If you have a job, you’re probably very busy. You’re now doing the work of three people, struggling to catch your breath.
The difficult part is to think about the long term. You not only need to be valued as a productive worker today, but also five years from now. Or ten.
Are you building that foundation for your future career?
We’re constantly going through cycles in our jobs, in our careers, and in our lives. And if you’re out hunting for a job, it’s tough to keep your energy up to do the draining work every day.
Be sure to give yourself a break. Just as your body needs its rest every night, your mental stamina will also go through normal ups and downs.
But there’s also some tricks and techniques to regenerating your energy when you need to. Try some of these out to see what works for you.
The Career You’ll LoveSponsored by Carl Dierschow’s career blog at www.Dierschow.com |
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You may have heard the advice that it’s good to have a coach or a mentor. But beyond that, it can be confusing. Why? What should I expect? Who should I approach?
To start with, let me explain the difference between a coaching and mentoring relationship. With a mentor, you’re looking to follow the path that someone else has successfully navigated, perhaps who can even open doors for you. A coach, on the other hand, focuses more on your specific goals, bringing out your best clarity and motivation from within yourself. Sometimes the two roles are combined to various degrees.
One of the most frustrating things about working for other people is figuring out why they do such dumb things. Incomprehensible decisions seem designed to make your life difficult and stop useful progress.
It might be something as large as relocation, reorganization, or laying people off – or as minor as requiring useless codes on your TPS reports.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, he stated that to achieve mastery in an area, it generally takes about 10,000 hours of serious learning, practice, and skill development.
I think it’s a valid conclusion, but there’s more to the story.
If you want to be famous for something, to be at the forefront, you have to establish yourself as world class. You want to be one of the best violinists? 10,000 hours. You want to make a living as a pro golfer? 10,000 hours.
When you think about it, “time management” is a ridiculous concept. Time always has been, and will continue to be, impossible to manage.
Each of us is given 24 hours a day, and that’s it.
Really, the choice is about how you manage your attention: where you place your focus, your energy, and your effort.
No matter how much I know I need to do some things, it’s a pain. I have to wash the dishes, but nothing much is going to happen if I don’t do it right now. So maybe I’ll procrastinate for awhile, then a little longer. Pretty soon, it’s next week with a big pile of dishes in the sink.
There’s a number of great ways to get around these mental barriers:
You’re incredibly busy, I understand. You have more stuff to do than you’ve ever had before. Reading. Responding. Figuring out. Taking calls. Emailing. Before you know it, you’ve worked 10 hours today and you wonder what exactly you accomplished.
That’s the trap.
DOING STUFF is not the same as ACHIEVING SOMETHING. And most people who look at their lives discover that a lot of the stuff they’ve spent time on didn’t actually result in anything particularly useful.
For many years, I fell into a trap: Working on problems.
What’s wrong with that?
Well, think about this: A problem is something that’s defined by your situation, or by someone else. Working on that problem means that you’re trying to find a solution that is just defined by that problem, and doesn’t usually address anything deeper.
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