The Welsh word for grandmother is Nain. My Nain, Gwenda was the 3rd of 13 children. Born in 1922, the Second World War kept her stuck at home longer than she wanted to. She helped to look after she younger siblings and 12 other children who'd been sent away from London, to be kept safe. As soon as she could, she got away from small town Wales and her family obligations. It was her time and she did what she wanted to do, spending her 20s and 30s as a fashionable Londoner and then moving to Canada with her husband and her young daughter. Later in her life she reinvented her life a third time, when my grandfather died. She married a fisherman and joined him, hauling in Chinook salmon in the frigid Pacific waters near Alaska. 

When I was a kid she and I weren't close. Annually I'd call and thank her for the money in my birthday card, but neither of us knew how to keep the conversation going after that and soon she'd ask me if my mom was there.

But all of that changed when I needed her. She and my mom happened to come and visit me and Bettina in London. I was having a hard time with my job, trying to prove myself, feeling like I needed to figure out what direction I was going in life, wanting to be as resp...

The reason you didn’t get your dream job might be that your references don't know you as well as you think they do.

It's an iceberg problem; most of your value is hidden under the surface--hidden even from those who like you the most.

I'm embarrassed to say I've been this kind of reference before. The person was an impressive employee colleague. I don't have anything bad to say, but I don't have a lot of specific good things to say either. I'd like to think that I pulled it off and helped the person get the job, but I felt bad after the reference call, knowing I probably didn't help very much. 

The person on the other end of the call is probably thinking, "Why did the candidate choose this person to tell me about them?"

I think this happens more often than not. Good people don’t get the job they should have and they don't know why their dream job has passed them by. 

Let's design the opposite of this scenario:

Your dream job comes up. Before you can even hear about it and apply, they offer it to you. This happens every day. That's a situation where your abilities are well known to the market. 

The problem is worse for remote workers or professions like teachers, where your best work is done mos...

Advancing systems like Chat-GPT make it easy to automate skills that only the most talented of us ever had before. But this makes those who differentiate with authenticity, humility and unique creative insights stand out even more.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught us that technologies can empower us to accomplish a lot remotely, but to sustain our best work we need true human connection.

Technologies will continue to improve, beyond anything we can imagine today. But every stride they make, will only shine a brighter light on what they cannot do, what is essentially human and what we need from each other: to see and be seen by real people who care.

Tim is available for online Zoom coaching almost every day, to help to make sure you are soon doing the work you are meant to do. He's a fully trained career and business coach and founder, with an MBA and over 20 years of experience. 🚀 Click here to get started with Tim. 🚀

These past two years have been really hard on many of us, leading a lot of us to the verge of burnout. 

We all know that we can’t keep giving our students what they need if we aren’t feeling supported ourselves. As therapist Anne Brunette says, "You cannot care for others if you do not take care of yourself. And yet, when we’re feeling stressed it’s hard to know how to make things better. 

Some small changes that can make a big difference 

Many of these tips, as you’ll see, are about taking time for yourself. That can seem impossible when there is so much to do, but it’s all about finding possible, helpful things you can do to keep yourself moving in the right direction. Safeguarding our most important activities…

• Leave the work at work. Consider staying half an hour later in your classroom (or coming in earlier) if you have to, so that you can fully relax at home. Unless you have kids of your own. ;-) 
• Organize and plan. Look for ways to do things now that will reduce your future workload. As Tim Ferriss says, you can ask yourself, "What would this look like if it were easy?" and then try to take a step in that direction. Again, this can seem hard to find the time for, but it's a bit like making...

Have you ever applied for a job the perfect job, that you're qualified for, but then you didn't get an interview? Applicant Tracking Systems might be to blame for that. Many schools now use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to scan CVs. This (in theory) helps them weed out all of those hundreds of applicants who don’t meet the minimum qualifications. It also gives them a searchable database they can use to explore and compare applicants. 

Considering how important it is for you to get past the ATS-scanning stage, with your CV. Here are some simple tips you can use to do that, to get your name onto the Qualified Candidate list and onto the interview stage.  

How to get past the ATS 

• Make sure all important information (including your contact information) is in the main section of your CV. Information in images, graphs, headers and footers are not read by the ATS.
• Use a standard file format. Word (i.e. .docx) and PDF files are easily read by an ATS. 
• Use standard job titles. The ATS is scanning for words, so it’s better to call yourself a “Teacher of X” on your CV, even if you’d rather describe yourself as a “Facilitator of Student Discovery”. 
• Use standard headings, like "Education" and "Work...