Ground of Your Own Choosing : Winning Strategies for Finding and Creating Work

Everything has changed about work except how we go about finding it. Our reliance on the use of traditional job search techniques in a work environment that has dramatically changed is the equivalent of "fighting the last war" with disappointing, even disastrous, results. Most of us sense this, but we don't know what else to do.

This book is a clear, concise guide to a new kind of work security, one that is not dependent on any particular job, but on your own capacity to generate work. It offers a compelling rationale for why it is necessary to change your thinking and provides practical steps, supported by real life stores, for taking action.

From the Author's Preface:

"Several years ago, I did a workshop for a group of Bentley College alumni. Right after we finished lunch, just before we started back again, someone expressed frustration with the inefficiency and wastefulness of traditional job-search practices, and I made the offhand remark, 'If I had my way, people would throw out their resumes and stop networking.'

"An electric charge went through the room. Thirty business professionals, some a few years out of college, others farther along in their careers, all of them well-versed in traditional job-search, came alive.

"Somebody had actually said out loud what they instinctively knew, that trying to find work the way we currently go about it is unproductive, frustrating, humiliating, and often downright awful.

A career expert was telling them that it was not only acceptable but also entirely appropriate for them to feel as they did, and it was as if they heaved a collective sigh of relief. 'Maybe it's not us,' they thought, 'maybe it's the methods themselves that aren't working.'

I wished I could have put aside the agenda I planned for the afternoon to pursue the subject with them. What I suspect would have happened is that they would have told me they follow traditional job-search practices because they don't know what else to do.

Not being able to answer the question, "What do I do instead?" is the reason people looking for work keep doing the same things and expecting different, less disappointing results.

This book was written to answer that question.

As a career counselor and business consultant, Beverly Ryle has been helping corporate professionals, business owners, and people-in-transition achieve their full potential for over twenty-five years. After an extensive career as a resume expert, career counselor and corporate outplacement consultant in Fairfield County, CT, where she worked with clients at every organizational level, she moved to Cape Cod where she maintains coaching relationships with individuals all over the U.S. and provides customized, individual career retreats for people who are ready to take charge of their professional future. Her ability to guide clients through a professional development process is built upon expertise in transition, communications, and negotiations, as well as the best practices of leadership, marketing, and consultative sales. This integration of counseling and business disciplines has proven to be very effective in the work she does with individuals and groups. In addition to individual counseling she provides transition, leadership, and sales training to business organizations, and regularly delivers professional development seminars on both business and career topics. Her credentials include: graduate education in business and career development; professional certification with William Bridges and Richard Bolles; training at the Cape Cod Institute with thought leaders such as Joan Goldsmith, Charles and Edith Seashore, Margaret Wheatley, and David Cooperrider; Leadership in the 21st Century and the Cape Cod Training Program at the Gestalt International Study Center.