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Finances
Eighteen Career Enhancing Caveats
By David Krueger, M.D
Many people walk through their lives never, ever being better at
something than anyone else. What is it that you know or do better
than almost anyone else in the world? What is it that you do
uniquely well?
Do your core values for yourself and your family fit with what you
are doing, where you are putting your energy, what you are
developing, and where you are focusing/immersing yourself?
In your career, as well as in your life, to
achieve full capacity and happiness, all of you must be going in the
same direction.
For career and personal success to achieve its fullest potential,
the inside and the outside must match: strength, motivation,
passion, strategies and goals must be consistent with who you are
and be an extension of who you are -- not to define yourself, but to
be defined by you.
The application of focus and direction on your potential and goals
with all of you going in the same direction allows expansion of
strength and measurable results to achieve your vision.
Knowing what you want to achieve is crucial, with
a game plan, specific steps, and measurable results. Review your
responses in these four areas.
- What do you want to achieve?
- What do you want to maintain without change?
- What do you want to change?
- What do you want to delete or avoid?
Investing in your core values is synonymous with
the pursuit of simplicity. Your decisions are your self statements,
not statements about anyone else.
Simplicity includes not taking things that others say personally,
but recognizing that they, too, are making self statements;
discerning internal versus external point of reference; owning
rather than blaming your decisions and their results; creating
reality rather than believing in fate. Change does not happen, you
create it.
Your assumptions and beliefs drive your behavior.
Coming to the end of the past is not enough: you have to have a
purpose, a dream consistent with your internal ideal in order to
have hope. A game plan and goal actualize hope, the confident
expectation that something good can be created.
You move toward what you picture in your mind. Pinpoint focus and
laser precision of that picture allow the pathway of a plan and the
flexibility of strategy to have a context and meaning.
What you believe to be true about yourself will
become true. What you believe will work well can be changed to
become that which works well.
Change may involve new ways of thinking, doing, being, and growing.
If you let someone recommend a solution or strategy for you, unless
you fit it to your situation and ideal, you will be getting a suit
tailored to someone else.
If you want to change your life, your performance, and your career,
change your mind first. At times, however, you may simply look for
patterns in your behavior, find out what is working, and create that
more often, and that will change your mind.
A wise and experienced addiction counselor who was one of my
treatment team members would say to some of his clients, “Sometimes
you just gotta act your way into thinkin’ and feelin’ different.”
18 Career Caveats
When your head and your gut (what you think and
feel) both agree, and act accordingly, you won’t go wrong.
It is disregarding, deleting, or covering over one
or the other that results in compromise. Emotional goals and
internal values must be consistent with external plan and vision.
Having a definition of success and an internal
ideal of “good enough” are essential for satisfaction.
Epicurus indicated, “Nothing is enough for the man
for whom enough is too little.” A passage in one of Schumann’s piano
sonatas marked, “As fast as possible” followed a few bars later with
the admonition, “Faster.” The most outstanding characteristics of
the superachievers I have known are that all of them love their work
and their play.
Rich is knowing you have enough.
An internal definition of success may not be easily mapped. And it
may be defined differently by men, by women, and even individual by
individual.
The familiar model of male competition makes measurement of external
success clearer. But internal success is measured by ideals,
relatedness with important others, and comfort with one’s self;
esteem that only results from having internal ideals and leading up
to them.
Long-term goals are necessary to keep perspective,
while short-term goals are necessary to sustain enthusiasm and
tolerate frustration.
Short-term setbacks are an essential part of
achieving success within the orientation and organization provided
by long-term goals. In learning to walk, the toddler’s fall is not a
failure but part of the process of learning to walk. When you have
the endpoint of your purpose clearly in mind, you can more easily
keep setbacks in perspective.
Respect the boundaries between work and private
life.
In order to be fully immersed in your work at your office, and your
private life when you are home, a clear boundary between the two
must exist for each day, each weekend, and for designated vacation
periods. In order to be maximally effective when you are at work,
making time for a private life and for play is crucial.
Creativity, which can be nurturing in itself, needs time to ferment,
develop and expand. Though you may enjoy and feel rewarded by your
work, play is equally important.
Develop your emotional and interpersonal
expertise as well as your technical expertise.
Both can be finely tuned and mutually enhancing. Consider also when
different listening positions may be more effective. At times a
colleague or employee may need your empathic ear; at other times, an
objective, even confrontational position may be needed.
Part of establishing a goal is identifying who you need to work
with. Then identify the skills, knowledge, and abilities you need to
develop in order to reach the goal. Thinking, feeling, and imagining
are all active forms of doing something. Yet thinking, feeling, and
imagining are different from action.
Physical action is not the only form of doing something. You can’t
simply apply willpower to become happy or undepressed; the emotional
issues that interfere and facilitate have to be addressed.
A potential space between urge and action is
where judgment resides.
“What is in my best interest?” is a question that can always be in
the background, and at times the foreground. Thinking about
something and considering it is a response, one that may be
necessary at times when you feel the urge to act, or may be feeling
the pressure from others to act. There are few true emergencies in
life.
You’ll never do anything important that will
feel comfortable in the beginning.
Mastery requires you to proceed despite your anxiety. You can’t
learn to swim by figuring it out on paper or in your head. Mastery
and effectiveness convert anxiety and uncertainty to comfort.
Anxiety is often assumed to be bad, as a signal of danger as if may
have been in an earlier context.
Consider anxiety as a signal that you are proceeding in new
territory, beyond where you’ve been before. Anything really
important requires a commitment to going forward despite discomfort.
Assess what reaching a goal will do.
It is important to know what achieving a goal will
do in order to distinguish clearly what it will not do. For example,
reaching a career goal will not undo the past, or make other
troubles go away. Having more money won’t make a marriage
relationship better.
Just having a choice can make choosing the same
thing feel very different. Not only can you change, but you can
choose how you change. Insight and understanding are internal
change; external change is another step in and of itself.
Every step of growth and change involves its own mourning; you have
to relinquish a past position in order to move ahead. What you
decide to accept undergoes a change. The only familiar territory is
behind you. Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard said, “Life can
only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Growth and change are hard. The only thing
harder is not growing or changing.
Recognize your own limits in order to achieve success. It may be
difficult to recognize those limits and to seek the advice of
others. It may seem a weakness or an acknowledgement of limitation
to consult with an expert. Failing to recognize the limits of your
knowledge in any area, or being unable to admit mistakes, can
profoundly hamper your judgment.
Admit mistakes in order to cut losses.
For instance, the prospect of selling a plunging stock at a loss may
make the loss so concrete and real that you will have difficulty
selling. As long as the stock isn’t sold, you can retain the hope
that it will rise again.
It is as if the loss is not real until the stock has sold, because
it’s only a loss on paper. The hope of salvaging a loss may ensure
further losses. Be able to recognize that success and sound
decisions in one arena did not guarantee success in others.
Physicians and other professionals are notorious for believing that
since they have achieved success in one specialized field, their
ability automatically spreads to other endeavors such as
investments. With little time to research investments or conduct
business activities, uninformed decisions may prevail.
Be willing to seek suggestions, critiques, and
advice and not to take it personally.
Consulting only with those who mirror and agree with your opinion is
far easier than listening objectively to critical or contradictory
information. The decision to seek consultation from individuals
knowledgeable in specific areas may be as logically sound as it is
emotionally difficult.
Distinguish lack of information and organization from unconscious
conflict. Further information, strategy, and redoubled efforts will
continue to not work if emotional conflict creates a barrier.
To make an informed decision if the structure/plan itself is
inadequate and needs to be changed, performance at the full level
and capacity within that structure is first required.
Planning and strategy are essential components
of a game plan.
Planning is creating an agenda for what you want to happen. Strategy
is having a view and structure of how you will proceed. Strategy
includes flexibility, because you can’t always predict exactly what
will happen or how you will need to respond.
The most common reason for failing at a game plan is not having one.
The second most common reason is having a game plan but not sticking
to it.
Examine the process that gets you to a good
result. Examine the process that gets you to a bad result.
You can learn immensely from both. Any plan for success must
incorporate the understandable fear of taking risks and making
mistakes as a necessary stepping-stone to goals.
David Krueger, M.D. is an Executive Strategist/
Professional Coach
http://www.executivestrategist.biz Email
execstrategist@aol.com.
He is author of 11 books on success, money, work, and
self-development. This article is excerpted from Dr. Krueger’s 12th
book, soon to be published, LIVE A NEW LIFE STORY: The Essentials of
Change, Reinvention, and Personal Success. |
