Minda Zetlin - Career Self-Care: Find Your Happiness, Success, and Fulfillment at Work

Career Self-Care is a must-have guide for todays new world of work. Minda Zetlin helps you navigate toxic bosses, unreasonable demands, and feeling stuck in a job you hate. If youre ready to take your career to the next level, this book will help you get there.

Barbara Corcoran, Shark and executive producer on ABCs Shark Tank, founder of the Corcoran Group, and host of the podcast Business Unusual

A personable, practical guide for improving your work life. Minda Zetlin has spent much of her career helping people pursue success without sacrificing their well-being, and her book highlights how you can take better care of your career and your health.

Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast WorkLife

Career Self-Care teaches you how to reach your biggest goals. It will help you become your best, most effective self and keep you focused on the things that matter most.

Eric Partaker, CEO coach and 2019 CEO of the Year, Business Excellence Forum UK

In Career Self-Care, Minda Zetlin weaves fascinating stories, including her own life story, with valuable insights for women (and men) to make their own self-care their priority. Doing so enables us to show up as our best self in every aspect of our career and our life outside of our career. This is especially crucial for leaders because when they dont practice self-care, they are in essence signaling to their teams that the same is expected of them.

Shelmina Babai Abji, author of Show Your Worth: 8 Intentional Strategies for Women to Emerge as Leaders at Work

Career Self-Care provides unique real-world, actionable solutions for any and every possible situation that readers may experience in their careers. The meticulous exercises that Minda Zetlin presents in this book should serve as a contemporary compass for professionals seeking to improve their self-care.

Dr. Eli Joseph, faculty member, Columbia University and Queens College, and author of The Perfect Rejection Resume: A Readers Guide to Building a Career through Failure

Copyright 2022 by Minda Zetlin

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given or liability taken.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zetlin, Minda, author.

Title: Career self-care : find your happiness, success, and fulfillment at work / Minda Zetlin.

Description: Novato, California : New World Library, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: A collection of pragmatic self-care methods for balancing the competing demands of career, well-being, and personal fulfillment. Includes exercises and questions for reflection-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022005806 (print) | LCCN 2022005807 (ebook) | ISBN 9781608687329 (paperback) | ISBN 9781608687336 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Career development. | Work-life balance. | Success in business. | Success.

Classification: LCC HF5381 .Z37 2022 (print) | LCC HF5381 (ebook) | DDC 650.1--dc23/eng/20220207

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005806

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005807

First printing, June 2022

ISBN 978-1-60868-732-9

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-733-6

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

To my mom, Erlinda Cortes Brobston, born Mary Boone (19242015), who made all of this look easy, and to my husband, Bill Pfleging, who makes my own career and self-care possible.

H ow do you feel about your job, your career, your work life, and your outside-of-work life? Is your job a source of misery and frustration? Is it time to make a change? Are you working as hard as you can at a profession that excites you, doing your absolute best to find the next step up, and then the next after that? Do you have a career that you love and a home life that fulfills you? Is it a constant battle to find time for all the things you really want to do? Even though all of it is wonderful, do you still feel overwhelmed?

Ive felt all those things at different times in my life and career, and Ive struggled with them all. But for more than a decade, Ive had an incredibly fun job writing for the website of Inc. magazine, exploring all the different ways successful people, and those who aspire to be successful, can better manage their jobs, their start-up companies, and the constant push and pull between their work lives and the rest of their lives. Ive talked to hundreds of experts, business executives, and entrepreneurs about the strategies that have helped them advance in their careers and how theyve avoided sacrificing their own happiness in the process. Ive learned strategies that have worked wonderfully, and I also found some approaches that absolutely didnt work, even though I hoped they would.

Through my research I learned thousands of tips and techniques and work style changes that could help, and I tried most of them myself, including everything I recommend in this book. And although many of those were extremely helpful, I mostly learned that building the life and career you really want is more about changing your overall approach, and the way that you value yourself, than it is about, say, learning a new time-management technique.

If youre like most people these days, youre struggling with too many things to do, read, watch, and listen to. Career Self-Care is meant to help, not add to the pressure. The chapters in this book can be read individually and in any order. Feel free to page through, find a topic or a chapter that appeals to you, and start there. Work your way forward or backward, or jump around if you like. Youll get just as much out of it in any order, so go ahead and start with if it makes you happy (which it might, since that chapter is all about happiness).

And please take the same approach with the insights and practical advice in this book. From spending one day a week doing no work whatsoever to starting conversations with strangers, Im about to make a bunch of suggestions, some of which may seem ridiculous or impossible or irrelevant to you. Others may hit you between the eyes and make you think, Huh. I wonder if that really would make a difference? At least, thats how I tend to respond to career or life advice that resonates for me.