Podcast Show Notes – Episode No 15



The best books and other resources to help you love your job
 
When I last checked, there are over 10,000 books on the subjects of career and career management. 10,000!
 
And
 
Hundreds of podcasts about careers, including this one
 
So how do you choose which resource to read or download next?
 
Well, today, I will be picking out the best career resources for you to check out right now
 
Hello and a very warm welcome to Episode No 15 of ‘Your Bravo Career’
 
My name is Mark Crossfield, I’m a Professional Career Coach helping you to love your job and build a great career.  
 
This podcast is about why your career matters
 
How you can enjoy what you are doing day each day at work
 
and how to build a great career along the way.
 
In this episode, I’m going to be talking about career resources
 
Specifically, books and podcasts, and as I mentioned at the top of the show there is a lot of choices, a bewildering selection to choose from.
 
So, that said, with all the choice you have, thank you for listening to my podcast today, and I hope you will find it valuable.
 
So, let’s start with books
 
Call me sad, but I love reading books about careers. 

I have a lot of them. 📚
 
I just checked and I have 593 Kindle books and 155 Audiobooks in my audible collection. That’s nearly 750 books. I’m not going to count my physical books, many of these are not accessible to me right now. Loft.
 
Now, not all these books are career books of course
 
But, whoosh, that is a lot more than I expected. Maybe you are the same and maybe you have been looking for some career inspiration and some career resources to use.
Hopefully, the suggestions I have for you will spark some interest for you.
 
So, where to start with career books?
 
The king of career change books is a book called What Colour is My Parachute by Richard Bolles
 
This is a mammoth of a book that has a new edition every year and has sold more than 10 million copies.
 
Richard Bolles lost his job in the 1970s and became interested in jobs and careers and he started asking career experts two specific questions:

1. How do you change careers without having to go back to college or university?

2. How do find work when the traditional methods of CV creation and looking on job sites aren’t working? (They were physical job boards back in the 70s)
 
And, he wrote up his finding and was able to get a grant to continue studying and sharing what he learned.
 
And that is how the book What Colour Is Your Parachute? Was created.
 
So, it’s worth a look at but remember it's quite a dense book, you need a fair bit of time on your hands to work through it. Some of my coaching clients come to me having read the book.
 
A much easier read is the book Squiggly Career by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis 
 
Or to give it its full title,
 
The Squiggly Career: Ditch the Ladder, Discover Opportunity, Design Your Career
 
The Squiggly Career was released in January 2020 and it is a no 1 Sunday Times Business bestseller.
 
The premise of the book is that the days of having a linear career progression are long gone.  Your career path is much more likely to take a squiggly path.
 
The book is very practical but doesn’t have the heft of What Colour is your parachute 
 
I would say that the book is for anyone who wants to take charge of their career, play to their strengths and design a career on their own terms. 

The book starts with knowing yourself and your values - with simple exercises that make you think deeply about who you are and what you want to spend all that time at work actually doing. 
 
If you have been listening to my podcast for a while now you will recognise that this inside out approach is one that I advocate.

The main focus of The Squiggly Career is on the five skills they say you need to succeed in work today, which are super strengths, values, confidence, networks and future possibilities.

I think you will get a lot of important takeaways from this book, especially discovering your super strengths and values which are going to be invaluable in your career going forward.

A few key takeaways are:
 
-       Focus on your strengths, not on your weaknesses
-       Use your values, those things that are important to you
-       Networking is just people helping people
 
 
My next recommended book is Do What you are by Paul D Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger 

Do What You Are is another bestselling classic that helps you to find work that aligns with who you are. 
 
When we are looking at a career change, we often focus on Values, Interests and Skills, I have talked about these on my podcast regularly
 
 
This book takes the idea of using values, interests and skills further by introducing into the mix Personality Type.
 
And, I’m very interested in this because I have just become a qualified test user able to use and administer personality and other types of tests. So, I will be using some of this personality testing work with clients who interested in this approach.

This book leads you through a step-by-step process of determining and verifying your Personality Type. 
 
Then, after you have determined this, you'll learn which occupations are popular with each Type, discover helpful case studies, and get a full rundown of your Type's work-related strengths and weaknesses. 
 
Even though this book uses the Myers Briggs Testing Instrument as a framework for career analysis, it doesn’t contain the official test. Instead, it relies on self-analysis. 

So, if you're looking for real confirmation of what Myers Briggs type you are, this book might not provide it for you.

This book does however explain well what a Myers Briggs personality type is and how to use it to understand your natural preferences and what this means for your career choices.
If you do want to know what your Personality Type is and want to determine what this means for your carer then message me and I can explain how we can do this together.
 
Finally, my last book is called Working Identity.

This book by Hermina Ibarra is still probably the best I have read. It’s an old book and I have read it many times and highlighted the best bits.

This isn’t a step-by-step book, however. More of a longer-term career strategy.

Some Key Points:

- The biggest mistake people make in career exploration is to delay taking the first step until they have settled on a destination

- Run small experiments to explore new identities of who you could become

- Action is crucial. It’s very difficult to think your way into finding your new career
 
So, whilst it’s good to read books and I recommend this, you need to take action in the world
 
Ok, so far in this episode I have recommended four books for you to have a look at. These are:
 
-       What Colour is My Parachute by Richard Bolles
 
-       Squiggly Career by Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis 
 
-       Do What you are by Paul D Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger, and
 
-       Working Identity by Hermina Ibarra
 
And in part 2 of the episode, we will turn out gaze towards the best career podcasts that you can listen to right now.
 
 
Welcome back to part 2 of the podcast.
 
And in part 1 we focussed on books and by the way, all these books are available as Audiobooks.
 
In this part of the podcast, we are going to look at podcasts,
 
And actually, if you liked the sound of the Squiggly Career book then the good news is, is that Helen and Sarah also have a great podcast called Squiggly Careers, with an S at the end – plural.
 
And they cover lots of material about the world of work, careers, management and lots of other relevant subject matter. Highly recommended.
They also did a socially distanced TED talk recently which is worth checking out as well, as it distils all the thinking down to a short presentation.
 
But I’ve just got 2 additional podcasts to recommend in this section, plus I will say a little bit about my own podcast later so hang around for that bit.
 
 
I love Elizabeth Day, and I love her even more after reading her biography.
 
Who is she?
 
Well, she’s an award-winning novelist and journalist previously working for the Observer newspaper who decided to draw on her 17 years of experience interviewing celebrities to start a podcast in which she talks to people about 
 
What they have learned from things going wrong, from their failures
 
And there is something refreshing about listening to people’s failures in an age obsessed with showing our best side, on social media for example.
 
Elizabeth interviews some great guests and big names.
 




 
 
What you realise by listening to these episodes is that failure is “a necessary staging post on a journey towards greater success”. And of course, that is very good to hear in the context of our career paths, isn’t it?
 
Elizabeth has fantastic interviewing skills and shows such wonderful compassion and appreciative enquiry with each guest.
 
So good.
 
My second podcast recommendation is The Coaching Cast by Suzy Hunt and Lisa Robyn Wood.
 
This podcast is branded as your working from home manager's club. 
 
And Suzy and Lisa do a great job of replacing what we have lost by working from home – the personal connections, camaraderie, and community, and have somehow distilled all of that into a podcast format.
 
In each episode, they explore different topics around leading and managing people sharing tips, ideas, and recommendations. 
 
They also have some fantastic guests on their show, including (Examples)
 
Insightful, interesting, and very entertaining. I’m regularly in stitches listening to this podcast.
 
Whether it’s BS Bingo, fun playlists or just a refreshing and contemporary view on an outdated aspect of our working lives.
 
Suzy and Lisa have been kind enough to share with me some of their audio from a recent episode.
 
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Highly recommended.
 
And finally, I wanted to discuss my own podcast
 
So this is episode No 15 of my podcast, and I still feel like I’m finding my feet as a podcaster.
 
I’m enjoying planning and recording these episodes and exploring and explaining the steps to loving your job and having a great job.
 
But, it’s a huge subject and I still feel like I have only scratched the surface.
 
I also love connecting with interesting guests, 4 of the last 15 episodes have been guest interviews and actually, the next podcast will be a guest interview.
 
I will be interviewing fiction writer Chris Wood who has gone from being a Detective Inspector to having a portfolio career, writing books and day trading.
 
And, I have loved the feedback from you, the reviews and the messages of support.
 
I see the podcast as a long term endeavour, and
 
I’m still happy with having these come out every 2 weeks and keeping the solo episodes relatively short with longer episodes for the guest interviews.
 
Yeah, so that wraps up today’s session, I hope you found these resources useful.
 
Let me know what you thought of the episode and
 
As I wrap up remember that I am always looking for positive reviews of my podcast, so If you can spare a few minutes please leave me a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you leave reviews. I would really appreciate that, thanks so much.
 
You can email me at mark@bravocoaching.co.uk and you can find the show notes at bravocoaching.co.uk/podcast.
 
 
If you are interested in working with me, you can book a free discovery call on my website, here:
 
And to remind you that you can download your free guides at
 
If you haven’t already subscribed, why not do that now. It’s all free of course and I’ve got lots of great content coming your way and some interesting people who I will be interviewing soon.
 
Have a wonderful week and I will speak to you again in a couple of weeks time.
 
Bye for now.