Category: <span>Career Management</span>

Published January 8, 2025 by

When Nothing Is Good Enough

Shame, John Hain, https://pixabay.com/users/johnhain-352999/
The Shame of Failure

Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

As I get ever closer to retirement, in what sometimes feels like running up a down escalator, I continue to mentally replay career flashbacks both good and bad. Part of replaying these flashbacks is gaming out how I could have changed bad events to come out different. For some events, as often as I’ve replayed them, I’ve never been able to game out how results could have been different.

One of those events was dealing with a client who openly scorned me from the first day we met. Over the ten months I worked for her, I was never able to gain her trust. Nothing I did was ever good enough.

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Career Management

Consulting Career

Published May 14, 2023 by

On Making Other People Look Bad

Loss and Prayer, 2023
Loss And Prayer

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

I’ve been doing a lot of reflection on my career these past months. Most of this reflection is on the many different people I’ve dealt with over my professional life. And how I’ve learned something from every person I’ve worked with.

Some of the lessons I learned were positive experiences, and I count those people as mentors and role models. Other lessons- not so much. One constantly recurring lesson I remember is how so many people I’ve worked with put effort into making other people look bad.

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Career Management Family Stories

Consulting Retaliation

Published December 26, 2022 by

When The Boss Appears At The Front Door

Person standing at front door. Photo by Kelly: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-home-area-rug-2950003/
When the Boss Appears at the Front Door

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Another Quora question got me reminiscing about my introduction to free enterprise after retiring from Navy life. It was the first, and only time, one of my boss’s appeared at my front door. It was an unexpected visit after I had abruptly resigned for reasons relating to his fraudulent business practices.

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Career Management Family Stories Quora Re-Posts

Career learning experience quora

Published April 10, 2022 by

Being Set-Up For Failure

Anger, Aggression, Inadequacy, Pain
Anger, Aggression, Inadequacy, Pain

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

As I’m beginning to wind down my career into retirement, I’m forced into reminiscing about career experiences both good and bad. One recurring theme of bad experiences relates to the many times I’ve been set-up for failures. I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would deliberately put effort into making the people around themselves fail.

I’ve experienced too many people in my professional life who seemingly worked extra hard to get me to fail. Most of the time I succeeded despite the best efforts of other people. But, there was one time I didn’t. As I reminisce about my career I keep coming back to the one time when despite my best efforts, I was successfully set-up to fail.

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Career Management Family Stories

Career Set-up For failure Washington Navy Yard

The Secret of Showing Up
Published August 3, 2020 by

The Secret of Showing Up

Finding Success In Your Chosen Career
Finding Success In Your Chosen Career

During difficult economic times the “Success Gurus” seem to crawl out of the woodwork. These gurus are happy to share the secret of how they made millions of dollars with little-to-no-effort/overnight/the easy way. For just a few dollars they will happily share some of their secrets. For a few dollars more they’ll share all of their secrets.

The secret they don’t share is the secret of showing up.

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Career Management

Career success

Rethinking Essential Workers During A Pandemic
Published May 7, 2020 by

Rethinking Essential Workers During A Pandemic

Essential Supply Chain Workers
Who Is Really An Essential Worker?

There’s been any number of articles lately about essential workers. This pandemic, with the related nearly-global lock-down of “non-essential personnel” should cause us to rethink our assumptions on labor.

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Career Management

essential workers supply chain