Project 52: Week 49

Our opening reflection, meditation, and quieting moment...

The real art in learning takes place as we move beyond proficiency, when our work becomes an expression of our essence.

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.

It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.?Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

~ Josh Waitzkin

"The poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order."

"If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation because love exists only among equals."

“To be converted is to know and experience the fact that, contrary to the laws of physics, we can stand straight, according to the Gospel, only when our center of gravity is outside ourselves.”

~ Gustavo Gutiérrez-Merino Díaz OP was a Peruvian philosopher, Catholic theologian, and one of the founders of liberation theology.

We are delighted to continue with a year-long offering as part of our Career Services initiatives. ~ Gerald Doyle.

Project 52: Week 49

WELCOME An invitation to LinkedIn

In our work with students, alums, and friends of various secondary schools, colleges, universities, and community organizations, we regularly invite our participants to be represented and active in their interest level on the LinkedIn social media network.

Understanding that the overuse or misuse of social media can sometimes lead to adverse outcomes, we have found that responsible and principled use of LinkedIn can be of great value to our participants as they develop their careers in ministry strands -- within and according to the Gospel, the Koran, the Torah, or your specific faith tradition.

For those unfamiliar, LinkedIn offers an opportunity to its members to post a profile similar and in many ways superior to an online resume or curriculum vitae (CV), to connect with and follow other members, to post content and read, share, like and comment posted by others, and to become a member of a wide range of interest groups. A basic membership is free, and we have found that most participants get great value from the free service and need not pay for enhanced features.

Why do we suggest participating?

• LinkedIn claims that, at this writing, 950 million members are in 200 countries worldwide. We have found that a considerable percentage of the contacts our participants want to establish for career exploration and development are represented on LinkedIn. Our participants can join that massive community at will.
• The LinkedIn profile is rapidly coming to compete with or replace a conventional resume or CV.? Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date LinkedIn profile means your virtual CV is accessible to all potential network contacts in LinkedIn’s community.
• Your LinkedIn profile invites you to crystallize your sense of inspiration and career in ministry vision for others. This benefits the participants by allowing them to take the time and effort to crystallize an elegant expression of these critical elements of the Tri Cosain journey. Once this is done, the results of that effort are instantly available to millions of potential network contacts worldwide.
• The LinkedIn profile, along with the CV or resume and such other elements as an email signature (see related articles in this series), offers a beautiful way to articulate what the participant has to offer in the worlds of work and life: a person’s “brand” in the best sense of that word. It is possible to articulate inspiration, vision, and career aspirations and share the participant’s skills, capacities, and experience in many forms. These personal offerings can be recorded as aspirations, work experience, life experience, educational experience, extracurricular, voluntary, pro bono activities, diplomas, degrees and certifications, publications, hobbies, and interests.? Using LinkedIn can be a crucial element in a participant’s personal “marketing,” again in the best sense of that word.
• LinkedIn is a great place to search for potential network contacts, role models, and thought leaders.? Many such people, we sense, have the vast majority of potential connections represented there. It is, therefore, possible in one place to freely follow such people, read their profiles that capture the elements described above, read and follow the material they post, and observe others with whom they are connected.
• A considerable amount of content is published on LinkedIn, and many people in professional fields use it to share ideas and insights. Active following and researching on LinkedIn can thus become a vital part of a participant’s learning journey and career in ministry. LinkedIn algorithms will serve up material that appears interesting to you as a member based on your connections, following, and past research interests. Content can also be searched using hashtags, which many participants use to signpost areas of interest in their posted content.
• For people you know, have met, or with whom you can demonstrate a reasonable connection (often only a legitimate interest in their work is needed), requesting a direct connection on LinkedIn is possible. Connection invitations need to be accepted by the counterparty and dispatched respectfully and with discretion, but connection invitations for legitimate reasons are often accepted. Once established, a connection allows you to exchange messages directly with the connection. Many people have found that a LinkedIn message receives more attention than an email.
• For participants with ideas or experiences to share, LinkedIn can be a great place to post their content. LinkedIn can be a place to celebrate good news, share ideas or insights, and honor or recognize others. Content can be shared as a post - usually a shorter, timebound entry - or an article - usually more prolonged and persistent. Using hashtags can draw the attention of others interested in a topic to a participant’s posting. A participant’s postings remain part of their LinkedIn presence indefinitely unless deleted by the participant.? Posting content and sharing, liking, or commenting on the content of others can be a great way of building one’s own “brand.”
• LinkedIn is free and available to people of any level of experience over 13. With a few exceptions, we encourage our participants and those at any stage of their career journey to be present on LinkedIn. Some participants feel shy about getting started, but we find that even a brief profile is a significant advantage to the participant. Once begun, the benefits mentioned above quickly unfold, and the profile can proliferate with education and experience in life and work. Participants can start with the network of their friends, relatives, schoolmates, and colleagues in any activity. Most people are surprised at how comprehensive their networks are when they reflect on this question and the benefits of recognizing and noticing the things happening among even a beginning list of network partners.
• LinkedIn can be a context for recommendations and endorsements. You can offer to recommend and endorse your initial contacts and request those references in return. The recommendations you provide and receive will be publicly visible to others in the LinkedIn network so that both your offered and received become part of your “brand.”.
• In addition to hashtags to follow, LinkedIn offers many groups with a wide range of interests and terms of reference. Many groups can be joined freely based on expressed interest alone. LinkedIn groups can be a great way to identify others interested in the same themes as you, begin to follow them, ask questions, and establish a dialogue that may lead to deeper connections and Conversations of Inquiry (see related article).
• Some of our participants begin by believing LinkedIn is not a fruitful arena for people with faith-based or non-profit interests or the work of organizations with a social rather than an entrepreneurial or profit-oriented mission. We have found the opposite to be the case, and we encourage exploration on this basis with almost all our participants.

We offer additional ideas about using Linkedin in other articles in this series.

As ever, I'm available to support you, your friends, and members of communities that matter to you (your educational institutions, your favorite clubs/organizations, faith-based groups, and others) in exploring the use of LinkedIn and other tools for learning, network-building, and self-expression within the Tri Cosain career roadmaps.

Monday, 28 October 2024

Gerald Doyle, Career Services

Additional Resources:

"Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life. Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin. Years pass in boredom, but that is okay because when our true love comes around, or we discover our real calling, we will begin. Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present to the moment, our true love could come and go and we wouldn’t even notice. And we will have become someone other than the you or I who would be able to embrace it. I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday—the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness—is where success, let alone happiness, emerges…" ~Josh Waitzkin

Residing in Chicago, Gerald Doyle provides ministry placement research and consulting for Career Services at the Catholic Theological Union and career services and coaching to students, families, and community members at Wolcott College Preparatory High School. He advises several edtech companies, including Upkey and GetSet Learning, and serves as the Interim Chief Administrative Officer at the US-China Catholic Association and as president of the board at Syrian Community Network

Scott? Downs, a former investment banker, management consultant, and entrepreneur, now works as an Agile coach, seeking to call forward great leaders and organizations based on great cultures. He is a consultant with Expleo Group and is an associate of the TrustTemenos Leadership Academy.

Scott and Gerald are co-founders of Tri Cosain, a practice that weaves inspiration, learning, and career for leadership in life and work. Gerald and Scott co-authored 9 Questions for Leadership in Life and Work, Conversations of Inquiry, and several other volumes in the Tri Cosain series. Their work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity, and well-being as foundations for personal leadership.

Copyright Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle 2023-25