How to Make Money Doing What You Love

How to guide for finding out your ideal career based on your lifestyle design and how to attain it, including writing effective resumes and cover letters, and networking.

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As I previously mentioned in my “What is Lifestyle Design?” post, one of the fundamental foundations of healthy lifestyle design and personal development is the workplace.  In order to begin designing and building the lifestyles we want to live, we must address this foundation in more detail.  This post will help guide you to developing a “packet” of tools that will help you define what you want as a career and how to take steps towards attaining it.

1. Break career myths

Though to an extent, education and other factors can play a role to doors that are open to you, do not believe you are hindered because you do not have money or something like a college degree. If you do have a college degree, but, have a degree many people “think” is useless then keep reading on.  You will find out you have many skills to package to an employer.

2. Stay open-minded

If you have a degree in a specific field of study, do not base your career only on that major.  You need to keep your door open for whatever opportunities that might turn up.  You need to be consciously aware of these opportunities.  Being open-minded also deals with taking jobs that you might think not relate with you in any way.  However, you might find a new passion, or it might open up doors to other opportunities.

3. Define key skills, interests, and values

Take out a sheet of paper and write whatever comes to your mind.  Do not worry about being perfect, you can go back and add to this sheet and take away whatever you want.  These will be guides to point you toward careers relating to your ideal lifestyle design.  However, remember to stay open-minded.

4. Define your career goals

Go look at my post on setting effective goals and apply those steps to define career goals.  We will define these goals in increments.  Start with a large goal, a longer term goal, then break it down into smaller time frames.  Maybe start with 5 years, 3 years, then 1 year, then 6 months, 3 months, 1 month, 1 week, then what you can do NOW..It depends on what you want to achieve and by when, remember to BE SPECIFIC and have a realistic plan in order to set effective career goals.

5. If you have a college degree

…Define the knowledge, mindsets, and approach someone with your major could bring to a workplace – Liberal arts majors have a lot more to offer than many employers think.  You need to come up with as many reasons why your degree is relevant to whatever ideal career you are trying to attain.  As long as you build a clear connection between your degree and the ideal careers, then you have a legitimate shot at landing that career.
If your degree is in something completely unrelated to the job you are applying to, come up with compelling reasons to the question “Why didn’t you major in ____ if you were going to apply for this job in ____?” and “What skill beyond the basic skills learned in education have you acquired because of your major?”

6. Research jobs relating to your skills, interests, and values

– With the ever increasing information on the internet, there should be no reason to not find information on whatever job or career you are looking into.  Identify who is hiring now, who will be hiring, and research inside info on organizations.  You want to know everything you can about the employers that interest you.  Define what they are looking for.
You especially need to research if you have an interview set up.  You need to research the company you are interviewing.  Yes I said “you are interviewing.”  You want to be interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you.  This will help determine if this company fits in with your desired lifestyle design.  Find out all the information about the company and come up with genuinely interesting questions.  Some places to research careers are:

Riley Guide

Vault

Quintessential Careers

Career Journal

Monster

7. Network

This might be the single most important step in opening up the door to many opportunities.  According to the U.S. Department of Labor, it is estimated that nearly half (48%) of those who find jobs, do so by referrals or contacts.  The other 24% directly contact the organization, 23% through career agencies and college career services, and the final 5% through help wanted ads either on the internet or in traditional print media.

This shows the importance of developing a network.  You need to put yourself out there, connect in person, attend conferences and meetings, join social media sites, organizations, etc.

8. Effective Resume

Next you need to have a resume that stands out to those scanning the resumes.  There are 3 questions you need to keep in mind when writing and preparing your resume:

1. Who is going to be reading it? Who am I writing this to? Your audience.
2. Are my claims legitimate?  What you put on your resume needs to be accurate and specific.
3. Is everything spelled correctly and is grammar correct?  From my research, this is actually one of the biggest problems people have with their resumes.  Look over your resume a few times and even have a few other people check it out for any grammar and spelling errors.

9. Effective cover letters

In order to write an effective cover letter you need to:

1. Define who is going to be reading it. Your audience
2. Get readers attention from the first line
3. Establish your reason for writing in the opening sentence or two.
4. Apply benefits/strengths that you have that apply to the job you are seeking.  Explain why you are the best candidate.  Explain what you want the employer to know about you, what skills or talents to you want them to be sure to mention?
5. Should be SPECFIC and PERSUASIVE
6. Establish connections between your experiences and how it relates to the position you are applying for.
7. Always back up what you want to say with evidence
8. Expand on your resume – Provide more detail

Take these 9 tips, sit down, turn off all your gadgets such as your phone, twitter, facebook, just turn get away from the computer.  Go somewhere relaxing, enjoy a cup of coffee or your favorite tea, and go over these tips.  Refer to them whenever you feel you are not happy with your current job situation.  Are you happy doing what you are doing for a living?
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Tagged as: achievement marketing, career, careers, cover letters, Entrepreneurship, guide, healthy lifestyle design, How To, improvemen marketing, Lifestyle Design, lifestyle design and personal development, networking, Personal Development, resumes, self help marketing, tips

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