Jeff Garton MS, CPCC
Jeff Garton Quick Facts
Main Areas:Inner Work Life Skills Training and Coaching for Employment and Career.Best Sellers:Career Contentment: Don't Settle for Anything Less
Career Focus:Mental Fitness for Increased Productivity, Wellbeing, and Retention
Affiliation:ATD, SHRM, IDES, Vetpower.org
Jeff Garton is a bestselling career author for the Association for Talent Development (ATD) , a co-author with Dr. Warren Bennis, master certified career coach, training provider, and national speaker whose background is specialized in leading the global staffing for Kraft Foods and the Miller Brewing Company. He is a graduate of the University of New Mexico and Glenville State College in West Virginia. He resides in Milwaukee, WI with his wife Heli and has three children and one grandchild. Jeff developed the concept and published the first books and training programs that teach people how to strengthen their mental fitness and inner work life skills for employment success and career contentment despite challenges posed by a difficult job market and dissatisfying work conditions. His efforts to help the jobless, transitioning veterans, and disgruntled workers have been featured on Fox and Friends, ABC Sunday Morning, NPR Radio, Voice America Radio, the Wall Street Journal, Modern Medicine, Medical Economics, Chief Executive Magazine, Chief Learning Officer Magazine, and on Military.com. His company, Career Contentment Inc. distributes online inner work life training from Likeable4Jobs.com, and licenses this training for use by employers, state workforce organizations, non-profits, and academic institutions.
Other Programs & Highlights
I invite you to preview our training on Likeable4Jobs.com. Click the "Courses" tab to see the curriculum. Once inside, several of the lessons are free to access.
Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Jeff Garton
About Career Contentment:My career is specialized in Staffing and Human Resources with the old Philip Morris family of companies, specifically Kraft Foods and the Miller Brewing Company. We took great pride in our Fortune 50 rankings for best places to work. But despite our attractive facilities, good salaries, and fantastic benefits, our employees were never completely satisfied. My HR colleagues used to joke that job dissatisfaction was the basis of our job security.
It wasn't until one year after I left the corporate world, and was able to clear my head of all the brainwashing about the importance of job satisfaction, that I finally had these two revelations that became the genesis of Career Contentment Theory:
- What keeps people in their jobs and productive despite their perennial lack of satisfaction is their ability to self-motivate with the emotion of contentment related to career.
- What causes people to leave good jobs despite efforts to retain them by making them satisfied is their ability to self-motivate with the emotion of discontentment.
What make career contentment significant are two psychological facts the business world overlooks because they don't jive with our love affair with traditional job satisfaction:
- People are directly self-motivated from within by emotions created by how they think.
- People are not directly motivated from the outside by employers investing to make them satisfied or engaged. That's because neither satisfaction nor engagement are emotions. They're not created from within but are conditional on employers budgeting for their implementation.
These revelations help us understand why employees continue to complain and quit after investing to make them satisfied and engaged. Not only are satisfaction and engagement not emotions, employees realize that an employer's traditional satisfactions are transient and unreliable. Employers control jobs and the means to satisfy while employees have exclusive control over what they think to create and self-motivate with any emotion they choose. Or as Chris Peterson puts it, the co-founder of positive psychology, "Career contentment trumps traditional job satisfaction."
About Likeability:This topic is equally important to career contentment, but its significance to job seekers has been marginalized by people who provide traditional job readiness training. For example, the jobless are repeatedly taught the mechanics of how to look for jobs, but which only qualifies them for consideration. That basic training helps gets your foot in the employer's door, but it's the wrong training to qualify you for hire. The streets are flooded with expert job seekers who are still jobless or have dropped out of the workforce.
Contrary to popular thinking, employers don't hire people for their packaging and skills to look for jobs, but for their inner work life skills - their attitude to fit with the existing team and their inner work life skills to perform well despite challenges that employers can't always make satisfying.
Likeability training is all about strengthening mental fitness for improved attitude, performance, and likeable impressions. If employers don't like you, they have no obligation to hire you, and your waxed-on image and updated employment tools won't get you the job. And if you've never learned how to increase your likeability, this can prolong your unemployment for months. That's because employers don't tell you why you're unlikeable. To avoid potential law suits, they simply say they found someone better qualified. That's what we're changing - one trainee at a time.
Learn all about it here: http://www.Likeable4Jobs.com.
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