Choice Points: Navigate Your Career Using the Unique PaperRoom Process - Softcover

Rice, Sydney

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0891061738 ISBN 13: 9780891061731

Publisher: UNKNO, 2003

Synopsis

The PaperRoom, the groundbreaking career navigation process introduced in Choice Points, leads people through an entirely new perspective of their lives and careers. With a series of innovative tools that help to examine assumptions and barriers and identify needs for challenge, recognition, accomplishment, and connection, readers reflect and take action.

About this title

About the Author

Sydney Rice, M.Ed., has more than twenty-five years' experience as a professional business coach, facilitator, consultant, and trainer. Founder and president of The Boston Coaching Company, Inc., she has worked with more than 2,000 individuals and more than two dozen organizations in a variety of settings. Clients have included Time Inc., BankBoston, the Boston Police Department, Chase Manhattan Bank, Harvard Community Health Plan, Cri-Tech Manufacturing, and Thomson Financial.

Through her coaching practice, Rice recognized the need to provide leaders and organizations with a structure that would enable them to maintain their professional edge by enhancing their ability to leverage their strengths, develop future leaders, and successfully navigate change. The Boston Coaching Company provides leaders with individualized coaching and organizations with BCC Leadership Coaching Programs, customized internal Web site-accessed coaching and mentoring. Its team of eighteen senior coaching professionals resides in the United States and England.

Rice is the creator of the Partnership Pact (TM), a collaborative coaching and mentoring model that has been effectively employed by groups and individuals in a variety of organizations experiencing the need to both embrace new knowledge and retain traditional wisdom. She also designed The PaperRoom, an innovative process that provides individuals with the tools to optimize their effectiveness and make career choices that are personally and professionally fulfilling. These processes have proven beneficial and practical for executives, entrepreneurs, professionals, and creative artists.

From the Inside Flap

If you feel trapped, dissatisfied, unable to move on, and hungry for congruence between work and life, you have a lot of company. The old paths don't measure up, but what is the alternative?

Reinventing work and life, embracing change, and understanding what blocked you in the past and what motivates you now are critical skills that don't appear by accident. With conscious intent and the proven career navigation tools in CHOICE POINTS, you can gain the perspective you need to create the life you want.

Working through the personal inquiry exercises of the unique PaperRoom process brings the influence of past attitudes and assumptions into focus. You'll see what is stopping you, what motivated you in the past, and what no longer works, enabling you to clear the slate and create strategies that will work now. You'll see how you've fulfilled your needs for recognition, accomplishment, challenge, and connection. With your new understanding of life stages, work patterns, family attitudes, and peak experiences, you'll discover that anything is possible. Here are the breakthrough tools to achieve the work life that's right for you and make your dreams reality.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Many of us are finding that "the way it has always been" is too confining. We want more breadth and depth in our careers. Often we feel overworked or powerless, and our old skills for navigating aren't getting us where we need to go. We see our personal standards compromised for the sake of the bottom line, our productivity falters for lack of professional fulfillment, and, regardless of age or level of accomplishment, many of us feel frustrated.

As this new century began to unfold, so did a new urgency to question what we value, what we honor, and what we hold dear. The economic picture became an ever-changing image that we were hard-pressed to bring into focus. Collectively we reached a "choice point," a time to review and reevaluate the quality and direction of our future and the workability of our business practices. It was not possible for those who went before us to tell us what to expect, what to do, or who to be. It had become clear that the world they grew up in no longer exists and that the new world doesn't play by the old rules. We needed a new approach to working and living, and new navigation skills to serve us in today's world, which leads us to CHOICE POINTS.

Regardless of your level in your organization or whether you are self-employed, feeling professionally stuck or at a major crossroads, or working harder and enjoying it less, this is the book for you. But launching another career shift or taking aptitude tests or even finding work based on the strengths in your resume is putting the cart before the horse. Maybe the problem and its solution aren't "out there," in the company, community, or family, the ever-present "other" wherein all opportunity, responsibility, and blame rest. Perhaps the answer is in us, in the way we think, the way we are used to doing things, and that's the good news--that we can do something about it.

Where Are You?

Consider for a moment that our habitual understanding or way of thinking is actually what is blocking our ability to see the best direction to take and how to begin. Much of the difficulty we are experiencing is due to our approach, our historical ways of doing things and succeeding. This faulty approach is based on the notion that stability (read: safety) means not changing, or changing only in predictable, time-proven ways. Webster's Dictionary defines stability as "the strength to stand or endure." In this book are tools to help you stay standing in a changing world. You will learn to choose change rather than let change choose you. The concepts and exercises presented here will help you uncover the specific perceptions, beliefs, habits, expectations, and assumptions that have been blocking you and provide you with new practices that will enable you to stretch beyond your past limitations.

In addition to our concerns about change, there is another problem complicating our professional lives: time. We say we don't have enough of it. But is that true? It may be on a given day. But we need to take another look at time. The habit of always looking to the past to inform us has limited our ability to see the present. We do have more time. We will live longer than our parents and be healthier as we age. Our lives simply are not as confined as our parents' (and their parents') lives were. We don't need to jam all that is important and vital into twenty or thirty years of adulthood and then coast. We don't have to peak at fifty only to descend rapidly into our dotage. Fifty is a new plateau for doing many different, meaningful things that can last well into our eighties. We don't need to do them all at once. And that reality has implications for each step we take toward making our work and life flourish. CHOICE POINTS introduces a new way to look at the stages of life that better reflects your current reality and allows you to take better advantage of this new reality and the opportunities it brings.

Where to Go from Here?

What might new rules for career and life design look like? Does having a career mean you do the same kind of work or stay in the same industry for life? What is wrong and what is right for you? What are your real priorities? What might it be like to work differently or to work at different things in the early years of raising a family? At what point do you choose to retire, and what could that mean? Doesn't retire mean to lie down? Retire to something, perhaps, but not retire. Our perspective of life is shifting as our thoughts turn increasingly to the way we are living, the results of the choices we have made in our work, in our relationships, in every domain of our lives.

Through sixty years of personal experience and fifteen years in my own coaching practice, I have learned that life seems to prepare each of us uniquely for our appropriate next steps. If we don't recognize or accept these unique opportunities, we lose something incredibly valuable, both to ourselves and to others who would reap the benefits. This is it--our chance to seize the moment, take a chance, and discover anew what we are capable of becoming. The value cannot be underestimated. It is the difference between a life that, as Shakespeare says, "creeps in this petty pace from day to day," and one that we can truthfully welcome each morning. We just need a few new tools.

Edition details

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0891061738
• ISBN 13: 9780891061731
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208