their bubble” and address realistic earnings and business planning.
2. LoA Confusion. The concepts and behavior of money, energy, and LoA are inseparable (check out GoodVibe blog to get up to speed on this topic). Once we are a coach, we fear that if we’re not making lots of money our vibration is “off”. It becomes a dirty little secret. We fail to look at where we spend our time and energy in the real world, which is what ultimately determines our degree of success.
3. Lack of Consistent Business Tools. Established industries have consistent tools to run the business (P&L, performance metrics, risk analysis), regardless of the company. Coaching has lots of different tools.
4. Practice Variations. Most coaches earn money from training other coaches, or selling to coaches. There are few proven models out there because few coaches are truly flourishing financially, and fewer are doing it the same way.
5. Remedial Business Skills. This may be the biggest gap. With the low barrier to entry for coaching, many enter with zero business experience. Are we doing them a disservice to not provide that as part of training?

This month’s issue of Choice magazine focuses on money, and making more of it. It’s the second time in about two years that Choice has dedicated an all-money issue. I looked up several coaches who specialize in business management; all of their tools are on-line, for a price.

I’m on fire about this one because the basic coaching model is simple: Xhours x $Y per hour = cash. And just like any business, it can be diagnosed for specific problems (lack of hours, no clear business plan) and consistent, effective solutions applied.

So if it’s so simple, what trips us up?

1. Action Paralysis. We don’t know what NOT to focus on. From add-on software, ad-words and websites to everything in between, we are constantly bombarded with products and training to purchase and use without any idea which is effective.
2. Zero Financial Planning. Lack of a template to map out projected monthly income and expenses. This is a business basic, but most coaches haven’t a clue.
3. Wasting Time. No correlation between the quality of effort and the income generated.

So here’s the bottom-line. I got so excited that I committed to Jeannette that I would have some truly useful tools for coaches soon. I don’t know what this will look like or how the heck it will happen.

Tell me coaches, what do you want to see? What would help you the most in your practice now, regardless of how long you’ve been in the biz?

Be the first to hear it,  join Jeannette’s open course on Manifesting Money, starting July 8. Check it out here .  I’m going to be there drinking in the smart sense Jeannette always comes through with and leading a session on “How Would Animals Behave Around Money”.

Our guide in Botswana, Victor, relayed an experience that epitomizes strong leadership.

While taking a group of tourists in an open Land Rover, through the savannah to look for lions on the hunt he gets lost. This is a big deal. Lost. At night. In the wild.

No roads. No streetlights. No phones. No way to be found. And the wild in Africa means lions and other cats, who hunt at night, and hyenas who hunt at night. A few other creatures feed at night and may not intend to harm you, but you don’t want to get in their way either. The rhino, hippo and water buffalo fall into that category.

Truly lost at night in the open savannah is dangerous and frightening.

What did the experienced guide Victor do?

He calmly told everyone he was lost and asked if anyone knew the way back towards camp.

Pretty shocking, isn’t it? Think about your experiences in companies, organizations or teams. When did you see a leader admit ignorance and ask for timely help? When were you leading and felt completely, utterly lost?

As an aside, I spent hours searching on-line for good content about leadership (see link to Leading Blog here and above). I found  little, and almost none mentioned trust. We are experiencing an extreme violation of public and private trust right now. I was impressed with this story because it perfectly demonstrates elemental leadership.

Here’s what the experience taught me about Victor and other good leaders:

• The leader’s sense of responsibility for the team is held above ego. Victor asked for help because he knew his first, and most important responsibility was to keep the group safe. The corporate parallel could be having the team succeed, or furthering others’ careers.
• The leader is chosen, in part, because of expertise. Tourists selected him and decided to trust him because of his experience and reputation.
• The leader seeks input. Victor’s no fool. He quickly recognized that someone in the group might know the way and asked for participation.
• The leader is decisive.
• The leader establishes trust and maintains it. Victor built trust with the group through his expertise. He maintained it by asking for help at the right time.

Victor had the chance to prove his worthiness to lead again. Two nights later I found myself 6 feet away from a male elephant, who was not pleased to see me. My first elephant standoff.