Edition 2 - Take control of your career with 1 bullet every 3 months.

Hey folks ??, thanks for joining us for this week's edition of Double-click where I expand on something that I’ve been thinking about this week or been dealing with as the CEO of 11:FS. I want to give you folks the real view on building a career, a business or just being a human in 2021 and beyond so I hope you find the content super duper useful and that it helps you be more successful.?

We were blown away by the response to edition 1 last week with over 5,500 people signing up! That’s amazing. Thank you. ???

If you're reading this and haven't signed up then get to the bottom and get this every week delivered directly to you here on Linkedin. :)?

Right, here’s what’s top of mind for me this week… Take control of your career with 1 bullet every 3 months.

Don’t panic. This isn’t a post about my hire and fire style. I don’t mean a bullet of a gun nor how to hold one to anyone’s head either literally or metaphorically. I’ve saved that one for a much later edition. ;)?

This is a bullet as in bullets and numbers that you find in Google docs and taking control of your career - something that is applicable to everyone whether you are in a big corporation, a small business or you’re a budding entrepreneur.

Before I get to the bullet though, let me double-click on something else that puts this into context...?

When it comes to your job and your career in life, to me they are two very separate things both in terms of what they mean and who the owner is of each of them.

Your Job:

Your job is your employer’s. They pay you an amount of money to achieve certain things. Most pay for achievement not attendance - although not everyone gets that right and I’ll come back to that in a later edition also. The construct of the job and the things you need to do in order to deliver for the business and to get paid are determined by your employer.?

Your Career:

Your career however, is yours. The arc of it and stories behind it are yours and yours alone. All the twists and turns are yours to define and yours to explain. The experiences to gather, the lessons learned, all of it is yours!

Most people I've worked with do not see the distinction and importance but there is nothing more important early on in your life than knowing how to take control of your career.?

Owning your career gives you the realisation and feeling of control. While others might control what you do today, you control why you do it, what you take from it and how it relates to your future destination. This should be both comforting, as you're in control of your own destiny, but also give you the pressure to better yourself. You can seek out your own learning and development opportunities. It isn't something that your company has to do to you, you are the one that has to make the time, engage and enable for yourself.

This leads on to what I mean by the bullet. I have personally lived my entire career by this one rule:?

You need to add one bullet to your CV every 3 months. If you don’t, you are not learning fast enough or adding enough to your career, or your employer for that matter, and something needs to change.

In order for this exercise to work, you have to start with a vision of where you want to get to. You might have a super clear north star aspiration, or have an area of focus that you want to go deep into to inform your future role. Either way this gives you a sense of direction and ensures that the bullets you are collecting (or not) are moving you in the right direction.?

For me, this wasn't a request to my employer. This was for me. The emphasis was on me taking control of my narrative. Taking responsibility for thinking about what I'm doing when I'm doing it, in order to ensure I was learning from what I was doing - not just doing it!!

Sometimes it meant I looked for opportunities to do my job better, sometimes it meant I was ready for a new job, but all the time it meant that I was becoming better through ensuring I was constantly reflecting on what I was achieving, why I was achieving it, and whether it was moving me closer to the person I wanted to be. I was constantly building experiences and value to my career whilst making sure I was delivering the job for my employer.?

This isn’t to say that every 3 months of my career everything has been wonderful. Quite the opposite as you’re always at your most uncomfortable when you’re learning something new. But both success and failure give you opportunities to learn and reflect.?

How often have we learned what not to do faster than how to do something?

At the end of the day you increase your value to your employer and other employers throughout your career through taking control of your learning and developing, so take control of yours today.??