I had a chance to give a presentation to a bunch of great people in a company in the UK this week, about career development.\u00a0Like all the rest of us, they\u2019re struggling with the apparent conflict between needing and desiring direction from their employer, versus the desire to have a career which is rewarding and fulfilling.<\/p>\n
Not that there\u2019s really a conflict there, but it\u2019s a set of needs which often leave people scratching their heads over what to do next.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know about you, but I didn\u2019t really learn about career planning until about ten years ago.\u00a0 Before that point,<\/p>\n
Like many people, I didn\u2019t really plan<\/span> my career, it just kind of happened.<\/p>\n That all changed back in 1997, when I knew that I had a big job change coming up (moving back to the US) and realized that it wasn\u2019t working for me\u00a0any more.\u00a0 I could have probably moved into a job as a lab manager, but I didn\u2019t want the burnout and headaches that went with it.\u00a0 So I launched out on a voyage of discovery, and haven\u2019t been the same since.<\/p>\n My message to the group this week was really quite simple:\u00a0 Make the decision to start taking control over the direction of your career<\/em>.\u00a0 Honestly, the rest of the presentation was just ideas and how-tos, but that\u2019s all stuff you can figure out once you make the core decision.\u00a0 The problem is that most of us are still in the state where we aren\u2019t really satisfied with how it\u2019s going, but not dissatisfied enough to put some work into fixing it.\u00a0 Or you get inspired for awhile, but then get busy and distracted by other things.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll tell you a secret:\u00a0 Our most popular excuse, \u201cI don\u2019t have the time,\u201d is really just code for \u201cI haven\u2019t decided that it\u2019s worth the time.\u201d\u00a0 After all, we all have the same quantity of time to play with, and we\u2019re constantly making decisions about how to use that time.\u00a0 So when somebody tells me they \u201cdon\u2019t have the time\u201d to spend an hour on deep thinking, it\u2019s really that they\u2019ve prioritized it lower than the other things they are<\/span> spending time on.\u00a0 Fair enough – not everything can be at the top of the list – but let\u2019s at least be honest about it.<\/p>\n So my role this week was to be an irritant, to create a level of discomfort with the current situation, in an attempt to help people justify spending some time on this important area.\u00a0 Once they\u2019ve made that switch, they\u2019ll figure out what to do.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"