Who is in Control of Your Career?
Part one of a two part post about your career.
There is only one correct answer to the title question about and it is of course: ‘you’.
Sure, there may be a number of external factors beyond your direct control that will influence your career journey, including the business cycle, management whim, the performance of your employer or the behaviours of others.
However, while these can certainly interrupt or alter your planned path, initially they are only a stimulus that you can choose to respond to and act upon. If left unacted upon, such stimulus can have too great an influence over your future.
The key is that you have a choice to intervene and regain control of your destiny by doing three things.
1. Acknowledge the emotional impact.
There will be some initial emotional response to the stimulus. For example, your role is made redundant. If you take pride in your work it is natural, just for an instant, to be aggrieved – despite your circumstances not being a reflection of your performance. The risk is that you are consumed by the negativity of redundancy (unless you planned it!). So it is important to acknowledge your feelings, but don’t dwell on them.
2. Assess the short, medium and long term implications.
Again, when our plans are derailed, there is a risk we focus on the immediate impacts and don’t consider the medium to longer term implications – which may turn out to be positive. You should determine what does this change mean for you beyond tomorrow. What opportunities now exist?
3. Engage a third party to support your thinking.
I can talk to two personal experiences when in in my career I was on the verge of a shift but I failed to engage a third party to support my thinking and so resisted that shift.
The problem with not engaging a third party for support is that you will naturally use your existing paradigms that were relevant to the ‘pre-change’ state to rationalise and make sense of the 'new state'.
This inherent bias is the very reason why we resist change – it is not the same as the past. By engaging a third party, such as a career coach, you can bypass the ‘old-self’ circuitry – which may no longer serve your purpose and consider the change from a perspective that will be more objective.
When there is a shift in your career path, you must control your response with objectivity, a long-term view and with support. This will ensure you properly consider your next move. In Part 2, I’ll share six actions to help you take the right action.
Craig Stephens is a performance coach who challenges and supports professionals, teams and business owners to achieve high performance. Find out more about Craig here. To see what his clients say about Craig, click here.
Craig is the author of Learning Dangerously – you can find out more about learning dangerously here.