Littleton, CO — December 29, 2000 — What’s your definition of the perfect job? The New Year is a good time for resolving to improve your work life. It may even be a necessity now with the slowing high tech economy.

For one person, the perfect job may mean more prestige; for another it means good pay and time off with the kids. Or perhaps it means security in place of plummeting stock options. Staffing experts Maureen Clarry and Kelly Gilmore, founders of the Littleton, Colorado-based CONNECT: The Knowledge Network offer these five tips to help you find what you are looking for in 2001.

1. Control Yourself: Realize you can’t control things like your company’s stock price or bad management. You can control your attitudes, your skills and your response to events. Spend your energy on bettering yourself instead of finger pointing and complaining.
2. Hold On to Your Goals: You are part of many systems: your work system, your family system, your community system. Those systems have goals for you. For instance, your spouse may want you to earn more or your company may want to move you into management. Don’t wait for a mid-life crisis to discover your personal goals are different than the goals your systems have set for you. Consider what you want and establish goals that will make you happy.
3. Let Go: Hold on to your vision, but be flexible in your plans to reach your goals. Don’t worry if things don’t go as expected, because they probably won’t. Let go of ideas that don’t work so you can develop “Plan B”. Ask any happy, successful person ­ it probably took “Plan B” and maybe “Plan C” to get where they were going.
4. Speak Up: You can’t change things out of your control but you can influence them. The influence you have depends on your skills in conflict management, networking, sales, collaboration and communication. Get more from your work life by strengthening these skills.
5. Be Quiet: You have all this information in your head about what you want, what you’re good at, how to behave and skills you want to develop. But that overworked logical part of your brain can’t do it all. Did you ever have the experience of trying to figure something out, but the more you thought about it, the more elusive the answer became? Finally, at 3 a.m. you woke up and said “that’s it!” Call it time out, meditation, contemplation or doing nothing, but be quiet as you plan your career for 2001. Because that’s when it will all come together and you’ll be able to say: “That’s it!”

Maureen Clarry and Kelly Gilmore founded CONNECT: The Knowledge Network in 1993. Both married with children, they had to “let go” and develop “Plan B” upon unexpectedly finding they were both pregnant in their firm’s early days. Calling it the “Get rich slow” plan they coordinated time off and established on-site daycare.