Career Secret 7: Stay in Control (and avoid George)

Up in the Air won a host of Oscars for its potrayal of corporate life in the 21^st Century.  George Clooney plays a corporate highway man, jetting around the US with the mission of “downsizing” companies.

The “downsized” employees react with shock, horror and helplessness.

In the 21^st Century world of work, there is no such thing as a job for life.  Assuming that having a job gives you security is a dangerous thing to do.  It can lead to complacency and shutting off great opportunities.

The truth is you always have many choices about how to make a living. You could take full-time employment in various sectors (corporate, government, non-profit, academia),  contract, free-lance, be an entrepreneur, volunteer, sit on a board, and sell homemade handicrafts at fairs.

To avoid George Clooney arriving at your office and giving you that speech, it pays to make sure you stay in control of your career and keep making choices.

You can stay in control:

By regularly taking time to set and check in with your career vision and goals, you can have a plan that looks beyond your current work.

By keeping up your skills and developing new transferable ones – you will open more options for the future.

Through professional networking  and building out your contacts  - you can lay the foundations for the next steps of the career journey.

In the 21^st Century nothing is certain, except that you always have a choice.

Secret 8: Set your career vision

What's your career vision?

There was a recent story about a man who bought a boat in London and wanted to sail it back to his home in the South West of England.  He didn’t have a map or any navigation system.  He assumed that if he set off and kept the land to his right, he’d get there eventually.  He ended up sailing three times around the Isle of Sheepey in the River Thames before running out of fuel and giving up.

He had no vision, no plan, no map and no compass.  He didn’t think ahead.

Without a career vision and a clear plan, our careers can end up going round and round in circles.

Setting a vision is about creating the long term direction for your 21^st Century Career.  A vision is like your guiding star in the sky – it tell us the general direction we need to head in over time.  It also helps you make important short term choices.

Career visions should be big, juicy, motivating and challenging.  They should stretch you and light a fire in you every time you think about them.

Some examples of career visions might be:

• To become known as one of the world’s best project managers, work with top organisations to help them successfully complete projects and also lecture and write about the subject
• To become a chief technology officer helping innovative companies to develop technology that can create a sustainable future for the planet
• To lead a non-profit that campaigns for the equality of employment rights for everyone and changes the face of the modern workforce
• To build a company that bakes the tastiest cupcakes in the world and delights its customers with the coolest branding in the marketplace
• To have a successful and lucrative career in finance that allows my to be financially independent by 40

Creating a career vision requires thought and time.  You’ll need to ask yourself some serious questions about what work means to you and what you want to get out of it.

You’ll need to look into the future and visualise how you’d like your life to look in 10 or 20 years time – how will you use your time and talent.

As you develop answers, they’ll need to feel authentic and in tune with your values.

Most importantly, the vision has to be something that is exciting.  It will need to get you out of bed on a cold Monday morning at 5am, get you through the late night with the boss breathing down your neck, get you through the month with no sales.

Secret 9: Write your career story every day

Write your career story

In the 21^st Century, you write your career story every day.  You are a walking resume.

Every action you take and every choice you make at work adds to your professional experience and skills. Future career success is determined by what you do every day.

This point is reinforced by Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin:

“I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not. . . . Average job length is two to four years. That makes you a small business. . . . You are the entrepreneur of your own small business. How do you get to your next gig? How do you do your career progression? All these things now fall on the individual shoulders.”

This new career paradigm requires more flexibility, the ability to change course quickly and take new opportunities as they arise.

To do this there are two key elements:

1)   Develop transferable skills

Transferable skills are the skills that are needed to be successful in almost any work. They include turning up on time, communicating effectively, learning to influence others, writing persuasively, delegating, managing others, creating a vision for a project and many others.

Being able to demostrate these skills is the key to jumping into the next exciting role in a career journey.

Being able to execute these skills will allow you to be successful in that role.

You can deliberately plan to develop these skills and this will help you to write your work story.

2)   Write your work story

Our work story is the combination of all our career experiences. We summarize these and create a narrative that tells the world who we are – often through a CV and in an interview.

Our work story tells the reader or listener about the trajectory of our career – it explains why all our experiences to date make us the right employee, consultant, freelancer for the job.  The story demonstrates our key skills through a series of successful experiences using those skills.

Remembering that you are writing your career story every day can help to make good choices that expand our skill base, create another great example of success and develop the stream of our career narrative.

Secret 10: Collect People

“No man is an Island”  John Donne

Who are you connected to?

If you’re planning to become a holy person, live in a cave and commune with god, you can skip this secret.

For those of us who measure success on this temporal plane, everything we do relies on other people for success. People hire us, work for us, work with us, buy from us, sell to us, inspire us, collaborate with us,  recommend us, connect us.

More than 50% of all new jobs come through networking and informal connections rather than direct advertising.

Most 21^st Century entrepreneurs use affiliate marketing and collaborations to build businesses that transcend their size as one man operations.

Getting a project done can become much easier if we can call on the right people to help think it through and make things happen.

Even more important is that our networks have networks too. If you have a network of 100 people, who each have networks of 100 people, you are connected to 10,000 people.  That is a lot of people to help you succeed in your career journey.

Collecting the right people is a key to career success.

For this reason, we should become people collectors and develop a network of great people.  So what makes a good network?

A good network needs a wide variety of different people who can fill different roles.  In my case, I think about people who are supporters (they energize me), inspirers (they help me create new ideas), advocates (people who actively champion me), connectors (those who have great networks and are prepared to share), mentors (wise folks who have trodden my path and can guide me).

The key in filling out your network is to fill it with people you like and have a natural affinity and connection with.  If you’ve ever tried to build a relationship with someone you don’t get on with, you’ll know that this seldom seems to work.

I think of a personal network a bit like an archery board.  As the level of intimacy and frequency of connection with a person decreases, you tend to have more of those people in your network.  You may only have 1 or 2 people in your absolute trusted inner circle who you speak with almost every day.  Yet you may have a broad network of hundreds of great people who you are Linked In to, and maybe connect only every couple of years.

In the 21^st Century we can use technology to keep track of our networks. We can use social networks (and Linked In is great).  We have the tools to connect with and meet anyone across the globe – we can email, IM, Skype, video conference and telephone.

The only limit to building a 21^st Century network is your imagination in what is possible.  So get collecting and reap the benefits.

Photo credit: Kennymatic, Vestman, Ali Brohl

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Has this ever happened to you? You had an unfocused, unproductive week at work and you couldn’t understand why!

That’s what happened to me last week. I thought I had everything in place – a 3-year business vision, annual goals, monthly revenue projections, a marketing strategy, monthly goals, daily and weekly action steps, two accountability calls with my business partner Phil…Yet I still couldn’t get out of my own way. I couldn’t manage to sit down and accomplish much. My attention wandered, I was distracted by email, doing laundry and waiting for the next post to pop up on Facebook. I was having trouble sleeping and was exhausted most of the day.

What was up? What kind of coach and role model was I being? I followed all the rules, implemented all the systems for success and still nothing could break me out of my unproductive funk.

Disturbed, I pulled out my journal and began to write down any thought that came into my head. Surprisingly, not many of them were work related.Here’s what came out on the page – I’ve been struggling with the chronic illness of a family member, worried about my husband and concerned how much longer he can endure working at his unfulfilling job while managing a job search in this economy, feeling guilty because I’ve been busy and out of touch with friend and family, worried about money, and frustrated that I haven’t finished my home office renovations yet.

My guess is a few of these ring true for you as well. So many of us push through the daily tasks of our work telling ourselves that we’ll get to our personal lives later, when we’re done with work. Yet work never quite seems to end and later keeps getting pushed off. And if you’re like me, when I don’t take time to focus on my personal life, honor what’s important to me and process my emotions, I feel like I’m on shaky ground, carrying a bag of rocks around with me through dense fog. And boy does it wipe me out trying to work while I’m carrying those rocks through the fog! Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our personal life is with us during our workday. The unresolved issues and unprocessed emotions take space in your brain; they mentally (and physically) wear you out and keep you from doing your best work.

As I’ve moved through my career, I’ve noticed my tolerance for pushing off my personal life has decreased as the impact it has on my professional success increases. I now see self-care as a top priority not only in having a high quality of life but also in my career success. If I don’t have the solid foundation of my personal life, no matter how hard I try, I cannot be fully present and successful in running my business.

So when it hit me last week that life was getting in the way of business, I took swift action. I made time for some self-care, I got in touch with friends and family, I talked to my coach, did some financial planning and finally got my home office together.

The energy shift was amazing! Not only do I feel good about the attention I paid to my personal life but in less than a week’s time, I’ve gotten many tasks off the work to-do list and several doors have opened to exciting and unexpected opportunities.

I am taking away a powerful lesson from this experience; a critical key to career success is making your personal life a priority. Taking time to care for yourself, process your emotions and nourish your relationships not only frees you from carrying that bag of rocks through fog, it also is a vital source of energy to accomplish nothing less than the extraordinary in your business and career!

What’s standing the way of your career success? What needs handling in your personal life? What support do you need to move forward?

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