The British Museum Reading Room. A panorama of 2x5 segments. By Diliff. CC BY SA 3.0.

How You Talk About Deciding Affects Who Thinks You’re an Idiot

Forrest ChristianCareers, Decision-making, Warren Kinston 2 Comments

How you talk about work affects who will hire you or work with you. I was reminded of this recently. I have been talking with some senior executives at work about how to build the structure for writing complex text responses for some of our forms. They reached out because I’m an expert in the responses’ topic and I’ve worked …

Gray cyborgs at DragonCon in Atlanta. (c) E. Forrest Christian

Role-Playing Games as a Metaphor for Your Work History

Forrest ChristianCareers, Underachievers Leave a Comment

I spent months of my life working on this, bringing to full realization the many and varied lands, peoples and beasts of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth! And I did not — not — do this so that five minutes into the game some players could, and I quote, “Open an evil can of hobbit butt-whup on those Rivendell pretty boys.” …

Domestic goat smile, Crimea, 2009. By George Chernilevsky. Public Domain

Warn of Problems, Then Become the Scapegoat

Forrest ChristianCareers, Change Leave a Comment

Hidden high potentials (2HiPo’s) have a significantly higher risk of being scapegoated by teams than do normal people. People with too much going on are irritating and usually seen as a threat, which is why 2HiPo’s also adopt some strange behaviors that serve to obfuscate their high level of capability. There’s not much that I can see you can do …

Callings

Forrest ChristianCareers, Finding your purpose, happiness 1 Comment

We religious types talk about callings a lot. Christians of the Calvinist mindset even call all work, “your calling”. Other Americans have caught on, and many spiritual people of various types talk about callings. It’s not a term restricted to people of a particular faith, or even of any faith. Saying that you have a calling seems to encapsulate something important, something big.

I think that Calling is an important topic for most hidden high potentials. We use the term when we talk, seeing many of your frustrations through of the lens of frustrated calling. It’s an important topic, one that I’m now convinced I have to deal with openly. There’s just one small problem.