We've Moved!

Our blog has moved to our website at: http://horizonpointconsulting.com/blog 

We've added a new series of posts related to Career Development that will come on Thursdays as we continue with our Leadership posts on Mondays.   We hope you'll find that this new location and look will provide you with great info that gives you access directly to Horizon Point's website.

Thank you to our subscribers by email!  You can still subscribe by email to the new location simply by typing in your email address on the left side of the new page.  

Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

I attended a seminar last week discussing ways to improve productivity and communication in the workplace.   One thing that stood out to me in the presentation was the emphasis the presenter placed on eliminating stressors so that people could be innovative and creative.   He placed a value on innovation and creativity as the only differentiating factors in creating a sustainable advantage. 

What if standard or traditional work arrangements are creating workplace stressors and reducing innovation and creativity?

This leads me to consider a tie to a book I mentioned last week,  The Elephant and the Flea  and its emphasis on employing free agents.   Charles Handy writes, 

"Meantime, more and more people are going to become aware that their knowledge which drives innovation and creativity has marketable value. They will be reluctant to sell it for a time-based contract, a wage or a salary.  They will want to charge a fee or a royalty, a percentage of the profits.  The difference is that a salary is paid for time spent, whereas a fee is money paid for work produced, irrespective of the time spent on it."  italics mine.

The beauty of this model is that you not only get results, but you get people who are less stressed because they are in control of their own situation, which allows them to be creative and innovative and produce better results.  It also may cost you less.  Many who charge a fee for work produced don't come with the added cost of a benefit package.

Or consider the FutureWork Institute described in the book Now You See It.  Describing the founder of the institutes philosophy, the author Cathy Davidson writes, 

"The workplace of the future had to start taking into account the life desires, not just the work ambitions, of workers.  She was convinced that the best, most creative workers in the future might not be workaholics with the eighty-hour workweeks, but people who had figured out what way they love to work and how they work best."

My two year old snoring is eliminating my stress and fostering my creativity...

As I sit hear writing this post on a Saturday at home, my two year old is asleep in my lap.  Although it took a little maneuvering to get him situated so that I can type,  I can't help but think that creativity does come when we are in control of when and how work gets done. But maybe thats the point... blurring the lines of work and life so much that you don't realize to consider it work, which fosters creativity and innovation.   What could eliminate stress and make writing more enjoyable than two year old contently asleep in your lap?

What way do you love to work and how do you work best?

Like this post? You may also like this one as well. 

New Addition to Thursday- Career Development Series

I will be starting a weekly blog post on Thursdays (in addition to our leadership focused blog post on Mondays) that focuses on Career Development.  Although this will be useful information for people of all ages, it should particularly be helpful for students.  Hope you enjoy this new series!

Here's what we'll cover:

Part 1: Your Horizon

A.  Know Yourself:  Explore your talents, passions and values to make wise career decisions.

-Talents as employers see them- KSAOs (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other Characteristics)

-Passions through your Holland Code

-Values- know your ideal workstyle and lifestyle

B.     Understand the Market

-Are you useful?

-Explore bright outlook careers

-What do employers want?

C.     Match Yourself:  Explore Your Horizon

-Use what you know about yourself and what you know about the market to learn about careers 

-Conduct informational interviews

-Job shadowing keeps you from hiding in someone else's shadow

-No one gets a good job these days without an internship(s)

Part 2:  Success Tools

A.     Define your mission

B.     Be a 3%er- set goals

C.     Practice Makes Perfect, why you need 10,000 hours and grit to succeed 

E.     Create a network and find a mentor

F.     It isn’t all about the money

G.    Don’t neglect happenstance

H.   Give Back!

           

2 Tips if you have Bored Employees

Last week,  I talked about how boredom at work is one of the worst employment states and offered suggestions for how employees can improve bored working conditions.  I want to focus now on leaders who have bored workers.

If you have people who are bored on the job, I believe there are two primary reasons and two primary tips for curing the boredom.

1. They are bored because you don't need them, or you don't need them full-time. 

Long gone are the days where every single position on the face of the planet needed to be a 40 hour a week job.  Nothing is a waste of money and talent more than paying people for time in a chair rather than time being productive.  Yet we are so enthralled with the 40 hour work week.

If your people are sitting there with nothing to do 50% of the time, then you need to either delegate (see below) tasks to them, or find a modified way to employ them in the time that it takes them to complete the job, whether this is full-time or not.

Tip 1: Consider Contract

In an interesting article entitled The Forgotten 5th?, by Erik Pages, an emphasis is placed on 1/5th of the workforce that operates on a contract basis.  Maybe contracting is an option for you to maximize your money and maximize others' talent.

In addition, Charles Handy, a great British thinker who was way ahead of his time, talks about the usefulness of the nimble "flea"  in his book  The Elephant and the Flea instead of the cumbersome "elephant" as an organization and a workplace.  Maybe you need to employ more "fleas" or "free agents" and think creatively about how to design jobs and working hours to get work done as efficiently and effectively as possible.

2.  They are bored because you have the I can do it better than everyone else syndrome. In other words, you have trouble delegating. 

I recently had someone tell me, "Well, I don't just hand it over because it takes more time to hand it over than it takes for me to do it myself."   I'll admit, I've had these feelings before myself, but in actuality, if this thought is occurring to you more often than not, and you're also overwhelmed with your workload (the person I am referencing definitely is overwhelmed with his workload), then why aren't you handing things off to people you are paying to get work done for you?

Tip 2: Delegate

Map out what you have to do every day or every week.   Pinpoint is what is critical for you do to, then delegate the rest.  Oftentimes we have an emotional attachment to certain task(s) or clients.  Instead of considering who we employ that could learn and thrive on these tasks or client interactions, we take them for ourselves because we are emotionally attached. That emotional attachment is often, to be quite honest, tied to wanting to get the credit for the work.  But leaders make more leaders, and credit does not matter so much to leaders as developing people does.  Delegate to develop.

Why are your employees bored on the job? 

New Leader Tuesday-Develop as a Decision Coach

New Leader Tuesday-Develop as a Decision Coach

Bored as a Gourd? Not an ideal employment state

I've been struck the last couple of weeks with the reiteration of one of the things that is extremely detrimental to both employers and employees: boredom at work.  

I've recently been working with an adult client wanting to make a career change.  She is an extremely talented individual, and In talking with her about her current employment  she says she is just a "warm body".  One of the main reasons she wants a change is because she's bored as a gourd at work!   She works for a government contractor (the waste of taxpayer money as she sits there bored is a topic for another day) and none of her talents and skills are being utilized in her role. 

Also consider a quote from a book I just finished reading, Tribes by Seth Godin: 

"Consider the receptionist at a publishing company I visited a week later. There she was, doing nothing. Sitting at a desk, minding her own business, bored out of her skull. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she's been doing it for two years." 

Two thoughts come to mind on boredom at work: 

1. What a waste of money! As a leader, why would you pay people to be bored?

2. What a waste of talent!  This may even be more of a shame.  Leaders should be making more leaders, and leadership isn't cultivated through boredom.

What if you are an employee and bored?

Two courses of action exist: 

1.  Change your work environment. You may want to check out these two posts to discover if there is a better fit for you in the workplace: 

Know Yourself

Match Yourself

2.  Proactively ask for challenging or varied tasks.  Does your boss seem overloaded and stressed, but your reading your romance novel?  Simply ask him/her if there is something you can help with.   If they don't volunteer anything (why they aren't volunteering, is again, a topic for another day) pay attention to what they are spending time on and see if you can help them without being asked.  Prove your worth and your talents by proactively getting things done without being asked to do so.

What if you are a leader and your people are bored? Stay tuned for next week...

Leadership How-To: Combine Communication with Teamwork

To continue our periodic posts on Leadership How-Tos as a suggestion from participants in my last Leadership I class, I'd like to suggest an activity that combines two of the class topics:

1. Teamwork
2.  Communication

In the class, everyone takes a Communication Style Assessment .  You can click the link and order a paper copy like the one taken in the class for $14.00 each or click here to see all the other products that go along with the assessment.  You can order the online version for $16.00 or even order $2.00 blinking pins for each of the four different styles.

To better understand communication in the workplace and build camaraderie amongst your team (and have a little fun while you are at it!)  get this style assessment or another you find that you like and have your team members take it.  Then plan a 30 minute team building session to discuss everyone's results.

Facilitate a discussion that includes:
1.  What each person's style means to them.  Get people to describe a scenario at work that shows their style.
2.  Have a good discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of each style.
3.  Ask members of the team to pair up with someone who has a different style than they do and discuss ways to improve communication between those two types of styles.  Have them share with the group.
4.  Focus on the fact that no one style is right or wrong, but knowing ourselves and knowing others on our team helps us communicate more effectively.

To reiterate the points of effective communication between different styles, if your workplace culture supports it, order some of these goofy blinking pins 

(no, I am not getting a kickback for promoting any of these products :)  and facilitate some fun team building around giving them away when people either demonstrate their style or recognize the style of others in a behavior based example.

Want other example of a teambuilding activity?  Check out upStartHR's post here.

Marketing Yourself Must Go Beyond the Traditional Resume

Considering a career change or actively looking for a job?  Just brushing up your resume isn't going to get you where you want to be, most likely.  Even if you are not on an active job hunt, creating a personal brand for yourself that highlights your strengths and expertise can help you get to where you want to be.  In addition, using a variety of mediums or avenues to market yourself is important.   In the days of googling everyone and everything, you need to have a web presence.

I have one client who TOTALLY gets this.  While we spent time working on revising her resume to reflect the experience she had related to the career transition she wants to make (from technical writing to an HR or administrative role) she already had domain names purchased and spent time over the holidays honing her own website to highlight her strengths and create an avenue to showcase the work that she has done.   The website is her portfolio. She also focuses on blogging about issues related to the field she wants to be in because she has a passion for these topics.  Reading and writing about these issues is fun for her as it should be for anything a person has a passion for doing. You can check out her site here: www.stephaniewhitlow.com

Her website also shows that she has the technical and creative ability to create and manage a website.  It also shows initiative. Although you can hire people to do a website for you without a whole lot of expense, I would recommend trying to create one on your own.  Its a learning experience and a skill that you can add to your resume.

Not ready to create your own website or start blogging?  At least be sure that you have a LinkedIn profile and it reflects your brand.  For certain professions, having a hardcopy portfolio and an electronic copy of it saved on a jump drive is beneficial.

Interested in reading more about this topic?  Here's another good read from the Working Wisdom blog.

What do you need to do to take your personal brand to the next level?

The January 2013 Leadership Development Carnival: Best of 2012 Edition

Our most viewed post of 2013, Pot Meet Kettle, is featured in this month's Leadership Carnival.

The January 2013 Leadership Development Carnival: Best of 2012 Edition

I'm going public!

I spent the whole month of January last year blogging about New Year's Resolution-ish posts tied mostly to goal setting.    You can check them all out here:

Strategic Resolutions
Your Stop Doing List   (The article by Jim Collins linked in this post is one of my absolute favs)
Goal Setting- A Series
Goal Setting- Diminishing Returns
Goal Setting- Feedback

Although I'm not going to spend the whole month of January this year talking about making yourself over with goal setting, (because by the time we get to the end of January we will probably have ditched most of our New Year's Resolutions anyway according to the research) I am going to to attempt to keep myself from ditching mine by going public with my goals for 2013.

In addition to the research driven topics I talked about in 2012 to improve your goal commitment, publicly declaring your goals has proven to help goal commitment and achievement.

Here are mine:
1. Maximize productivity in the morning.  I am, by far, the most productive in the morning if I will just take what seems to be the small but actual a huge step of getting my two feet to hit the floor.   This year, I'm committing myself to get up at 5 AM at least three times a week for a workout, a devotion, no rushed feeling while getting my little one ready, and time in the office early to get started.  I want to spend the hour I get to the office early these three times or more a week writing and reading about career and leadership topics. Long term, I want to write a book and have it published on career development.

2. Grow company revenue by 30% or more in 2013.  I spent quite a bit of time last week looking over the business development activities I engaged in and analyzing what results those activities created. With this, I have come to the conclusion that this a challenging yet reachable goal.  I have set mini goals/tasks in each area of my business to help reach this target. For example, make four initial contacts with a new business prospect each month. In order to keep up with these targets and tasks, I have created a simple spreadsheet (that I actually use with some of my coaching clients).

Here's an example of what it looks like:

I wish I had a way to synch this with my Outlook task list, or something that would let me do both in one system that is inexpensive and coordinates with my email and calendar.  If you know of one, please let me know!

That's it for my goals that are professional in nature.  As far as the personal goals, number one above incorporates some personal components such has health and spirituality, but here are the exclusively personal ones:

1. Cook dinner and sit down as a family to eat at least four times a week. 

2. Be committed (as I have been the last two years) to one day a week at home with my little boy.

3. Express gratitude to those closest to me.  (For more on the why behind this goal, read an earlier post here.)

4. No debt except our house by the end of the year.

5. Read 30 books.

What are your goals for this year and what tools to you find helpful in achieving them?  Go public with yours!

Want more?  Here is a blog I follow who has gone public with her personal and professional resolutions too- Intern Queen

Managers' Impact on Employee Productivity- Great post from upstartHR

Employee Productivity Post from upStart HR

This is a great posting from Ben Eubanks from upstartHR that summarizes some research on a manager's impact on employee productivity.  Be sure to click the links at the end of the post to see the original source of the info and the YouTube video.

Wishing you Merry and Bright this Holiday Season!

As is our custom, we will take a few weeks off from our blog postings over the Christmas and New Years holiday.  We wish you and yours a season filled with Merry and Bright!

How Children (and Adults) Succeed

At the prompting of Joe Adams with The Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA),  I just read the book How Children Succeed: Grit Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough.  Joe captured my attention about this book when he was giving a presentation to the Decatur City Schools Foundation on their standardized test scores.  Joe was asked the question, "Well how do we help kids succeed in school" (or at least that was the basic just of the question).  

Joe caught my attention when he pointed to this book and said,  "I didn't earn my PhD because I'm smart, I earned it because I would put up with more crap than anyone else."  While you might find this statement odd, what the book and Joe intend to mean is that we are missing the mark if we think teaching purely academic skills are what make children and people in general successful.

I think the same is true of the work environment.  If we think that only teaching people the technical skills necessary for the job is going to make them successful, then we are wrong. 

Here are some key points to consider from the book in helping people succeed: 

1.  Provide secure environments for people to live, work, play and learn.  In the working world, provide a work environment that provides support, especially support during stressful situations.  This is especially important for young children, and in my opinion, especially important for new hires in an organization.  An organized new hire orientation period where training and support are provided and expectations are established can lead to much success down the road for that employee.  For tools on this, click here.

2. Being a "helicopter" parent or boss, doesn't work.   In fact, it can be as detrimental to success as being an absent parent or boss.  Micromanaging and swooping in to "rescue" all the time does not lead to successful people. 

3. Allow people to fail.  That's where the most learning takes place. 

4. Challenge people.  No one succeeds, or leads a fulfilling life when the status quo is never challenged. 

5.  Speaking of a fulfilling life, help people develop grit in their work to lead to productivity and fulfillment.  Angela Duckworth who is chronicled in the book defines grit as "a passionate commitment to a single mission and an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission."  This involves getting people on the right seat on the bus or allowing them to get off your bus and join another one if the grit just isn't there. 

6.  Hard work matters and it leads to success and fulfillment.  In fact, determination and hard work matter more than a person's intellect.  

What type of characteristics does your work environment or leadership style have that help people succeed? 

Overcoming Barriers, Just Listen

After completing a career coaching project with 50 high school seniors,  I put together a report for the client that explained many things about the coaching project, including barriers that students had in their way of achieving college and career success.  Here is the list of barriers:

•  Lack of self awareness about strengths and interests, which limits confidence
• Lack of knowledge about careers
• Teenage pregnancy
•  Not having passed all parts of the graduation exam
• Students living in poverty (measured by students qualifying for free and reduced lunch)
• Single parents households (one coach who coached 25 students only talked to 4 students that had both a mother and father figure present in the home).
•  Lack of understanding about what it takes to get into college, for example, not taking the ACT, assuming the school of their choice has a major they want to pursue, knowing or thinking they could qualify for a Pell Grant, but having no idea how to obtain one, etc.
• Lack of computer skills or limited access to computers at home needed to register for ACT and complete college applications.
• Drug use.  At least one student appeared to be under the influence of some type of substance and one student told a coach that she believed 75% of her classmates were involved in drugs in some way.  While this may be an exaggeration by this student, it cannot be overlooked. 

With this list of barriers, you can see how it might be near impossible to even get to the point of the career coaching session which was actually talking about what they wanted to be when they "grow up".  Much of the time was spent focused on how to overcome the mountains in their path.

This got me to thinking about barriers people have in doing a quality job day in and day out at work.  While many of those who work for you may not have the same exhausting list of issues, everyone has a set of issues that they deal with that are difficult when they show up to work for you. 

Is it important to help them overcome these issues?  Yes.  Not that you need to become a full-time therapist as a leader (but you could pay to have an Employee Assistance Program- EAP to provide this service if needed), but you do need to realize what would prohibit your staff from doing a great job and help them to at least make the mountains they have in front of them hills.   When you help eliminate some of the barriers, you get a more focused employee who is able to produce results for your company.  

Here are some things I've seen companies do to help employees deal with personal barriers:

Provide classes like Financial Peace University to help employees with the stress of money related issues.

Provide an Employee Assistance Program that allows employees access to counselors specialized in areas such as marital counseling, substance abuse counseling, etc.  or, for smaller companies, provide time off to meet with such a counselor and help with making sure these services can be billed through health insurance plans

Provide wellness programs or healthy living incentives to reduce health-related issues.

Provide paid time off (or a personal leave or vacation plan that is flexible enough) so that employees can take time off for family related issues, whether it be time to attend the school play or time to care for a terminally ill relative.

What's most important? 

What's most important though, as a leader, is just simply listening.  I think we were able to uncover many of the barriers these teenagers faced simply because they had a devoted 45 minute to an hour time frame with an individual whose job for that time frame was just them, and most importantly, just listening to them.  So whether or not you can provide any of the above listed things to overcome personal barriers,  you can take time to listen.  And sometimes listening means hearing the things that aren't said.  Listening to your employees and establishing a level of trust through listening may lead you to understand obstacles that keep them from performing A+ work or you, then be able to start to help them fix it. 

How have you helped your employees eliminate personal obstacles that limit success? 

Usefulness as an Employee Satisfaction Tool

Our little boy loves Thomas the Train.  Although it can be mind numbing to listen to Thomas and his friends over and over again,  listening to it enough has led me to pick up on the fact that the underlying theme is that all the engines' purpose is to be useful.  Not happy, not successful, not prosperous, not even efficient, but useful.  The usefulness theme is embedded in the videos, the songs, the website, in all things Thomas.

What if the workplace was embedded with the theme of making you and your employees useful?  How would this shape employee satifaction efforts and organizational commitment and how would it shape how you handle leadership? What would be useful for you to do for your employees?

While I sometimes tire of the constant requests for "Choo Choo" (aka Thomas and his friends), I am pleased that the usefulness the lesson is being taught through one of my child's favorite things to watch and do.  He not only sees that hard work is valuable, but that each train is different and, therefore, has a different way to go about being useful.   The "steamies" have a different purpose than the "diesels" and that's okay.  Taking it even further, each individual engine is especially good at something.  One is obsessed with being on time (which you could see serving to be useful in certain situations), one is strong and hauls the heavy loads, while another is nice and clean and is responsible for carrying passengers on the island of Sodor where they all live to be useful.

While you might think that useful could be, well boring,  it turns out that all the engines on Sodor are happy and satisfied.  The only time they aren't is when they aren't serving their intended purpose.   The end state of being useful actually leads to a greater end state of job satisfaction and commitment.

Research show that a key component in creating job satisfaction is the nature of the work or the characteristics of the job.  Matching people with the right work helps create a sense of satisfaction that leads to motivation and success.  Why? Because being useful means meeting a need, and deep down we all want to meet needs, whether it be our own needs or others. You want every employee to feel a sense of meeting a need that maximizes your company's success. Here are some tips for helping you emphasize usefulness which will help lead to job satisfaction:

1.  Place people in assignments that allow them to feel as though they are important and competent (perceived competence) based on their strengths and personality.
2.  Allow competent people the opportunity to make decisions about how they do their work or how they get it done  (see Task-Purpose-Endstate as an example of this) (participative decision making).
3.  Related to number two, leave those that are competent alone to do their job (job autonomy).
4.  With the right training and leadership from you, allow people to expand their job role within their scope of usefulness so they can learn and grow with your organization (job scope).*

When have you felt most useful?


*Source Jex, S.M. & Britt, T.W.,  Organizational Psychology, A Scientist-Practioner Approach. 2008. pp 137&155.

Leadership How-To: Team Communications

One of my favorite companies, Red Sage Communications, Inc.,  who did my website and marketing materials, asked me to write a blog on team communication a few months ago.

You can check it out here on their blog: Communication and Team Work on Red Sage's blog

There are five tips, or how-tos in improving team communication.   Happy Reading!

Task- Purpose- Endstate

This posting comes from guest blogger, Captain Davis Ozier of the United States Army.   

Within an organization, developing our personnel is a critical task that receives a lot of talk but never much attention.  Managers generally think, hope, and assume that subordinates will be developed by simply observing those around them or that merely teaching them a task is sufficient to be considered as developing them in their position.  It doesn’t.  People are at the center of our organizations and the successful execution of our daily business falls on their shoulders.  It is therefore imperative that leaders spend time developing their people to grow and succeed, and empowering our subordinates is a great first step.

The US Army has historically trained a topic or subject on a model of Task – Conditions – Standard, which defines the task, the conditions under which the task will be completed, and the standard that must be reached to be considered a successful execution of said task.  What if, as leaders, we adopt a slightly different approach, and modify our format to Task – Purpose – Endstate?  Define the task at hand, the reason for doing it, and what it should look like at the end.  Doing so empowers the individual or team while affording them maximum creativity and flexibility.  And who do you want to rise within your organization – those that can only execute tasks that are described in detail to them or those that have the ingenuity and agility to develop creative solutions on their own?

Adopting the Task – Purpose – Endstate model has its drawbacks, though.  There will be a learning curve where the subordinate might, and probably will, fail.  This failure is not only acceptable, it is encouraged!  Ask yourself the simple question, have you learned more from your failures or your successes?  As long as leaders can identify the critical tasks ahead of time that are no-fail missions and ensure they are appropriately resourced, there is no reason to worry about potential failures.

Leaders must prioritize development of our team members.  However, it won’t happen on its own – it must be a deliberate and planned effort.  Take a moment and reflect on how your bosses have developed you?  

How do you currently develop your subordinates?  

November Leadership Carnival is up!

Another one of our blog postings is featured in this month's Leadership Carnival.  Check it out here:

November Leadership Carnival

Leadership How-Tos: Firefighting and 80/20 Rule

For those of you that were a part of the leadership classes, several previous blog posts highlight how-tos in the firefighting and dealing with "slackers" conversations.

Check them out: 

80/20 Rule   The how-tos are numbered in the middle of the page.

Are you a firefighter: Part 1   The how-tos are bulleted towards the bottom of the page under the heading "How to put away your fire hose" 

Are you a firefighter: Part 2:  This one is linked to our discussion on being an empowering leader.  The how-tos are numbered in the middle of the page.   The best how-to in this lesson, I think, is another two-birder:
Do you need to assign a task to a team member to get something done?  Then: 

 Bird 1:  Assign the task to someone who is not the expert in this field.   This gives them the opportunity to learn and helps build confidence and empowerment.
Bird 2:  Get your "expert" this task area to mentor and coach the new person in this area.  This shows your expert you trust them to train others, which builds confidence and empowerment too.

You've got two people now who are competent in an area, and hopefully two people who are empowered by following this how-to.

Your Horizon Part 2: Match Yourself

Last week,  I talked about the first step in discovering your career horizon: Know Yourself.   The next step is matching yourself with jobs that fit align with your talents, passions and values.  In considering your matches, you also have to consider the job market where you live or where your willing to relocate.

1.  Take assessments that match yourself to jobs that fit you: 

For free tools, check out O*NET's Career Exploration Tools.  Some of these assessments require you to print out an manually score the assessment while others let you download the application to your computer.  The easiest tool to use is the Career Interest Profiler that can be found at mynextmove.org  which will provide you with a list of careers that match you based on your assessment results and how much education and training you have or are willing to pursue.

If you are willing to pay a little for an assessment, you can take some more comprehensive tools found at:

Self Directed Search
Strong Interest Inventory  This includes an in-person or over the phone interpretation from me.

2.  Learn more about your matches:

First, explore online to learn more about your matches.  I like to use careerinfonet.org   You can enter occupations in the search field in the top right-hand corner of the screen and watch a career video about the job, learn more about what's needed to be successful on the job, daily tasks and activities of the job as well as salary and job growth data. 

Speaking of job growth data,  You can't be a marine biologist in the middle of Nebraska......

This is where it is important to consider the horizon of the job market as to whether or not you can get a job that aligns with your talents, passions and values in the area where you live or where you are willing to live. 

Finally,  talk to people who are in the occupations that interest you.  This Job Shadowing Questionnaire may help.