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Careers Archives - All The Single Girlfriends

Change or Die: My Job Hunt

Aug 9, 2012 by

Change or Die: My Job Hunt

I’m an optimist. That should explain why, around my 66th birthday, I decided to look for a full-time job.  It wasn’t that my consulting business was in the dumper.  It was just that I decided it would be a good idea to have a regular paycheck, some benefits, people to be around, and learn new skills “on the company.” According to Buddhist philosophy, adversity is a gift since in it we are presented with lessons we can’t ignore. That gift was a big one.  Those employers inviting me for interviews probably hadn’t Googled me.  Otherwise they would have known my age.  Forget all that crap about “not looking your age.”  The reality is that we are older.  Employers don’t want older. It was a shock to be knocked out of the box because I was old,...

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Top 5 Advices for Marketing Newbies...

Jun 11, 2012 by

Top 5 Advices for Marketing Newbies

A cousin who calls me Obi Wan (I know, I know) and is about to join the marketing world asked me this:  “What are your top 5 advices for a marketing newbie?” The question made me recall my own Marketing Jedi-In-Training days.  Those were not happy days.  At all.  My memory recounts endless tears, utter confusion and an almost paralyzing fear that I was really born devoid of a brain. Back then (Sigh! This sentence beginning always makes me feel as old as Yoda), marketing was the career of the desperate.  When you’re a fresh college graduate and jobless, you take a marketing job until something better and serious comes along.  Like accountancy. And so it was that I found myself signing that first employment contract with much relief.  Never mind that I have...

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Anybody Who Pays?

Feb 1, 2012 by

Anybody Who Pays?

I was having a lovely lunch with some business colleagues when the talk veered to someone’s new business. Me:  “So, who’s your target market for it?” Businessman:  “Anybody who pays!” WEH?! In the Jurassic Era, “anybody who pays” is an excellent marketing strategy.  What do dinosaurs know about marketing anyway?  All they care about is not being devoured by the T-Rex. In the 21st century, however, there is no “anybody who pays.”  If your marketing director is dispensing that sage advice, you should fire him.  Immediately.  If you continue listening to that drivel, you will be devoured by the modern day T-Rex – your competition. I don’t need to tell you how saturated the market is with every product and service known to man and fungi.  There are products and services whose purpose in...

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That Gratitude List: Item #1 is becoming a writer...

Dec 26, 2011 by

That Gratitude List: Item #1 is becoming a writer

Here it is the holiday season. And no one over-40 gets through it without work, the emotional kind, I mean.  Ministers, spiritual coaches, and therapists worth their salt all tell us that work goes a lot easier if we start with a gratitude list.  Yeah, really. Well, that gratiude list really does trigger an internal paradigm shift – going from poor-me to lucky-me.  At the top of the list I put something that I have been wrestling with since 1975.  That’s my decision to become a writer. Had I not made that decision I might have become a rich, powerful woman.  After all I had the intelligence, stomach for risk-taking, and drive to take that great leap forward into investment banking or even being a security analyst. But, it dawns on me more and...

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Plan B: Turning this-isn’t-working into that-could-work...

Nov 28, 2011 by

Plan B: Turning this-isn’t-working into that-could-work

Who hasn’t surrendered to the reality that the original strategy, tactic, and/or educational investment wasn’t panning out?  With such a volatile economy disrupted by technology, we’re all finding ourselves stumbling or even stuck.  Yet, it’s been tough to admit that, yet again, Plan A didn’t work.  We feel foolish.  Our confidence is shaken to the core.  And we just want to relocate to an emerging economy like Nigeria which is growing at about eight percent.  Could be that we will have more luck there. Serial entrepreneur David Murray sucks out the drama from failure.  His book “Plan B” chronicles how few plans yield any results.  And that’s it’s primarily through constant course correction, sometimes radical, that we can finally hit some home runs. Murray presents the riveting example of why Facebook is going gangbusters and MySpace...

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Finding Your Path in the Business World...

Nov 10, 2011 by

Finding Your Path in the Business World

“I see you exploring,” my friend said about my business ventures.  “You’re doing a good job.” That was nice to hear.  Sometimes, I feel like a kid playing at being an adult without taking on any real responsibility or getting any real results. I started this experiment in entrepreneurship with one idea; an idea that seemed to expand as I asked people for advice and then change as opportunities came along.  I got advice from creative, knowledgeable people who had started businesses and knew what they were doing.  I wholeheartedly acknowledge that I would not have known where to start without them.  However, if I had to do it again, with everything I know now, I would change a few things. 1. For one, I wouldn’t spend so much money up front. I wouldn’t...

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Gloria at 77

Aug 29, 2011 by

Gloria at 77

At age 77, Gloria Steinem is having a renaissance in the media.  Of course, thanks to Steinem, we single women didn’t have it rougher than we did.  We could have, you know. For decades, Steinem not only fought that we women, single and married, be perceived and treated as people [not babes]. She also remained single, until late in her life.   And that was despite her classically attractive face and bone structure which could have attracted a wealthy husband.  Steinem was not from a privileged background. In conjunction with the airing of the HBO documentary on Steinem, Maria Shriver interviews her in the current edition of Interview Magazine.  The conversation has many surprises. For example, despite all her emotional boldness in activism and not marrying, Steinem tells us that she essentially ducked whatever was associated...

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Patty Azzarello’s New Book On Business Success: Destined To Become A Classic...

Apr 12, 2011 by

Patty Azzarello’s New Book On Business Success: Destined To Become A Classic

True confession. Although I regularly read business books – everything from building a personal brand to using social media to having successful virtual teams – I don’t really like business books. For me, most are too theoretical and tend to paint an overly rosy picture of the benefits the reader will get if they follow the advice in the book. A few years ago I read Who Moved My Cheese? According to the book’s website I am one of 24 million people who bought this book. You would think with that many people reading the book it would have a dramatic impact on my thinking about business. Here’s what I remember about it. Not much. Oh, I remember it was a quick,easy read. I remember thinking it was clever. But, I didn’t note or...

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Ask The Girlfriends

Apr 7, 2011 by

Ask The Girlfriends

This post is the first in an All The Single Girlfriends series: Ask The Girlfriends. We thought the collective life  experience/”wisdom” of the Gf authors might help younger women sort through a few of life’s challenges. As our way of giving back to women under 30, Gf authors will answer questions about life, career, relationships and well .. we’ll see where this takes us. Most of us realize by the time we reach our age that we left some great advice sitting unused on the table because it came from our mothers or some other purveyor of unsolicited advice designed it seemed only to burst our bubbles or cramp our style. With this series we’re reaching out to women under 30 and asking them to provide a question to us that they want some help...

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“You” As A Digital Brand...

Mar 23, 2011 by

“You” As A Digital Brand

Recently I was re organizing my home office. Er .. ok, I was moving piles of papers to make my desk seem less cluttered. I came across an article that someone had sent me in 1997.. don’t even ask Girlfriend! I don’t remember who sent it to but I saved it because at the time the concept intrigued me. It was Tom Peter’s The Brand Called You which you can find at Fast Company online. As the fates, would have it soon after reading it I was “right-sized” or “down-sized” or whatever the politically correct term was at the time. I was fired from my  job with the Georgia Lottery Company. Peter’s idea that a company would want to hire “more than a resume” was radical 14 years ago. He talked about managing our...

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Passion vs The Economy

Mar 7, 2011 by

Passion vs The Economy

Fifteen years ago when I left an 18-year career in corporate travel management to become a professional visual artist, I had made a life-changing choice of Passion over Money. Little did I realize that the decision to follow my passion would soon become a cyclical battle of doing what I loved, then picking up a day job, then quitting the day job to do what I loved, then finding another day job. I had read the book, “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow”, and while I was certainly doing what I loved, the appropriate amount of money was slow in coming. Then the economy tanked and I found myself repeating the words I started hearing over and over in the news, on the radio, from friends and relatives, and especially from...

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Starting Over, Over and Over

Feb 11, 2011 by

Starting Over, Over and Over

The shock for me – and now for more and more of us – was that I was older, yet I had to start over again.  In 2003, my communications boutique had collapsed.  My personal life hadn’t been too hot either. [My free e-book GeezerGuts].  African-American bestselling author and Yoruba priestess Iyanla Vanzant puts this way in her new book Peace from Broken Pieces. You need to start over when you “trip over the fallacies and fantasies that you have created or inherited. You slip on your dysfunctional puzzle pieces and your distorted sense of self.” It took longer than I expected but I did get on the other side of all that.  By trial and error I discovered that my talent and the market were right for social media.  Finally I found out...

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