Everything in your professional – and personal life - is downstream of how effective we are personally.

The most important task in your career is not that YOUR output is effective.

Instead, it is to understand how YOU can be effective.

Its that time of year when people are thinking through careers and making plans in an uncertain world. This is the first part of three articles to help you navigate the world - and to be more effective in this world.

Don’t panic, these are not some self-help hippy-dippy, positive thinking typical LinkedIn articles!

The issue with self-help - as the wonderful Martin Weigel writes is that “seeking certainty and answers in an uncertain world, there is it is fair to say, a near-infinite supply of confident advice, formula, and prophesy”

These articles are not about certainty or prophesy, but rather its a (subjective) view of what I found interesting thinking through my career, trying to navigate both people and careers along the way.

The one thing that I found 'along the way' is this: forget what’s ‘out there’ and work on what’s ‘in here’ - ie going on in my internal world.

This first article is about two topics: "Managing Oneself" and "Getting to the Promised Land" to help analyse how you can become effective.

Why "Managing Oneself" is the first choice to make

Peter Drucker wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called ‘Managing Oneself” and they subsequently turned it into a very short, easy to read book that I recommend you read and keep coming back to.

"Managing Oneself" identifies the questions you need to ask to gain the insights essential for taking charge of your career.

Drucker writes that ‘the challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious. The answers may appear self-evident to the point of appearing na?ve”.

Perhaps the answers are self-evident to some, but definitely were not to me, or to the many people who ask me for career advice.

Indeed, reliable information on managing oneself or knowing how and when to change the work we do tends to tainted by halo effects, opinions and selection bias.

The full quote from the Peter Drucker book, ‘Managing Oneself’ is:

?“Managing oneself is a revolution in human affairs. It requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. In effect, it demands that each knowledge worker think and behave as a CEO. It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers’ thoughts and actions from what most of us still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.”

Drucker starts the book with the line ‘History’s great achievers have always managed themselves’.?

Whilst we might not go down as one of history’s great achievers, the reality is that we still need to know how and when to change the work we do. ??

A striking question he asks is:

How do I perform? ?In other words, how do I learn? What way do I learn? How do I perform under pressure? How do I work? What is my focus like?

This is at the heart of being effective - knowing your current baseline on performance in order be effective.

What could be holding back performance? The fact that you are 'trapped' in how the world was and how you use to be.

#2 What got you out of Egypt won’t lead you to the Promised Land

?Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, "what got us out of Egypt won’t lead us to the promised land".

In other words: what made us successful to date will not get you where you want to go to.

?Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith writes about a related idea in the book ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There’, which discusses the habits of successful people that ultimately stymie them – ‘the excessive need to be ‘me’.

Most us are trapped in the world of ‘fighting the last battle’.?

This stores up all sorts of problems for us. Maybe our career does not continue on the upward trajectory we imagined. ?Maybe we rub people up the wrong way – or just simply loose our way. Goldsmith would say we are attached to ‘who we are’.

?So, if we want to move to the Promised Land, whatever we might perceive that to be – a new role, a new job, a promotion, a bigger client win, what is holding us back is a limitation in the current way of how we see the world.

Here is an example of this: in the book ‘Moral Mazes’, sociologist Robert Jackall set out to discover how big corporations work in practice, not just in theory. He interviewed dozens of managers about their jobs and came to one simple conclusion: “What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you.”

You may not like this idea. But you must recognise it. Yet most people have not really integrated this idea into their thinking.

In the wider world, you can see lots of people in denial about artificial intelligence tools such as chatgpt or Mid-Journey and saying they are 'not creative' or 'plagiaristic'.

My answer to this is 'so what'....

Again, you may not like AI, ChatGPT, Midjourney, but you blinding yourself to reality does not help you.

Or as a better writer than me, Rishad Tobaccowala, writes, 'The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past" (check out his newsletter!)

We all require - including me - a different way of understanding ourselves, others and the world.

Next article on this topic will dive into how to be a professional

Thanks for reading Article #1.

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