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Always be in the driver’s seat
Do you have a career plan that gets you excited and moves you forward? Or are you “heads down and working hard” hoping it will all work out? In the corporate 9–5 culture circles I swim in, most people want the same ideal.
We want to be paid well, work for a winning company that makes a difference, to leverage our strengths, and be surrounded by people that respectfully challenge us to grow and develop.
Obtaining that elusive ideal is figuring out what you do well, designing a career plan around it, and asking for the growth you need to make yourself marketable to the company that fits your ideals.
Neglecting to articulate career needs significantly reduces the probability of getting what you need. Someone else will make decisions for you.
There is no better time than the “Great Resignation” to dig deep to understand what you want.
There Are No Downsides to Writing a Career Plan
There is nothing more wondrous than having someone give you precisely what you want without having to ask. You know, heads down, hard work, and boom, you’re promoted into that perfect job. Oh, Why thank you! Another martini please.
Well, that’s a fantasy. The tap on the shoulder isn’t going to show up. It’s not because you aren’t great; it just rarely works that way.
In the real world, we need to know what we want, put ourselves out there, accept the vulnerability, and ask.
The benefits of a career plan:
- You dramatically increase your odds of getting what you want by being upfront.
- It’s a more positive experience to express what you need versus point out what you don’t like about your job.
- Just knowing you have a path to something aligned with your future brings hope and can create energy in the near term.
- You ground yourself from the storm of your highs and lows in life and prevent rash decisions that you might later regret.
- There are many ways to get what you want, and sometimes there are less apparent paths only found through others’ help.
- It’s a win-win conversation no matter the outcome — the electricity of people powers companies. Leaders can’t lead people that don’t want to be there in the first place. Either you’ll bring your electricity to the organization you are in, or close a door to open a new opportunity.
But What if I Don’t Know What I Want?
Most people I have mentored don’t have a clear vision of their career plan.
A few souls out there seem to know with certainty and have always known. And then there are the rest of us that take the scenic route figuring it out.
Start paying attention and learning about yourself — what do you enjoy or not enjoy? Start writing things down and toy with ideas over weeks, months, or even years.
Let it be messy. Let it unfold. Start to find the patterns and the deep-seated needs of contributing to the world through your career. Most importantly, get started.
How Your Brain Might Try to Protect You from Ambition
As you write out possibilities to identify what you want, you may notice your brain serving up all the reasons why it’s not possible.
These ego-protecting mechanisms can cause you to shrink away from sharing your ambition, decide it’s a dumb idea, or that you’re not suited for it. It’s vital to notice when this is happening. You might indeed know what you want. Your challenge might be self-doubt and insecurity. Self-doubt is more common than we realize, particularly for women or anyone outside the “norm” of a particular career.
Sometimes when we say, “I don’t know what I want,” what we’re trying to say is “I’m too scared to say it out loud.” And sometimes, we even believe this lie we tell ourselves.
That is why it is crucial to work with career coaches or mentors to break through mental barriers. If you skip this work, it’s a lot more likely you will be passed over on opportunities and feel stuck and resentful of the career you don’t have.
Engaging Others in Your Career Plan
Once you have either an idea of what you want to do next or even threads of an idea, put them into a document you can share.
Being proactive puts you in charge of career planning and makes it easier for others to get into your corner with you.
Share your career plan with your manager, other leaders, HR, and trusted mentors. You will get back input and opportunities in a variety of ways. Maybe a small step to be asked to work on a project that directly aligns with your aspirations, or perhaps an opportunity for a new role that nobody would have known to think about you to fill previously.
Be open to moving in the right direction. Many leaders point to one step or pivotal person that opened their career trajectory. And they only recognize that moment in retrospect.
Keep Showing Up for Yourself
As you start to unlock paths to what you want out of a career, you will need to revisit, iterate, and keep engaging others.
You’ll grow, you’ll open new doors, you will close others. And over time, you’ll get more clarity on what drives you and where you can make a difference. And inevitably, you may commit some “career experiments” where the only lesson you learn is that there are jobs or industries that you find utterly soul-sucking so that you know what to avoid in the future. That’s fantastic information to learn because it gets you that much closer to making a wiser next step.
It all starts with knowing what you need and asking for it.
Follow for my next story where I’ll share the template I use with people I mentor to help them figure out what they want from a career.
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