The way you move from feeling “stuck” to achieving sustainable success involves a change in your mindset. That’s were being brave matters.
A great career invites you to inventory your ideas about what work means to you, how you define success and what matters to you most in life. You need to be brave to do this inventory. This is because, to do this type of inner work successfully, you need to sort through where you are operating authentically in life, and where you have invested your time and energy into being who others want you to be.
Identifying and maintaining a great career requires you to feel as well as to think. It’s amazing what people will do to avoid uncomfortable feelings. To access your full spectrum of emotional wisdom, you have to tap into the feelings you’ve trained yourself to avoid as well as the ones you naturally embrace.
Charting your own course professionally, and course correcting effectively in changing times, requires you to develop an appreciation for the role that your energy level plays in both work and life. Those of us who have helped the elderly in the last stages of life know what it “feels” like to be in nursing homes hospice situations where people who need our energy literally pull this from us to keep going. Similarly, you can feel an energy drain when you cross the thresholds of some work environments where people feel listless, bored and disconnected from the larger meaning of their work in the world.
A great career isn’t about having it ALL. It’s about having enough of what’s authentically meaningful for the balance of your work and your life to nourish you. It’s about focusing on what matters most, letting go of what you no longer need (including limiting ideas) and working with others effectively. It’s about:
- Developing confidence in your own decision making process – particularly under pressure
- Understanding the role that your family system may have played in shaping your early career choices
- Rediscovering the power of fun, thinking “playfully” and minimizing the judgement of your inner critic
- Enhancing your interpersonally agility so you are able to stay true to yourself while bringing out the best in others
What’s vital to remember in rapidly changing times is that there are many fulfilling paths to success as long as we maintain an inner alignment between what matters to us personally, what we do professionally and how the intersection of these two adds meaning and value to the lives of others.