When these things happen, that are largely out of our individual control, its easy to stress out, get down, lose faith, and complain a lot. You could do any or all of those.

Or you could look for opportunity.

Call me crazy, but I think times like these are among the best times for you to have the greatest impact on your career. All thats required is equanimity, attention, and a few tools. What follows are my reasons why these are good times for your own personal career innovation, and what you can do about it.

Leeway, Openness to Ideas, Accessibility – why now is a good time for some career innovation

In bad times, there is often more leeway given for people to talk about the bad times. Granted this is not always true, but generally people are given the chance to talk with their managers, with their peers, or in organizational meetings. Take this as an opportunity for reflection on what you really want from your career. You have more freedom now to be bold, go for your ideals, and explore things you’ve always wanted to explore.

Often, executives, managers, decision-makers and “people in charge” of your destiny are a lot more accessible and physically present. Depends on the company, but generally they feel bad about the bad news, and unless they work for AIG, they really care about what happens to the company and its people – you. They are therefore more approachable, and open to meeting.

The decision makers are likely grasping for ideas and solutions themselves, thus they are more open to new ideas, or a fresh approach that may help them solve their problems.

Given that the chess board is laid out this way, now set your game plan, and execute.

Career Innovation Map

Map out, literally, what you want and all your current options for getting there. I’m a huge advocate for mindmapping to graphically represent complex sets of interactions and get some clarity. Doesn’t matter if you use Mindomo, Freemind, Mindmeister, or paper and pen. Take a quick look at this demo of mindmapping then do one with yourself as the central theme. The idea here is to map out all the potential career scenarios that could come your way. Its also a place to document areas in each scenario for you to have impact. This is a career wish-list of sorts, so be bold. Put you in the middle of the map, and each branch is a potential scenario for where you could take your career. This is an exercise in being expansive and innovative in thinking about your professional life. In my experience you end up with a lot more options than you thought you had. Plus, you can more easily identify the logical steps necessary to carry out each option. Now you’ll be ready to act no matter what ends up happening.

Update your personal brand

If you’re not sure what I mean by ‘personal brand’, do yourself a favor and check these guys out. Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Schwabel, and Seth Godin. They all understand the direct impact of what you say and do, on you. Even better they clearly lay out options for actions you can take now.

If you don’t have time to go to each of their sites now (be sure and do it later) and flip through this slideshare by Dan Schwabel. Even a cursory run through will paint a picture for you of what personal branding is and what you can start to do about it.

| View | Upload your own

Personal brand is something you are always impacting whether you’re aware of it or not. Now is your chance to be more intentional and more visible. Here’s some tools to help.

VisualCV: this site allows you to have a media rich resume online for free. VisualCV is indexed by Google (therefore findable), and easily shareable via a unique URL, like this Visualcv.com/joshuakahn
Some other nice features are that you can display your work visually, with links, and images. You can also share your VisualCV via URLs, direct email, and can track how many have seen your ‘public’ CV. The site also allows you view/save your resume in PDF form with one click. Emurse.com is another popular option with similar features. Zolio is on the scene now in beta but is still building features.

LinkedIN, Facebook: I’m always amazed at how many LinkedIN profiles I see that are woefully incomplete. Look through some of these articles on getting the most out of LinkedIN and follow the advice there. In short, get your profile to 100%, link any of your sites there, display your email and be open to networking.

Twitter: There probably not a more central tool for getting out a message. The beauty of Twitter is that you can use it to communicate to people in Twitter and outside of Twitter. Most social networks have a “status update” or allow you to display an RSS feed to your connections in that network. This allows you to use Twitter to communicate to all your networks at once. If you really want to get funky with this “write once, post everywhere” theme, check out ping.fm.

Social Networks in general: If you’re like me, you probably have a long list of social networks that at one point or another you’ve checked out. You might be more or less active in these, but I would encourage you to go to each one and make your profiles and pictures consistent across all of them. In each one, where you can, include the links to your LinkedIN profile, Twitter handle, or other sites of yours. You don’t have to be real active in each of these places, but you can still automatically push your communications into each area.

Execute your plan

Now that you have your scenarios and career wishlist mapped, and your personal brand content and communication structure set up, take some action.

Remember how those “people in charge” are more accessible now? When an executive says, “if you have any questions or concerns about the current situation, my door is open” that’s your cue. Set meetings with those directly responsible or even dotted line responsible for your career. Bring your career innovation plan. Present it as, “in case you were wondering what to do with me”.  Be honest, be bold, tell them what you could do to help, ask for what you want.

Best case: they take your ideas, note your initiative, and your risk pays off. You get what you want, or something close to it. Bottom line, you’ve had an impact on the direction of your career.

Worst case: they are restricted by circumstances and can’t help you directly.  However, you have a hopefully honest assessment of your place in the organization currently from someone you may not generally have access to, and you are now perfectly prepared for investigating opportunity elsewhere.