This Is Not The Career I Ordered™ Blog
Savvy Professional Career Wisdom by Caroline Dowd-Higgins
This is Not the Career I Ordered is read by thousands of careerists around the globe. With savvy tools, inspiration, and resources, this timeless book empowers you to enjoy your career, and love your life!
End 2023 Strong at Work

With days left before the beginning of a new year and the holiday season in full swing – it’s an opportune time to finish out the calendar year with intentionality at work. The economic predictions about inflation, a potential recession, and company lay-offs are conflicting at best, so take advantage of the opportunity to demonstrate […]
The Great 4-Day Workweek Experiment

As someone with Futuristic in my Top 5 Clifton Strengths profile, I am fascinated by what’s coming down the road. Workplace futurists are predicting trends that range from multi-generational behaviors, remote/hybrid roles, and the 4-day work week. Futurist David Houle calls the 2020’s the most disruptive decade in history. The post pandemic journey has brought […]
How Neat Is Your Desk? 5 Strategies To Help You Get Organized

Our desks are the mission control of our workdays, and, if you’re anything like me, when my desk is orderly, I feel a bit more grounded than on the days when it looks like a two year old climbed up and gleefully played fifty-two-pick-up on top of it with a stack of files. If one […]
Design Your Life and Career in 2017

The New Year provides opportunity for reflection and a fresh start. Many people feel stuck or helpless in the wrong job, the wrong relationship, or an unhappy life. The concept of design thinking will empower you with practical and creative strategies to reboot what’s not working so you have more control over your destiny. With […]
I’m Floating My Stress Away!

Admittedly, I am a high-energy, focused, and ambitious career woman who works very hard. While my career brings me great satisfaction and achieving a new goal gives me an adrenaline rush, I find it hard to sit still, let alone relax. I exercise hard to honor my body and it’s rare that I am not […]
Applying Eat, Pray, Love to Your Life

If you haven’t read Liz Gilbert’s book Eat Pray Love or seen the blockbuster movie with Julia Roberts, the nutshell version is that it took Liz (the protagonist) a full twelve months and three countries to strike a balance between pleasure seeking and inner spiritual peace. Liz ultimately found her authentic self and although traveling […]
Crack the Gender Code in the Interview

I read a fabulous article by Muriel Vega in Pink Magazine online about how men take credit more easily for their accomplishments and often see negotiation as a sport. In the end this often gets them higher pay rates. Connie Glaser, a communications expert and author of Gender Talk Works: 7 Steps for Cracking the […]
How To Use Your Office Holiday Party to Land a Promotion

Vicki Salemi wrote this great piece in the New York Post and included my insight about leveraging the office holiday party to your career advantage. Check it out! When a company’s branch manager throws a huge party to land a client in the Jennifer Aniston flick “Office Christmas Party,” out this week, many viewers may […]
Honor Your Body in Life and Career

I recently listened to Arianna Huffington’s book, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time, and it changed my life. I knew that sleep was essential for health and wellbeing but I felt caught up in the myth of how hard working and successful people must sacrifice their life for their career. […]
The Best Ways To Earn Money By Working From Home

This blog was contributed by Reanne Brian. The stay at home job market has boomed astronomically in recent years. What used to conjure up images of miserable looking people stuffing envelopes for hours on end is now a legitimate and lucrative option for many people. The popularity of the Internet for conducting business is one of […]
Create a Kinder Workplace

The workplace can be stressful enough without office politics, gossip, and malcontents. Tom Terez wrote a great piece about building a kinder workplace. We spend so many of our waking hours in our place of work, it only makes sense to create and foster a more civil environment. Here are a few of Tom’s great […]
These Women Abandoned Their Jobs And Became Tech Entrepreneurs

This blog was contributed by Reanne Brian. Entrepreneurship used to be something that was reserved for a few elites with the capital to pull it off. Now it’s something we can all enjoy, thanks to new innovations in technology and the marketplace. Technology has reduced the costs of communication across the board. We now have tablets, cloud-connected […]
The Entrepreneurial Spirit: Keep Feeding It!

The New Year is just around the corner, and if you’ve had a business idea brewing, consider making 2017 the year you take it to the next level and explore entrepreneurship. In my coaching practice, and during the course of my travels, I talk to lots of women interested in starting their own businesses. They […]
Breaking Free: How To Get Out Of A Job You Hate

This blog was contributed by Reanne Brian. Nobody wants to end up stuck in a rut. For many of us, the idea of toiling away every day at a job that we hate just to pay the bills sounds like a nightmare. That’s what makes it so tragic that so many people end up doing just […]