As I’ve talked about before, some of the key “perspectives” you need to adopt in an Encore Career are growth mindset, own your expertise, be an apprentice, develop your value proposition, and balance your human skills with your technical expertise. 

These are the things that will help you build a strong foundation for an Encore Career. However, these aren’t perspectives you can just wake up one day and possess. There are certain ideas and activities you must take to develop them. 

On Creating Your Encore Career, I discussed my top five of these ideas and activities to start building your foundation.

1. Get coaching 

Coaching is helpful both for developing your mindset and developing new skills. Even I, as an Executive Coach, understand the need for coaching myself. Coaching helps us through every process we go through in our Encore Career.

2. Join a Mastermind or other peer group

Just like coaching, peer groups help you develop your mindset and develop new skills. In this case, however, you are developing in this way with peers who are on a similar journey to you. In these peer groups, you get to hear others’ mindsets, thought processes, and the issues they're coming up with. It is a great learning opportunity that could maybe be even more useful than having an individual coach.

3. Join communities

Some examples are:

1. LinkedIn

2. Open Coffee

3. EICC coaches

4. Go to conferences

Some examples of good conferences you may want to attend (depending on your industry) are:

1. Permission to Prosper

2. Copywriting 

3. EntreFest

4. Influence and Impact

5. Speaker Training

6. EICC

7. Book Writing

5. Outsource work

How do you know when to outsource work? I recommend doing so when:

1. It’s work that’s outside your expertise

2. You own a solo business and don’t want to be overwhelmed by your business

3. You’re willing to pay some money to make more money

4. You want to expand your Impact

I have applied all of these things in my own professional life and have found them to be incredible tools. I encourage you to start applying them as well and begin building your strong foundation today.