Richard Maun - Riding the Rocket: How to Manage Your Modern Career

In Praise of Riding the Rocket

This book lives up to its title and gives you answers that really help you!

Riding the Rocket: How to Manage your Modern Career has been written to be used and provides us with useful thoughts and insights about being a success, changing careers and looking after ourselves at work.

The chapter about using our intuition to choose a job that we are well suited for was really inspiring. A novel and useful way of helping us to decide on a career path! We can also make a positive choice to learn from our past, be in charge and make our modern career what we want it to be. A great book!

Angela Farmer, General Manager, Guys Dental Hospital

This is a great book for anyone who is working no matter what stage of your career you might be at. Packed full of practical advice, top tips and some truly hands-on life lessons, Riding the Rocket is an insightful read.

I particularly love Richards Antidotes he has converted me from a life-long Ignorer to a Chooser.

Anna Stevenson, Director, Stevenson Consulting

Sometimes it takes a major life event to make you stop and think; is this really what life and work are all about? Riding the Rocket is a book that not only helps you take stock of who you are and what you have achieved, but helps guide you on your future path and frame some choices at your own pace.

To make the best use of this book, make yourself a delicious cheese sandwich (Richard does mention sandwiches), sit down and work through the exercises and see where your own rocket ride takes you. Life is often not easy and with this book in our pocket, we can make it much easier for ourselves.

Erin Weston, Human Resources and Occupational Health and Safety Coordinator, Brophy Family and Youth Services, Warrnambool, Australia

Riding the Rocket brings together a valuable and potent mix of intuition, evidence and experienced views to help you on your rocket probably more than any of us, either individually or with a group of well-meaning friends, can pull together.

Richard has included useful tools and thought-provoking exercises that you can use for your rocket. Reading this book is like having a lovely coaching session you just need to add you to the mix. Good luck!

Andie Hallihan, Director, Applied Angle

Richards Riding the Rocket holds a full cargo of instruments, tools and techniques to help us actively manage our career. Trajectories dont necessarily go straight up in a predictable pattern and his skilfully crafted work helps to align, direct and manage our career in a path of our choosing and its good to know that we do have some choice, no matter how off course our flight pattern might feel at times!

An enjoyable read with lots of practical tools, to create an enjoyable future!

Helen Fisher, Business Consultant

We all know that we are in times of constant change, so our ability to manage this change and make good career decisions is essential. This book hits the mark and is a valuable addition to the series. Looking after our career engine and ensuring we keep powering along will reap benefits for all.

The toolkit and companion e-book (Building the Rocket) are both excellent and full of practical tips.

Kevin Bennett, Director, KB Business Solutions Pty Ltd, Australia

Copyright 2013 Richard Maun

Cover design by Cover Kitchen

Artwork supplied by Rebecca Maun, www.richardmaun.com

Published in 2013 by Marshall Cavendish Business

An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196

www.marshallcavendish.com/genref

Other Marshall Cavendish offices: Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown, NY 10591 Marshall Cavendish International [Thailand] Co Ltd. 253 Asoke, 12th Flr, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand Marshall Cavendish [Malaysia] Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia

Marshall Cavendish is a trademark of Times Publishing Limited

The right of Richard Maun to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the publisher.

The author and publisher have used their best efforts in preparing this book and disclaim liability arising directly and indirectly from the use and application of this book.

All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain necessary copyright permissions. Any omissions or errors are unintentional and will, if brought to the attention of the publisher, be corrected in future printings.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN : 978 981 4484 83 1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

DISCLAIMER

Please note: This book is full of real life examples and stories. However, personal details have all been changed to preserve anonymity, so if you think you know whom I was writing about you are mistaken. It was someone else completely, from a different place and a different time, riding a different rocket.

For Steve and Graham

For their support and generosity.

We live in the age of the modern career, where we have to fend for ourselves and be proactive to ensure we have a happy, successful and rewarding life. We do this by riding the rocket through the arc of our career, from our first working day to our last. Our rocket transports us through space and time and we decide how high to fly, how fast we travel and where we go were in control.

This book is intended to support us on our journey and to provide essential insights and tools to enable us to keep safe, make good decisions and create opportunities for development and career change.

Please read the detailed contents and ask yourself:

How can I use this book to help me make progress?

What aspect of my career needs attention?

Which item do I need to read now?

Forget what you know about careers, because the traditional career ladder approach of steady increments and long service is rapidly being consigned to history. In its place we have the modern career a composite of roles and industries, contracts, self-employment, consultancy, changes, risks and rewards. We need to be proactive, take responsibility for our own training and development, be aware of our strengths and how we respond under pressure and plan ahead for the future. A modern career means having a modern attitude and to achieve that we need to remember:

We have one key task riding the rocket.

A career is the span of our working lives and by riding the rocket we take responsibility for the speed, height, course and destination of our career. We need to tighten the straps of our seat in the nose cone, calibrate the gauges, take a firm hold of the control column, fire up the engines and throttle up. Its not always going to be a smooth ride and it may be scary at times, yet riding the rocket and being in control is both exhilarating and rewarding and essential.