Your work has a huge impact on your quality of life and personal happiness. Answering the 14 questions below will help you reflect your work and where you are in your career journey, and what to do next.
Please rate each statement according to your level of agreement (1 = never agree, 5 = always agree)
1. The work I do reflects my most important values.
2. I really look forward to Monday mornings.
3. I have lots of upward mobility in my current role.
4. My job is helping me to develop the skills I need for career growth.
5. I’d be delighted to be working in the same role and company in 5 years time.
6. I never complain about my work to other people.
7. I can balance work success with achieving significant personal goals.
8. My job lets me use my personal strengths.
9. My career is exciting and energizing.
10. I am recognized and rewarded for the work that I do.
11. I love the culture that I work in and it allows me to thrive.
12. I have a clear vision for career success and am actively working to achieve my goals.
13. I have the right career support (mentors, advisors, network) in place to allow me to thrive.
14. I feel like my work makes a significant difference to the world.
How is well is work working for you?
Now add up your ratings for each question. If you scored:
0 – 35:This probably isn’t news to you, but your work just isn’t working. Don’t despair. Now is a good time to revitalize your career journey. A good place to start is to go back to basics and do some career planning. It’s hard to be successful without having a clear definition of success.
35 – 55: Your work is ticking some boxes and there are other areas that need a tune-up. You may be able to address some of the challenges by shaking up your current role, or making a change in your current organization. However, it may take a more radical career shift to address some issues.
I’ve been meaning to write about procrastination for ages, but I never seem to get round to it…..
Procrastination is nothing to be ashamed of – almost everyone gets a bout from time to time. I realized it was time for me to get off Facebook and share some powerful ideas to help you kick time-wasting for good.
Beating procrastination can buy you more time, increase your sense of accomplishment and take away the frustration of feeling stuck.
Learning how to kick start work projects, do what really matters and sieze the day can have a huge impact on your happiness and success.
What is procrastination?
Psychologists define procrastination as something “counter-productive, needless and delaying” – and that is no fun at all.
We all have some great techniques for procrastinating – some of my personal favourites include:
“I’ll start doing that this afternoon / tomorrow / next week / next month…”
“I’ll just clean the house / bathe the dog / take out the recycling / check Facebook / cut my toenails first….”
“Every time I’m about to start, the phone rings / my boss comes by / I get an urgent email….”
What makes us come up with these fiendish avoidance tactics?
Check your Head
According to the Mind Gym, procrastination is typically driven by our deeper beliefs about the world. If we can identify the underlying assumptions and motivatiors, we can start to understand and beat our procrastination.
They suggest some common beliefs that lead to time-wasting:
Perfectionism – do you strive for absolute perfection in everything you do? Perfection is such a high bar to reach, this creates a huge amount of pressure to perform. Trying to write the perfect CV, create the ideal Powerpoint, have the perfect call with that customer is such a daunting task. It is easy to understand why starting such a task feels scary and is easy to put off.
Certainty – “Before I take my dream trip to Australia / start this project on marketing to pharmaceutical companies / go to that yoga class, I need to know all about it”. The need for certainty can push us to spend years in the research phase and never pull the trigger. We fear that unless we’re an expert, we’ll be exposed as a fraud, look stupid and everything will go wrong. So we never start.
Fear of failure – starting is the first step on the downward spiral to failure, public humiliation and destitution. The demonic spectre of failure has stopped many great ideas and projects in their tracks. This is probably the single largest cause of procrastination.
I’m not good enough – when we don’t believe we can do something, we’ll find every reason and excuse in the world not to do it. The most debilitating thought in the world is “there is no way I can do this”.
Next time you find yourself cleaning out the cellar or re-tweetig that latest fascinating post, take a second. What are you putting off and why?
Changing Minds
To beat procrastination, start by changing your thinking. Once you’ve identified what is behind your procrastination, try this approach:
Step 1 – Redefine your belief
Start to take the pressure off yourself by rephrasing your beliefs in a less harsh way:
“I must get a perfect result” becomes “I’d like a perfect result”
“I must know everything about this” becomes “It would be good to know everything about this’
“I’m terrified of failing” becomes “It would be better not to fail”
“I can’t do this” becomes “I’m not sure if I am ready for this”
Immediately, these beliefs become less imposing and less of a barrier to getting starting.
Step 2 – Create a safety net
Now to further crumble your belief. Add in a get-out clause that makes the belief even less daunting. For example:
“I’d like a perfect result but if I don’t get one it doesn’t matter.”
“It would be good to know everything about this but I already know enough to start and I’ll keep learning as I go along.”
These statements take away the terrible future consequences we’ve already imagined for the task. It is fine if we try our best and we don’t quite reach perfect. If we do fail, we may learn more than if we succeed.
Step 3 – Go for it
With the newly minted belief in place, it is time to launch in and get started! When I’ve used this technique, it often feels like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I always find that just taking action is the best way to beat procrastination
“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.” Johann von Goethe
Part 3 of the 15 Secrets to Career Success in the 21st Century.
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 21st 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 21st 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 21st Century nothing is certain, except that you always have a choice.
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 21st 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 21st 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 21st 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 21st 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 21st Century network is your imagination in what is possible. So get collecting and reap the benefits.
I have a friend, let’s call him Stan. Stan had been at the same employer for 12 years, in the marketing team. Whenever I met Stan, this is what I’d hear:
“Those b@st@rds don’t appreciate me, they work me so hard and I sweat blood for them. Every year, they give me a terrible performance review, no bonus and a rubbish payrise. They pass me over for promotion. It makes me sick, I just don’t care any more.”
Stan was notorious in his office for his legendary procrastination skills. He spent all day complaining to anyone who didn’t manage to avoid him.
His nickname was Levi, because he was always out the door at 5.01.
Stan had told me many times that he didn’t care and wasn’t prepared to work his fingers to the bone for no gratitude in return. He had given up.
When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, Stan’s employer let him go.
Stan was mystified, angry, indignant and talked about suing. Of course he didn’t.
No-one else at his office was surprised. They saw it coming a mile off.
Stan walked straight into Secret Number 1– you get out of work what you put in to work.
He was barely in the office and when he was he did nothing productive. He distracted other team members with his negative attitude. In return, Stan got poor performance reviews. In fact he’d been on three performance plans over his career.
He was passed over for promotion because he gave out the signals that he couldn’t care less.
However you make a living, your career will have ups and downs. There will be times when you are flat out and giving everything and calmer fallow periods. Learning to make this choice consciously and being aware that you will get back what you put is key to managing this flow.
Please, don’t be a Stan.
2. You have to take ownership of your career
Suited and booted
Picture me as a tender 21 year-old dressed in my three-piece pinstripe suit with natty pink shirt back in the mid-1990s.
I’m striding into my shiny corporate office for the first day of world domination.
I’d arrived – from now on my benevolent employers would shower me with money, support, training and appreciation.
All I had to do was show up and collect the daily kudos.
I deluded myself that it was in my firm’s interest to take care of me, promote me and sky-rocket my career for me. I barely put in any effort for the first year.
When it came to review time, I showed up expecting a pat on the head, a bone for being a good boy and a dazzling review.
My bubble popped. It seemed that I was somewhere below half-way down my peer group and my managers were questioning my attitude.
It slowly dawned on me that I and only I really cared at all about what happened in my career. It was my responsibility to set the direction, ask for the good projects, demand the training I needed, find the right mentor, look for ways to use my strengths and skills.
If I didn’t do it, these things simply wouldn’t happen.
You have to take ownership of your career – no-one is going to hand success and career satisfaction to you on a plate.
3. Everyone should learn how to make money independently
This lesson hit home to me the day I got my first cheque from a client after starting Less Ordinary Living.
Ten years of sucking at the corporate teat had brainwashed me into believing that the only way I could possibly make money was through steady employment.
Without a job I felt as vulnerable as a baby seal wandering through an Eskimo village. When I quit my job, I really did see myself “living in a van by the river” as Pam Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation eloquently puts it.
It took a week or two to start finding clients and in that period, I was close to running back to the corporate edifice and begging forgiveness. The prodigal son, on a rapid return visit.
Yet when the work started to come and I took that first cheque to the bank, something amazing happened. I felt liberated.
I actually managed to make some cash, under my own steam, without anyone else’s benevolence.
This feeling is not to be underestimated. It symbolises that you have the ability to fend for yourself. I almost felt primal – like a prehistoric man bringing back the first woolly mammoth to the cave.
I’d recommend that everyone tries making some money independently. Figure out something you are good and passionate about and find a way to make a little bit of money from it.
Sell a service (doing someone’s garden, being a handy man, helping someone write their CV, wallpapering, painting, anything really) or something you’ve made (at a local fair, on ebay, through a website you made).
Once you’ve done this, you’ll realise that having a job is not the only way – even if you never choose to freelance or be an entrepreneur, you’ll know more about how to make ends meet in the worse case scenario.
You’ll take away some of the doomsday fear of redundancy and see that you have more choices than you might appreciate for making a living in the 21st Century.
Children – our future and our past. We’ve all been a child, and many of us will also raise one.
As an adult, it’s easy to assume that this grown up, rational state we inhabit now is superior. Yet, spend any time with children and you remember that kids have a lot to teach us.
1. Have more fun
Spend any time hanging out with a 2 year old and you’ll realist that they like to have fun.
It’s joyful to paint all over the kitchen table, roll around laughing at the funny cow in a can noise thing, climb through a play tunnel for hours, hide behind the door and play peek-a-boo. In fact it’s a laugh riot.
Somewhere in the Laws of Adult, most of these games become verboten. We have to suppress our emotions, act stiff and try to protect our dignity. Sure we can laugh at other people, preferably behind their backs. However, good old fashioned innocent fun and play is banned.
I’ve spent a lot more time playing recently – just throwing out dumb word association games, dancing around singing into a hairbrush, a spot of tickling here and there. Try it out for yourself – fight back against the fun ban!
2. You are allowed to daydream
Grown ups rarely daydream. The adult world considers them to be naively hilarious and a sign of weakness. Here is what often happens when an adult shares their burning dream:
Person A: I’ve always dreamt of being a polar explorer and I think I’m going to go after it
Person B: Snigger. Good luck with that – send my love to the polar bears. See you back in the cube farm next week.
Dreaming is seen as childish and foolish. Wasting time going after doing what you really want when you could be getting on with your serious, boring adult life.
Children love to dream. They use their imagination and create amazing possibilities.
Dreaming is a healthy way of stretching ourselves. It gives us a roadmap for making the life we want. Reconnect to what makes you excited.
3. The world is infinitely fascinating
I was probably the world’s most annoying child. I fired out questions like a machine gun to anyone in range. “What’s that called?”, “How does that work?”, “Why did that person say that?”, “Where are my Christmas presents hidden?” etc. Children stare in wild-eyed wonder at the world and want to know all about it.
As adults we are told that we should be very clever and already understand everything. There is a stigma about asking too many questions – we might show our weakness, reveal some ignorance, people might think less of us. Horrors.
As we stop asking questions and getting stuck on the hamster wheel of life, the world around us can lose its sparkle and appear mundane. We take the amazing people and things around us for granted.
See what happens when you start to be more interested in the world around you and engage with it.
4. You can express your emotions
When a child is upset, you know about it. No wait, you KNOW about it. Same when they are happy, joyful, bored, angry, afraid. Bottling up emotions is simply not an option. When a child feels something, they tell the world.
The adult world teaches us that suppressing our emotions is important. We shouldn’t inflict our feelings on others. Better to keep them locked up and spend time brooding over them. Or suppress our natural joy over something in case we make a fool of ourselves. Frankly a lot of the time, this leads to unnecessary suffering when simply expressing ourselves would be the better option.
Learning to express our emotions effectively is important. I’ve really worked on understanding my feelings and being able to put them into words and actions. Letting them out into the world as they arise has taken a huge amount of weight off me and I feel lighter for it.
5. You should live in the moment
Children are born with very little conception of time. When you’re young, your only concern is what is happening right now at this very moment. The past is quickly forgotten, and the future is of no importance.
When children play, they are absolutely absorbed in the game. Just watch for a minute or two – eyes wide open, face alert and active, attention unwavering on what is unfolding. Kids are mini Zen-masters.
We are taught to analyze everything, to pore over the past for what we did wrong, and to constantly be setting out a better future for ourselves. How often do you really live in the moment as an adult? Try it and see how different the world looks.
Release your inner child
I know that I learn a huge amount when I let my inner child out to play.and try these things It keeps me open to learning, joy, curiosity, authenticity. I get back into living in the moment.
Over to you
How do you connect to you inner child? What do you learn from doing so? If you have children, what have they taught you? What would happen if you spent the day living like a child?
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