Career Hopes for the New Year: The What and The How
12 January 2016
What you really want to have unfold for your career over the next 12 months?
How can you ensure you give yourself the best chance of making these hopes eventuate?
To help bring to life your career hopes in 2016 I have prepared for you some questions to ponder, some actions to take and some pointers about setting career intentions - I hope you find them useful as you set the year up to be a fabulous one.
1 – Reflect
If you haven’t yet, the first step is to take time to reflect on what was great in your career in 2015. Reflection helps you make sure more of the best continues, and also helps you highlight what you might like to be different. An article I wrote at the end of last year helps you reflect on the following:
· What progress did you make?
· How good were your workplace relationships?
· How engaged were you by the work you did?
· How much fun did you have at work?
· How much did you care about the work you did?
2 – What do you want to have happen in your career this year?
Some people are able to easily answer this question and can skip straight through to the next section on How to make it happen. For many others answering this question takes more reflection and pondering. The values we hold as individuals mean that career success is very different for each and every one of us. Knowing what it is you want to have unfold in your career in the coming year comes from a combination of:
· Knowing yourself – Your values, beliefs, strengths, skills, personal attributes
· Knowing the environment around you - the supports and barriers available to you at work and at home
· Imagining and fleshing out as much as possible the biggest picture you can of your personal vision
· Connecting to and keeping front of mind the things that hold and give you a sense of meaning
At the end of this article I have included a short exercise* you can do to help develop your knowledge in these 4 areas. Another good way to explore what you want to have happen in your career is to do some journaling, especially on questions such as the ones below that are focused on giving you insight into your career.
· At the end of 2016 what is it that you want to be proud of having achieved (Hint: it won’t be the things that were easy)?
· What would feel like it career progress to you?
· If you could only do one thing for the rest of your life what would it be?
· Ignoring what others want you do, what is it that you want to do just a little more of in 2016?
· What particular talents do you have that the world needs more of?
· What is 2016 asking you to do that you cannot not do?
If you have a friend or colleague who is also exploring what they want to have happen in their career over the next year it can be good to ask each other these questions as talking them through will often also bring new insights and clarity.
Another action that often helps open people to the range of possibilities in their career is the process of updating your resume, as it is impossible to put a great resume together without seriously considering your career from a big picture perspective. I have written a number of articles on putting together a great resume: see here and here.
3 – How do you make it happen?
With some intentions in mind for what you want to have unfold in your career in 2016 two things are valuable to put in place that set the year up so your hopes are more likely to eventuate. The first is to ensure that you take your intentions and give them more fine detail clarity. Giving our intentions more clarity means we have to think more structurally about them which gives them a greater sense of reality and makes it easier to put plans in place to make them happen. The second is to make sure you put in place things that support you to stay focused and on track. Again and again I speak with people who are full of good intentions at the beginning of the year, but as time progresses they get busy, lose focus and don’t prioritise their hopes with the result that weeks and months go by without action. Yet putting small things in place to maintain focus on the big picture of your career is often easy and enjoyable.
Clarity:
· For some people the best way to get clarity about career intentions is to turn them into goals. When you write down a concrete, specific goal it is hard to hide from it, and research shows again and again that people are significantly more like to achieve something when they write it down as a goal. Investigate specifically turning your intention into SMARTEST goals.
· Another way to gain more clarity is to turn your career intentions into questions. For example an intention may be to develop your professional network. This might be turned into the question: How will I develop my professional network this year? – Or When will I develop my professional network this year? Then allow any further questions to follow, for example: How can I build networking into my schedule?; Or Where would be the best place to develop my professional network? Other people may even help you answer your questions or open other questions for you.
Support Yourself:
· Consistent, ongoing, daily action is the surest way to make a major shift in something be it fitness, relationships, skill development and career. A little bit every day builds a habit of action and once you have a habit things happen with less effort and you can then focus on developing the next habit. Answer the question: What is one small thing I can do every day to support the hopes I have for my career this year? For example maybe you can write for 10mins each day before you turn on your email; maybe you can review your career goal every morning by having it automatically pop up on your screen; maybe you can send a helpful article or link to colleagues in your network at the end of each day… When you have small daily actions in place then determine slightly bigger weekly actions you can take – before you know it a shift will occur.
· Find yourself a mantra, or some words of wisdom that fit for the type of difference you want to make in your career in 2016 and adopt it. Print it out, paste it up somewhere you will see it, repeat it regularly…
· Ask around for someone to be your career buddy (or buddies) and set in place specific ways that you support each other.
Finally a nice thing to do is to make a promise to yourself about what you want to achieve in your career in 2016 then write an email to your future self using a online service such as futureme.org that you schedule to receive at the end of the year. In your email congratulate yourself for the specific differences you have made in your career this year.
*Bonus Exercise
A nice little exercise to do to ponder the 4 areas mentioned in section 2 above is to grab a big piece of paper and divide it into 4 columns. Give the columns the headings: Self Knowledge, My Environment, Vision, and Meaning. Start by deliberately cultivating a mindset of curiosity and openness to what might emerge in answer to the question about what it is you what to have happen in your career in 2016.
· Under the Self Knowledge column list all the things you know about yourself (consider what you know about your values, beliefs, strengths, skills, personal attributes).
· Under the My Environment column note down the resources you have available at home and at work to support you and also those things that you perceive as barriers.
· Under the Vision column you need to decide a time frame (e.g. 6 months, 1 year, 2 years…). The trick is to find the time frame that best suits you with where you are at in your career – the further out you go in time the less distinct you are likely to be. With a time frame in mind then list what you would like to see in your career at this time. Think about things such as learning you have undertaken, networks and relationships you have developed, things you would like to have seen progress in…
· In the Meaning column list those things that are sources of meaning and purpose for you.
If you have found this article, or others I have written valuable please encourage friends and colleagues to subscribe (here is the link). Especially encourage them if they are people who work in the public sector, as my career intention this year is to encourage more public sector career flourishing.