The Fatal Career Mistake You Won't Realize You're Making

There is a certain lovely feeling that creeps over you usually around the six-to-nine-month mark in a new job. Finally, the pieces of the job fit together. Finally, you understand what's going on.

After months of overwhelm and confusion, the job finally makes sense. Most of the learning curve is behind you. You know your teammates pretty well and you're not as afraid of making a mistake as you were before.

You deserve the wonderful glow you may feel once you've cracked the code on a new job. The problem is that it's just at that point that many people turn their brains off.

"Okay," they say to themselves, "now I know this job. That's awesome. Now I can think about other things, like getting season tickets to see my favorite team play this year, and working on my garage."

Life is complicated. You can't give every waking moment's thought to your job. You have friends and family to take care of, your health to look after and all kinds of fun activities and obligations to keep you busy.

Still, the worst thing you can do with respect to your job is to believe that if you get up and go to work every day, somehow you are also managing your career.

It's not true. Doing your job well -- even spectacularly well - has very little overlap with the separate activity called Managing My Career Like a Business.

We all tend to go to sleep on our careers. We go into hibernation. We stop asking ourselves "Is this job supporting my personal goals?" or even "What are my life goals?"

You can easily fall into a rut. You might stop thinking about the future, or wondering what your life would be like if you got to design every aspect of it -- which, of course, you do.

It's very easy to fall into a stupor and make your job the most important thing in your life -- without understanding what  your job is giving you beyond a paycheck. That's the worst mistake you can make! 

When you fall asleep on your career, insignificant events and trends on your job loom larger than they deserve to.

Who said what to whom and the  latest tidbits of office gossip become terribly important and block out other topics, like the vitally important topic 'Where am I headed in my life, and how is my journey going?' 

Nearly everybody has fallen into this alternate universe at some point. We start to care way too much about the petty ups and downs and ins and outs on the job.

We give them more importance than they deserve. The petty ups and downs become a compelling distraction that keeps our attention away from the main event, called The Rest of My Life and What I Want From It.

We start to care too much about who's in with the boss and who's out, who might get promoted this year and how our own stock is doing on the internal company stock index. We convince ourselves that these are topics of vital importance to us.

We fall into the workplace drama pit and stress ourselves out because we believe that the issues and relationships we deal with at work are critically important to our lives, but they aren't.

Our fear of change gets us thinking that losing the job we've got would be a catastrophe. We forget that it's only when we're trying something new that we learn anything.

Once you've learned a job, you want to keep it!

It's easy to forget how important it is to keep learning.

If the learning would disrupt our slumber, we don't want it! 

We make our boss a towering figure, but he or she is not as significant as we pretend. Your boss is not nearly as significant as your own mission  is, but we tend to give our power away to the boss. 

We become willing victims of circumstance. We say "It's not my choice - I have to do what my boss tells me to!" because it's easier to abdicate our power than to feel it and use it.

You can't afford to give away your power. It's the only fuel you've got to take you through your lifetime and carry you along to the vision for your life that you've created.

"What vision?"  you might be thinking right now. "I haven't created a vision for my life."

Exactly, my pumpkin! That's the problem. That's why you get sucked into the workplace soap operas and worry too much about whether your boss is happy or unhappy with you.

The soap opera is a welcome distraction if it keeps you from thinking about your own future. You have a mission here on earth, and your job is to figure out what that mission is and then to carry the mission out.

When we are little kids we let our imaginations soar. As we grow up we box ourselves in. We settle for less than we want or deserve. We start thinking "Who am I to decide what my life should be?"

Who are you NOT to decide? The fatal career mistake you won't realize you're making is the mistake of falling asleep on your career and pretending that because you have a job, your career is fine.

That's false! Imagine going to work every day ready to bite your tongue before you say something true and something you feel strongly about, merely because if you tell the truth at work your boss might not like it?

You probably can imagine that, because millions of people go to work disguised as somebody who looks just like them but doesn't say the things they feel.

You don't have to live that way. You can make a vision for your life and take steps to get there. In fact, that's the only way to get there -- it won't happen on its own.

It's a new year. If you've fallen asleep on your career, don't panic -- most people have done it once, twice or three times!

You can wake yourself up. The first step is to get a journal and start writing in it. Write about the life you want. Don't censor yourself!

 Write about what you love to do and what you used to love when you were a little kid without the limitations we put on ourselves as we get older.

Forget about how hard it might be to make a career change or get a new job. It gets a lot easier when you are powered by mojo!

Band together with a friend or relative of yours who also wants to take control of his or her life and career. The biggest step is the first one.

That's the step where it hits you that you call the shots. When that realization hits you, you'll say "Everything is up to me. I'm sick of blaming my boss or my company for my problems.

"My boss has no more power over me than whatever amount I give him. He isn't sitting in his house stressing about me right now, so why am I stressing about him?"

We are all stepping out of old boxes. We are waking up to our own possibilities in the Human Workplace. What changes can you make to bring your life closer to the vision you're creating for yourself?

It takes courage to try. The bed is soft and the blankets are warm.

It would be easy to go back to sleep on your career and think no more about the rest of your life -- but what a tragedy that would be, when your amazing future holds so much promise! 

Questions and Answers

Who draws the images for Liz Ryan's stories?

Liz Ryan draws them with markers and colored pencils.

I recognize myself in this story. I've fallen asleep on my career and I need to wake up. How do I start?

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