A Vision of You Dedication
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GET YOUR DREAM JOB THE ESSENTIAL CAREER MANAGEMENT GUIDE Your DIRECTI N & F CUS IN LIFE A VISION OF YOU DEDICATION I dedicate this series of “Get Your Dream Job – The Essential Career Management Guide”. E-books to my parents Maureen and Carl Phillips who blessed me with a great upbringing and childhood. Executive development was always a discussion point in our home and the countless hours we have spent talking and researching professional development have been a great advantage in life. Additionally, I must say it was a great privilege to grow up in Canada. Mom and Dad, thank you. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge Terry Szwec, who was the CEO Career Coach at the leading Executive Search Firm in Toronto, Canada and was kind enough to coach me for free while we worked together. Terry your career advice is threaded in this book and your kindness will never be forgotten. Many thanks. NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR I hope this book makes a meaningful contribution to your career. Having a best in class career management strategy will allow you to provide a better life for your family. An increase in your disposable income is not about earning more money. Increasing your income is about increasing your access to healthcare, to education, to security, and protecting those you love. Make a decision now to be the highest paid professional in your industry. After all any success starts with a vision. My experience is that the best vision starts inside you. Not from the market, or from a global economy, or from the latest technology. A vision comes from who you are as a person. You are unique and your value is hidden inside your soul. Your contribution to this world can only be made by you fulfilling your purpose in life. Do not listen to market reports or take advice from people telling you to be realistic and responsible. Follow your heart and listen to that quiet inner voice. Set a vision for yourself based on who you want to be, not what others think of you or what you think the market will give you. Setting a vision for yourself based on your inner voice takes self-confidence, self-esteem and courage. These are the ingredients of the fertile ground to which the seeds of a vision can be planted. You only have one life and it will pass quickly so don’t waste it trying to be something you’re not. Be yourself and expire every resource you have in realizing your vision of yourself. I hope this book sets you on this course and provides a meaningful road map to help you achieve your dreams. I wish you all the best as you walk the road of happy destiny. Sincerely, Shane Phillips Chief Executive Officer The Phillips Group YOUR DIRECTION & FOCUS IN LIFE INTRODUCTION Get Your Dream Job – The Essential Career Management Guide series has been broken into six E Books, this is the first and is called “Your Direction & Focus In Life”. The E Books of the series are listed below, and for the process to work you will need to read each and every one. Follow them intensely, with unshakable resolve, and they will produce a job offer within 90 days. 1. Your Direction & Focus In Life Vision alone will trump skill, ability, opportunity, markets, and anything else you can imagine. Having a clear vision of where you want to be 20 years from now and most importantly who you want to be is the key, not just to your job search but to life. 2. Your Energy While a tree gets its energy from the sun, and a car may get its energy from petrol, a human being gets its energy from emotion. Happy and excited people deliver the best results. A job search can be a depressing and demotivating experience, but with the right approach it can be an uplifting and rejuvenating experience. Ensuring your energy levels are at their peak is a critical step in the process. 3. Getting An Interview At Your Dream Company Getting an interview with the CEO of your dream company is not an easy task. Get Your Dream Job – The Essential Career Management Guide, breaks it down into small steps which will allow you to set up a meeting with the biggest CEOs and decision makers of your industry. Our tried and tested process has helped people to penetrate even the most coveted of organizations. YOUR DIRECTION & FOCUS IN LIFE 4. Your CV and Social Media Profile Having a professional personal brand that employers can view online and in CV format is a foundation stone to your job search process. This chapter walks you through setting up your CV and social media profile to catapult your career to the next level. 5. How To Interview Succeeding in an interview has nothing to do with how good you are at your job. We have all met people who were great in interviews but could not perform in the job. Remember it is not the best candidate who gets the job but the best convincer who gets the job. Use this chapter to get all the tips and tricks to handling the toughest interview questions. 6. How To Negotiate Your Salary Negotiating your salary is one of the most important things you will do in your life. Based on thousands of salary negotiations, “Get Your Dream Job - The Essential Career Management Guide” provides you with a process that will give you the upper hand in the negotiation with any employer. Proven tactics to increase your salary. YOUR DIRECTION & FOCUS IN LIFE TABLE OF CONTENTS Why Focus? 7 Identity 15 Finding Your Focus 24 Articulating Your Direction 32 The Five-Step Focus Process 39 The 5x5 Dream Box 51 The Last Exercise 54 Summary 56 Exercise Checklist 57 YOUR DIRECTION & FOCUS IN LIFE WHY FOCUS? “You are a trader, you may think you are a banker, an accountant, an engineer, or whatever it says on your business card, but in reality you are a trader and you are trading your time for money.” Jim Rohn Entrepreneur & Motivational Speaker Most people don’t like to think of themselves as a product or a commodity that is being traded. You have to realize that you are a commodity, and whether you like it or not your time is being traded for money. Understanding the game allows you to win the game. Employers will try to get the talent they need at the lowest possible price and smart candidates will make employers pay a premium for their services. After interviewing thousands of people, I realized that there are huge discrepancies between salaries for the exact same job. For example, the lowest paid CFO I have come across was earning $150,000 USD a year including base, allowances and bonus. One of the highest paid CFOs in recent history of a publicly traded American company was Peter Oppenheimer, CFO of Apple, who in his best year earned $68.6 million USD. Oppenheimer was trading at a large premium and unfortunately many CFO’s are trading at a discount. The question is how do you trade at a premium and stop trading at a discount? The answer is focus. Oppenheimer has spent his entire career in technology. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic 7 YOUR DIRECTION & FOCUS IN LIFE State University, San Luis Obispo in Agricultural Business and an MBA from Santa Clara University, both with honors, he worked with Coopers and Lybrand in their Information Technology Consulting Practice and then joined Automatic Data Processing (ADP) where he was CFO before joining Apple as a Controller for the Americas. He has effectively had three employers his entire career, all of whom were in technology. Oppenheimer has had a very focused career and this allows him to trade at a premium because people pay for expertise. People pay for expert knowledge. The biggest opportunities come to those executives who are the most focused. This is contrary to what I see when I review people’s job search strategies. Most people panic and start applying for any job under the sun. Loss of focus caused by panic will not help you trade at a premium, it guarantees you will trade at a discount. Truly, one of the most common job-search strategies is to apply to every quasi-relevant advertisement on the internet until exhaustion and then eagerly wait for a response, hoping that something will stick and your dream job will just appear out of cyberspace. In actuality, frantically throwing your CV around the internet is tantamount to a drowning man who does himself no favors by flailing his arms and legs around in a failed attempt to stay afloat. Neither do you do yourself any favors by whipping your CV around the market place. In fact, it may do you more harm than good on many levels. Remember: if the drowning man just calmed down and took a deep breath, he would float and be absolutely fine. Firstly, you should know that 60% of the jobs on the Internet 8 YOUR DIRECTION & FOCUS IN LIFE do not exist. It’s usually one of two things that’s going on. Often, a company may post a job while in reality they already have the person they wish to hire in place and are simply running through a hiring process as per their corporate protocol. Many government companies, for example, are required to take an advertisement for senior positions as part of their policies and procedures even though they often have a candidate in mind for the position.