Tornado Thinking

Tornado at Your Career Crossroads

 
Do you keep spinning up these persistent conversations with yourself? Over and over again, you question how work is going and you keep examining information or situations around you to see if there is any “answer” for what to do next. Then, the phone rings, or your colleague comes to ask you for something, or a customer enters your office or any of a million distractions happen, and you stop the career conversation in your head.

But about twenty minutes or two hours later, you start to spin up the same conversation in your head. The same career information and situations come to mind—day after day—and they enter your mental Tornado. Day after day, you feed the Tornado.

Certain tough or complex career management decisions often circulate in our thinking, over and over—in that Tornado. Much like in a real tornado, our mental Tornado contains valuable material. But when we suck up excessive informational debris off the landscape and just keep spinning it with no productive end result, we develop a sense of burnout, fatigue, and discouragement. And daily distractions and responsibilities guarantee that, every time we get into the Tornado, we’ll get pulled away from our thoughts, and the Tornado will subside—for a while. Sound familiar? And tedious?

Consider these questions:

  • The Tornado. Did you see movie Twister? Are you just picking up more informational “debris” off the career landscape, or are you getting practical, personal, as well as critical market information to design your personal strategy? Find out what’s in your tornado. Assessment tools will help us rapidly identify interests, skills, management style, personality and values that represent valuable information about you that is lost in the spin.
  • Spinning the information? Do you find yourself coming back to the same “career conversation in your head” but never finishing it? Get the conversation going outside of your own head; the value a coach brings.
  • Are you problem-solving when you should be decision-making?

 

Good analyzers and problem solvers (engineers, financial professionals, R&D-types) love this one. They just keep gathering data to “solve the problem” even when data is not the issue—decision making is. Sometimes knowing your deeper needs, personal strivings, values, and even professional fears can pull together the valuable elements that have been swirling amidst the debris in the Tornado—and enable you to decide on a fulfilling course of action.

 

SOLUTION:  The Think Out Loud Laboratory (TOLL)

Our work will help you wrangle your mental Tornadoes to the ground, sort out the contents to find the value, and build as well as sustain a better career with the contents you preserve. You need to stop the spin. It represents only mental busyness, but not career management.

You need to get the conversation out of your head and into dialogue with an objective and trusted advisor. Our work together creates your TOLL where we wrangle your mental Tornadoes to the ground, sort out the contents to find the value, and build as well as sustain a better career with the contents you preserve. You need to stop the spin. It represents only mental busyness, but not career management.