What Are Your Career Goals?

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I collect dreadful questions. I’ve got six so far. These are the seemingly easy questions you know you’re going to get over a networking coffee, in a job interview and in the elevator up to your office. These are not questions you want to stumble over.

Having good, true answers to the Six Dreadfuls is confidence-building, anxiety-relieving and crazy-empowering. I’ve written in this column about the First Dreadful (“So, tell me about yourself”) and the Second Dreadful (“What kind of work are you looking for?”).

This week I’m skipping ahead to the Sixth Dreadful, a fairly recent addition to my collection. A coaching client told me she had gotten it in an interview and had been unprepared. I felt responsible for the miss; it’s an obvious Dreadful.

I ran it past a different coaching client recently, a lovely 50-year-old man.

“Are you ready for the Sixth Dreadful?” I asked my client. “Brace yourself…”

(Read the rest of the story at The Seattle Times.)