Hello! I’m Carol O’Dell, and I’m planning on having multiple encores in my life (I like the sound of that). I married at 18, was a stay-at-home mom for close to 20 years, but even then, I always had multiple fingers in multiple pies. I was a chidren’s minister at church (vounteer, but a lot of work), piano teacher, and watched other people’s children—all to contribute to the family income. Then, I started a private school for home school students—to give them social experience, science labs, SAT prep, and prepare them for life.

 My story began in 1961 flying for TWA, we wore hats, gloves

and spoke a second language.  Then I worked for  ABC-TV in NYC,

Four years later I married and have two grown sons.

During my time as a devoted mother I volunteered for my

community, bred and raised labrador retrievers, and worked

for TWA recruiting flight attendants.

My hobbies are reading, gardening (orchids are my passion)

hiking, traveling (have been to India twice) learning new

languages (two weeks in Paris) and origami.

I have worked most of my career life as a construction project manager. who realized even though this provided for my material needs, it did not satisfy my desire to work for a meaningful purpose.

Within the last two years I have broke off my full time employment and am now working on two new careers, one as a writer and one as a real estate investor.

My writing allows me to pursue my lifelong love of presenting ideas and giving a voice to issues needing help. This is mainly along environmental sustainability lines.

I am still working in the HR Consulting area but seriously thinking about my encore career(s).  The financial crisis has made it a little trickier but when the right opportunity presents itself or I find it, I’m ready to give it a try.

Encore careers should be similar to finding a new job, you don’t want to run away from the current one but instead you want to be pulled to the new one.  I still enjoy my job and the people I work with but it’s time to wind down the stress a little and feel that my efforts are more geared to helping others than a big corporation.