Hi everyone!
Today, I’m coming with a spotlight of a book I was not likely to have accepted to read, but I had the hunch that I’d love this one and I was right.
First, I’d like to thank the author and Erik McManus from Breakeven Books for allowing me to become part of this blog tour.
I have it 4 stars and it’s my first 4-star rating for a self-help book! I was pleasantly surprised by the content and organisation of this book. It was really useful for me at this precise moment of my life and it reminded me that you should do anything and everything you can to reach your goals and achieve your dreams.
Here is the summary, for a sneak peek:
“This self-help book is about managing careers and managing self through self-coaching. It is NOT a book about job search strategies or techniques. It is not about doing a job interview or presenting yourself well. It is not about what you’re doing wrong and what you can do about it. Instead, the book is a reflective companion about you and your work life. It is about finding the power within you and using it to coach yourself to success.
It is a self-coaching book that goes through the journey of reflections that clarifies what’s essential in the hope of helping you to manage your career better. Managing a career is much like growing a business. The entrepreneurship aspect is not apparent until you get self-employed and need to create your opportunities, which is quite comparable to a job search. If you’re reading this book, you might be seeking fulfillment, or satisfaction at work or recognition of one’s talent being unused or potential still to develop. On the other hand, you might be ambitious and strategic and would like to position yourself for bigger things.
Whether you’re stuck and looking to jump-start your career or doing well but want to fast-track it or feeling unfulfilled and looking for clarity in your work life, you can coach yourself to success. The book presents self-coaching opportunities to enable forward movement, especially when there’s a sense of being stuck in career development.
- It’s a primer that engages the reader to act and do something. It’s a call to action.
- It’s a self-coaching book that uses reflective questions or inquiries. It invites you to reflect upon, dig deep, and increase self-awareness and self-empowerment.
- The language is short and straightforward but still refers to sources when necessary and available.
- This primer hopes to speak from the voice of a friend and a perspective of a coach.
Your Career Your Business is a self-help handbook that you can read over time, hoping that you will take the time to stop and reflect upon the inquiries at specific points. You will see the rationale for the book and who might benefit from reading it, and how in the Introduction. Hopefully, you can identify yourself as the book’s subject and set aside time for reflection using the questions in every chapter.
The first chapter illustrates how thinking over your career can be solution-focused instead of problem-centric. Taking the former perspective opens up possibilities, while the latter can be self-defeating. The second chapter introduces the idea that you can coach yourself to success by focusing on your best hope, amplifying what is important, looking back at past achievements proving your strengths and moving forward with small doable steps.
A paradigm shift presented in Chapter Three needs to happen to reclaim your ability to take charge and control your future. Chapter Four will show how taking charge of your career is necessary for responding to environmental shifts and the changing workplace. Then, as presented in Chapter Five, these developments call for an ability to reinvent yourself and your career when necessary. Finally, it speaks of how changes in the past point to the possible significant shifts in the future.
The book emphasizes that your career is your business, so nobody will if you don’t take charge of it. Through time, career management and development have shifted from the employer to the employee. So how should you manage your career? Chapter Six presents the parallel process of managing a business and managing a career, while Chapter Seven explains how strategies can be intentional or emergent in some cases. Like a business, careers can develop with the goal of continuous growth. Chapter Eight presents how careers can grow very similar to how a business can grow and thrive over time.
Chapters Nine and Ten ask the reader to look inwardly to reflect on how their purpose and mission play a role in making career decisions and how the search for a resonant career can veer one toward one direction instead of another. The search for authenticity, meaning, and passion could influence career choices. These are some of the best predictors of fulfillment.
Chapter Eleven is a call to action reiterating how managing oneself and personal leadership can engender commitment to career success by listening to your own voice. The inquiries serve that purpose. If you reflect upon the questions and listens to your authentic inner voice, it could open up some possibilities that you don’t see being drowned out by the day-to-day busyness of life.”
Now, it is structured in a way that allows you to reflect on the important aspects of every step to take and thought to modify in order to get exactly where you want to.
I’d also like to update you on the author, who made me feel close to her by giving me a situation I think all of us have lived, choosing a job that’s not making us happy over love and family, not even stopping to think about the importance of enjoying what you do and creating balance in your life.
“Gina Cajucom is an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) who promotes better conversations in the workplace using ©Authentic Workplace Engagement (AWE).
These are future-focused, progress-oriented, and co-constructive dialogues that need to happen in the workplace to break the selfdefeating cycle of attributing cause or casting blame. AWE emphasizes strengths and small steps toward progress using essential dialogues and touchpoint conversations.
Gina’s extensive experience working with upstarts, small businesses, and large
corporations across industries, gives her the unique ability to see organizations in
their duality. Top executives, owners, and major stakeholders are focused on the
bottom line—productivity and profitability. People at the grassroots level, who
grapple with work-life balance and career development, are either partly engaged
or completely disengaged. Gina’s strength and commitment is to work-life
integration while contributing to bottom-line business results through leadership
coaching.
With over fifteen years of experience in human resources management (H.R.)
and organizational development (O.D.), her stints in coaching emerging leaders
and executives across industries awakened her passion for leadership development
and work-life integration. This unique experience inspired her to help young
leaders and professionals with their career management challenges within or
without their organizations through Career Coefficient http://www.careercoefficient.ca.
A Certified Human Resources Leader (CHRL) in Canada, Gina completed
two years of graduate study in MS Human Resource Management at the
University of Santo Tomas in Manila and has completed a Master’s Certificate
in Organizational Development (MCOD) from the Schulich School of Business
Your Career, Your Business
at York University in Toronto. Her extensive training in co-active coaching
techniques with the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and Solution-Focused
Brief Coaching with the University of Toronto, complements her undergraduate
degree in B.S. Psychology. She currently contributes to the development of
Brief Coaching in the Philippines in partnership with the Canadian Centre
for Brief Coaching http://www.briefcoaching.ca. She also volunteers her time with
The Coaching Fellowship http://www.tcfs.org, helping young international women
leaders of impact accelerate their leadership potential.”
I do not read self-help books because after doing so with a few, I was fed up. However, this book has been an eye-opener and I’m already planning to read it again and take notes on my answer to the questions made in it, so I can make plans for my future ASAP.
Before leaving you, I’d love to allow you to read the excerpt and the link to the promotional video I added to this post, so you feel that urge to get to this great book. Also, it’s a short one that gives you so much in so little!
Without further ado, let’s just read it, shall we?
Hope you enjoy if you decide to get to it.
Cannot wait to hear your thoughts!
Bear hugs!
Anne
The Book Dreamer's Alley 