Staying employed is as much about attitude as talent.

Virtually all of us have been affected by the current unemployment situation. If we haven’t personally lost a job, taken a pay cut, or ended up on reduced hours, we have friends and family members who are dealing with any and all of that. Keeping a job has become a far more serious concern of late. Be sure you aren’t setting yourself up with your attitude.  Here are three things to think about:

Are you excusing yourself from doing the work?  Yes, all this doom and gloom is demoralizing, but that doesn’t give you a free pass.  The longer you are in a job, the easier it is to tell yourself “I’ve done this a long time, I deserve to throttle back a little.”   You don’t have to go full bore all the time, but you do have to do the work. 

One of the most frustrating comments I hear from employers about older workers is that “they don’t want to work.”  We’re talking real estate professionals and scientists with graduate degrees here–at least in terms of where I’ve heard the comments.  Deciding that you’ve earned the right to slow down is okay of you take less pay to slow down.  But if you are still holding the same job and claiming the same salary, that “right” you think you deserve could land you in the unemployment line.

Are you part of the solution?  It makes no difference if you are eighteen or eighty, you have things to offer that can help the company thrive.  The probability that those talents have become highly polished skills increases with experience.  Use yours with intelligence, grace, and collaboration.

This is not a case of insisting that the old ways are better.  This is a commitment to dealing with the current challenges well by bringing everything you can to bear.  In particular, learn to build alliances with those who understand what you don’t.  Together, the difference you can make will be huge.

Are you gobbling benefits?   Just because the company offers health insurance doesn’t mean you need to head for the doctor’s office every time you get a cold.  Many of us have gotten far too accustomed to solving our problems with pills.  The resulting skyrocketing health insurance costs has become a horrendous burden to most employers.  This is big piece of why ”older workers are more expensive.”  Keep yourself healthy instead of expecting doctors to do it for you.  (They can’t anyway.  They just figure out why you are sick–sometimes.)

The same is true for taking more than you really need as sick days.  It’s wiser to stay home if you have something communicable, but taking a sick day to coach a baseball game is neither honest or smart if you want to keep the job.

For those of you grumbling about how miserable your job is, here’s one last bit of advice.  If you don’t want it, someone else would be ecstatic to have it.   Suck it up, turn on your smile and do the very best job you can.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and CEO of Mining Silver, a company focused on using the talent of those over 50 more effectively.  She’s the author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  Contact her at mary@mining-silver.com.

Some resume advice given to those of us over 50 is misguided-and wrong.

At an AARP job fair I volunteered at yesterday, several job seekers told me stories of situations where they had ideal qualifications for work they were applying for, but they didn’t include it, because it was more than ten years ago.    They were under the impression that hiring supervisors were death on seeing anything but their most recent experience. 

This is ridiculous.  The strongest thing someone over 50 has to offer an employer is the breadth and depth of their experience.  It means they know how to show up for work on time, solve a problem without creating a new one, soothe an irate customer, and so on.  Negating that by limiting what you can talk about to the last ten years is lunacy.

This suggested strategy is probably stemming from a misunderstanding of advice that you include only the last ten years of experience on your resume to reduce the chances of ageism.    There is some legitimacy to that.  But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t mention relevant experience  at all.  It just means you don’t need to list every job you ever had.  (Remember when we didn’t have experience and we were desperate to list anything that looked like a job?)

If you are looking for work and have been in the workforce for a while, you need to be both creative and attentive in what you tell a prospective employer about what you can do.  A key piece of a good resume writing strategy is to separate your achievements and strengths from the chronology of your work experience in how your format your information.  That way, you can mention that you successfully owned and operated a car repair shop, even if it was twenty years ago, for example.

The most important thing to do with your resume is to give the person to whom you are sending it a clear idea of your experience at solving the problems they are trying to address.  When you learned that skill isn’t anywhere near as important as that you have it.

Experience is GOOD.  But knowing what part of the vast amount you have applies to the job you’re seeking is critical.  Telling everybody everything won’t work.  But neither does not telling the person who needs to know, simply because you did it more than ten years ago.  Use your head on this and stop  following arbitrary rules that well-meaning but misguided unemployment counselors offer.

**** Mary Lloyd is CEO of Mining Silver and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, visit her website at http://www.mining-silver.com

Bad assumptions about networking mean a lot of us get less than we could from it. Far less.

Real networking has nothing to do with business cards or methods of organizing them. It has nothing to do with “getting ahead.” It has nothing to do with “meet and greet” events billed as “power networking opportunities.”

Real networking—the kind that will make a difference your career and your life—is about getting to know people who are focused on what you want to be focused on and relating to them authentically.

No phony “Let’s do lunch” or “I’ll call you next week” stuff that never happens. More like “I thought you’d appreciate this article, given our conversation last week.”

Let’s get one thing straight right now. You do not network with people you don’t know. First you meet them, then you get to know them, and THEN they become part of your network. And they do so because you like them, they like you, and both of you have a common interest. It may be that your kids are on the same hockey team. It may be that you are both trying to create a better version of a fuel cell. Either way, the bond and the value to each other is built on interaction and mutual respect.

A lot of career development seminars and job search advice books tout “networking’ as THE solution to all your professional needs. And that is very close to the truth. But what they suggest is typically not anywhere close on how to create a network.

It is not done with cold calls to a bunch of people you need favors from. It‘s done via on-going engagement in what you believe in. When you are on target with your values in the way you reach out, people of the same persuasion tend to show up in your life. You meet people who are not only interested in what you are interested in; they are also folks you want to know personally. They won’t all be “BFF” material. But they will be meaningful players in your overall Game of Life.

Waiting to create a network until you need help is like waiting to put on your life jacket until after you’ve been thrown out of the speed boat. Your network should be a lifelong effort and should include people from all aspects of your life. Branch out. If you do different things with the same people all the time, you might be more comfortable with the crowd, but your network is going to be a lot more limited. The more far flung your contact base is, the more likely it will be contain what you need when it comes time for that network to serve you.

But that time should be a long way down the road. A good network is built on friendship and service. Giving any way you authentically can is the quickest and smartest way to foster its development. That might be forwarding a cogent news release, letting a friend know that another friend is looking for what they have to sell, or just calling to say “how ya doin’?” when things have been difficult. Real networking works because it’s a shared effort to live life well. It’s genuine and benefits both parties.

The “synthetic networking” that’s often recommended for job seekers is just another form of cold calling—a strategy that’s long on rejection and short on results. Cold calling to ask a very busy person for an informational interview might work, but asking a friend who knows that person to set up that call will make it work a whole lot better. (And that friend will want to help because of all the help you’ve given in the past.) The fake version is better than doing nothing at all, but it’s not anywhere close to the effectiveness of the real thing.

Networking is a time-honored life skill. Our moms did it with the neighbor women about great casserole recipes. Our dads did it with other Scout Leaders or fishing buddies. Real networking is like populating your own virtual city with great people who have all the skills, insights, access and resources you need. They may live 2000 miles away, but you still know you can count on them.

Networking enriches your life. The fact that it helps in your job search or developing your client base is secondary. Build it for the long haul and build it for real.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. She covers networking more extensively in the book. For more about her and her work, please visit her website http://www.mining-silver.com. She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

This post originally appeared as an article in the May 2010 issue of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold

There are really good life coaches out there who GET IT about the importance of customizing your retirement years.

Karma Kitaj is one of them. She seems like my emotional twin in the attitude with which she reviews my book Supercharged Retirement. Check out her blog for what has to say about the book and the possibilities for “after we give up work.”

Being certain about what’s supposed to happen can be a major obstacle–on the job and in your personal life. 

There’s a big difference between being ready for what comes next and deciding you know what comes next.  The former is like returning the ball in a tennis match.  You need to do what you can to be ready to deal with what comes, but you are well aware that you won’t know what’s coming until it’s on the way.

Assuming you know what’s coming next is like deciding your opponent is going to lob the ball and positioning yourself for that before the shot.  You’re out of position for every other possibility that might come once the ball is on the way.  That’s far less effective–in tennis and in life. 

When you decide you know something you really can’t know, you’ve essentially decided all other possibilities don’t exist.  They become part of the “background noise” that your sensory system filters out before you even realize they’re there. You don’t decide on what they actually might offer because you’ve already decided they aren’t coming.

Ellen Langer puts it well in her 2009 book, Counterclockwise:  Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility :  “Certainty is a cruel mindset.”  She makes the point relative to medical care and illness, but it’s equally true for career planning, interpersonal relationships, and romance.

We get a lot of advice to “ask for what you want” and “visualize your ideal” but there’s a downside to that approach.  If I ask for a chocolate chip cookie and the person to whom I made the request is both capable of and willing to give me a glorious box of handmade chocolate truffles instead, I will never know what I missed out on.  If I write down that I want “a regular fulltime job with good benefits,” the chance to do something with an unconventional work schedule that suits me better will never hit my radar.

Yes, we need to know what we need and want.  And we need to be effective in expressing it.  But do the specifics make a difference?  If not, don’t use them.  ”A meaningful job doing challenging works with pay that covers my needs” leaves a lot more room for positive surprises than “a senior level accounting job in a Fortune 500 firm.”

To give yourself direction, be specific about what you need rather than what kind of clothes you’re going to be wearing when you get it.

In that same vein, stay open to being open.  Don’t rule anything out until you really look at it.  It’s easy to say you’re open to new directions, but it takes a concerted effort to get your mind to go to those unfamiliar places.  Look for the unusual possibilities and look at them when they appear.

Life is an adventure.  None of us know what is going to come next.  The better you get at dealing with what does (instead of deciding what should have) the more enjoyable the adventure will be.  And the better you will set things up for the next positive surprise.

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Mary Lloyd is a consultant , seminar leader, and speaker and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.

Well, how much work is “enough”? And how much is too much? Or too little?  As so many of us grapple with being “out of work” these questions take on more significance.   And that’s good, because most of us look  at “work” as “whatever the boss tells me I have to do.”

Work is both bigger than that and more important than that.  How much of it you need in your life is not going to be the same as what your spouse, mom, kids, or best friend needs.  Work is a uniquely personal thing, yet we don’t often look at it that way.

We all need to work.   Much of it won’t be for  pay. but it’s still effort expended toward something bigger than your personal comfort.  So while we are waiting around for something that pays–or even better something that pays well–take a look at what work really means for you.

What’s the most important thing about work ?  The chance to excel?  The confirmation of competence that comes from getting paid?  Money to pay the bills?  The opportunity to make a difference or to solve a complex problem?  Knowing what’s the most important thing about work for you gives you a much better shot at being satisfied when you work.

It also will give you good clues about “how much is enough?”  If you are in it for the extrinsic motivators–a paycheck, a title, or recognition within a community, enough to get that will be all you need.  If you are in it for the intrinsic motivators–the chance to solve a problem, make a difference or be part of a highly productive team, the limiits are higher.  And the challenge of keeping your work  in balance with the rest of the things you want in your life is greater.

But how much is enough?  That, too, is personally defined.  The crazy thing is that we are all married to this “fulltime” mindset without any real evaluation of what would work best for us as individuals.

A lot of us are working fewer hours–for less pay–because of the downturn.  Do you like having that extra time for other things?  Could you live on that number of work hours on an on-going basis?

Others of us are working ourselves to a frazzle because we’re among the few left on board after deep and repeated staffing cuts.  Does the job do enough for you that you want to continue this pace?

Some of us were forced into retirement–or took  it willingly.    Is not working at all working for you?

We all need work.  What kind and how much is a far more personal decision than we usually make it.

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Mary Lloyd is CEO of Mining Silver and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote and Do What You Love.

It’s not “how much” time we have, it’s how we use it that’s the problem. Most of us spend our days trying to get more done than there’s time for. Or so it seems. When we retire, we have time in our days but we start to see the whole of our remaining lives as too short to do the things we want to do. Both of these approaches rely on the mistaken idea that “There’s not enough time.” Most of what we blame on the amount of time we have is really the result of not using what we have effectively.

Have you ever been in a tight spot time-wise where you had to get a lot of things done quickly? Your performance goes up two notches. You focus on only what must be done with laser-like sharpness. Quite often, everything gets done with time to spare. If you can do that in the extreme circumstances, why can’t you do it every day? Because we don’t take charge of our time that way on a day to day basis.

You can “have enough time” if you do these three things:

Be clear about what you really want to be spending it on.

If your ten-year-old son (or grandson) walks in the door bleeding profusely because of an accident with his bicycle, your time needs to go in a new direction. But when he asks you to drive him to the skate park? Too often, whatever anyone else asks of us gets priority over what we really want to get done. Some of those things are unhealthy along with being off path. (Office gossip, smoke breaks, and petty arguments are easy examples.) Nobody wins when we do that. Letting other people take whatever of your time they choose puts your own life on hold. Not fair—and in the case of children, a really wrong message to send about how the world works

But what if it’s your boss that’s doing the asking? Well, there are times to draw the line there, too. How much of your week should legitimately be dedicated to your job? For many of us, that number is more than “40 hours a week”–but it should not be infinity. “Okay” may need to be replaced with “I can do that, but which of these other things do you want me to leave undone to get to it?”

Be strong in saying “no” to things that aren’t part of your priorities.

Your best friend calls suggesting a Saturday shopping trip. You’ve been planning to redo your garage storage with your sweetie that day. Do you say yes to your friend because, well, she’s your friend? Or maybe your sweetie tries to opt out because one of his buddies has suggested a golf game. If you get that laser focus going, you can do both, but do the thing with the priority first.

Your success with “no” is going to be a function of how you go about it. Sometimes you don’t even have to say it—you just have to not say “yes.” Sometimes the “no” that you need will come out as “Thanks for that input. I need to get back to this project now.” Sometimes it will be “Great to see you” as you walk the person to the door. Kindness and saying “yes” aren’t synonymous. True friendship rests on mutual respect and good business relationships depend on sincerity. If you don’t want to spend time on the interruption, say so with a smile and get on with what you need to do.

Commit to spending every single second of your time well.

We assume we need huge chunks of time to do big projects. Quite often, the small bits that are available in the everyday routine can be every bit as effective. Every big job is a collection of little jobs that need to be done in a particular order. This is just as true of writing a novel as putting in a vegetable garden. Ticking off one or two of those little things several times a week will get you a lot farther than waiting for that big chunk of time. Those rarely materialize.

Committing to using every minute well becomes even more essential when you retire. It’s easy to fritter away the remaining decades of your life doing “whatever.” Most of us have no idea how long our lives will be. It’s far better to plan for the long run and die before you get it done than die years after you ran out of things you wanted to do. Make a long list. Add to it again and again. Be bold–if you want to get a degree in paleontology the year your turn 87, go for it!

Your time is yours. Covet it. Use it on purpose.

This post originally appeared in the April 2010 issue of Barbara Morriss’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. Her passion is in capitalizing on the potential of those over 50. For more, please visit her website http://www.mining-silver.com. She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

If you want to be miserable in retirement, assume your primary relationship will take care of itself.

Check out Mary Lloyd’s guest post on financial planner Steve Juetten’s Seattle Examiner blog.  How to Mesh Retirement with Your Relationship.

Knowing when to give up on a project or plan requires both wisdom and courage. How do you decide?

Health care reform legislation is still being debated and the outcome of the eventual vote is getting “iffier’ by the minute. In my home state of Washington, they’re in special session of the legislature because they’d been unable to get agree upon a budget during the regular session. These are two political examples of something we all grapple with personnally:  How do you decide when it’s time to throw in the towel?

My dad seemed better at this than I am.  Raised during the depression, with the family in dire straights after the death of his father, he was still capable of deciding when something simply wasn’t worth working on any more.  He was good with his hands and had a wonderful, practical mind, so it didn’t happen very often.   But when it was time, he was wise about pulling the plug.  Sometimes it was to just throw the thing out and buy a new one.  Sometimes it was to start over with better materials.  Sometimes it was to take a different approach to solving the problem that precipitated the effort in the first place.

I need that wisdom.  Way too often, I end up piling one bad solution on top of another and making a monstrously ineffective mess of the whole thing.  My kitchen is a good example.  It needs to be remodeled.  The appliances are starting to die.  The  countertops were chipped and cut up when I moved in six years ago.  The flooring was probably worn out long before that, but it’s still there.

This is my year to redo the kitchen.  All I really need to do is those three things.  Instead, I’ve turned it into a project that makes a lunar launch look simple.  I need to quit and go back to basics.   I am wasting time now and money eventually if I don’t.

It would be nice if we could get it right and perfect the first time we did anything.   But that’s not reality.  It takes courage to look at a lot of hard work and decide you have to give up on it.   But building onto old bad solutions only worsens the problem.  This is true for my life.  This is true for my state.  This is true for my country.  Two wrongs don’t always make a right.  Sometimes they just make a bigger mess.

By Mary Lloyd, CEO, Mining Silver and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.

“Love what you do” is great advice, but what if you’re stuck in a job you hate?

Every so often, a new guru advocates “Do what you love.” It’s the best career advice ever, whether you’re just starting your work years or getting ready to throttle back for retirement.

But what if you’re already doing something you don‘t love?  Most of us can’t afford to just implode what’s paying the bills.  How do you get from what you are doing now—which you may literally hate—to what you really want to do without totally starting over?

• It doesn’t have to be a jump over the cliff. We tend to think either/or on this.  Keep doing what you’re making money at now or take a massive, scary leap into the unknown.  You can do a lot on your current job to prepare for that better work life.  Think remodel rather than demolition.

• Get real about what you want to do. Flesh out your dream job right now so you know what you’re getting into.  If you fantasize rather than taking a serious look, you see only the minuses of your current job and only the pluses of your dream job.  Be honest about that new work and thorough with the details. You’ll either be creating momentum for the day when you can make the transition or learning that your “dream job” isn’t all that much better—or maybe even different—than what you’re doing.

• Become a virtuoso at what you can now. Many of the skills you need for your “perfect work” can be developed in any job.  Follow-through, time management, writing, speaking, and critical thinking skills are all transferable. Patience, tolerance, and persistence are attributes that are golden anywhere.  Work at becoming a superstar at these kinds of things right now.

• Find the center of the sweet spot. What’s most important about your dream job?  Sometimes the crux of what you yearn for can be part of what you are already doing.  If you can’t find a way to put it in your current work, give yourself that special thing in a hobby or with group involvement.  Doing so will whet you appetite for more and create the motivation to take bigger steps eventually.

• Educate yourself in small doses. The word “educate” conjures up expensive, time-intensive options—college degrees or formal training for accreditation of some sort.  That thinking makes the dream unachievable because the “entry fee” is more than you can handle either in time or money or both.

Get your education in smaller doses.  Read books.  Surf the Net.  Make friends with people who do what you want to do.  Join groups involved in that profession or interest area. You can learn a lot in doable steps if you get rid of the  idea that learning has to be in some kind of formal setting.  Plus as people in the field get to know you, you develop a network that you’ll need later.

• Don’t wait. Staying in a job you hate indefinitely is self-inflicted slavery.  Anything you can do to help yourself move toward something better is healthier emotionally.

Getting your feet wet has lots of benefits.  People in that field get to know you and start to appreciate you.  Your focus becomes sharper as you get more depth.  And if you do eventually decide to seek that formal credential, the coursework will be easier because you are already familiar with the terminology and the concepts.

Anybody can say “I hate my job.”  And any job is going to be awful on occasion.  But if you really need something different to make your heart sing, the only one stopping you is you.

You can change that.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  Her passion is in capitalizing on the potential of those over 50.  For more, please visit her website http://www.mining-silver.com.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

NOTE:  This post first appeared in the March 2010 edition of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold.