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05/07/06
Do You Suffer from Zeteophobia?
Filed under: Job Search
Posted by: site admin @ 1:48 pm

Just back to my office from the industry’s best annual conference (Career Masters Institute, in San Francisco this year), I’m buzzing with lots of incredible ideas to help my clients be more successful in their career-management pursuits and job searches.

So, what’s zeteophobia? It’s a ‘coined term’ by noted psychologist and Stanford University professor John Krumboltz and means ‘a fear of career planning.’ Among many key ideas he offered, the optimal solution to this vexing problem (and, by the way, a stalled career plan could also be addressed this way) is the happenstance approach.

Simply, this is starting to take action now to create unexpected career opportunities — with an emphasis on action and not decision making. To support this theorem, Dr. Krumboltz shared a great parable he wrote about a rabbit and a crow … the bottom line of which is a rabbit doing nothing on the ground … got gobbled up by a fox, whereas the crow doing nothing up in a tree … survived. Moral? To be sitting and doing nothing, you have to be very high up.

The connection to career planning here is for individuals to create and transform unplanned events into career opportunities. Position yourself appropriately, surround yourself with positive influences, raise the antenna, and be prepared to follow up on every good idea with action in order to capitalize on the moment. I’ll be following up with concrete, salient recommendations in a subsequent post.

– Jan Melnik, MRW, CCM, CPRW, President, Absolute Advantage  … Don’t forget to check out careerhub.typepad.com for the best in career search advice from the career industry’s top experts 

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