How a Career Vision can Help Guide You

Note: This is another excerpt from my book, Own Your Career Own Your Life, which will be published later in 2020. Back in February I published an article titled Owning Your Career Starts with Vision. I thought I would continue that thought here:

A Vision Can Help Guide You

While not everyone has clarity on where they want to go or what they want to be when they grow up, it can be really helpful. The biggest reason to have a vision or plan is that it helps guide important career decisions. Depending on how long you’ve been working, you have probably experienced a few of these critical decisions already. For example: 

• Your company or boss offers you a promotion or a new job doing something different than what you’re doing now
• Your boss tells you that you are not meeting expectations and won’t be getting the promotion you wanted
• A friend invites you to come interview for a job at his or her company
• A recruiter reaches out to you about a job you are qualified for
• Your spouse or significant other gets a job offer in a new city
• You have children or health issues that cause you to reconsider how much you are working
• You have one too many bad days at the office and decide you want to make a change
• There is a leadership change in your company and your priorities or job description changes and becomes different from what you signed up for or are used to. 

All of these things are real situations that happen weekly all over the world. Most of them have happened to me in my career. And any time one of them occurs, how you respond will have a big impact on the rest of your career. 

But most people don’t have any kind of vision, plan, purpose or values to help guide their decision and just go with their gut (or more likely, what their boss or friends recommend). I know because I have been in a couple of these situations. 

Let’s look at an example of something that happens pretty often: 

Jennifer works in finance for a large corporation and has been doing well lately. She exceeds all expectations and gets along great with the team. So her boss comes to her one day and suggests she’s in line for a promotion to a director role that will provide her with more money and more authority, but she will have to put in more hours at the office to learn the role and get everything done. 

Many people accept this promotion because they want the money or status or just feel like it’s the right thing to do. Maybe they don’t want to disappoint their boss or company. Besides, everybody wants to move up and make more money, right? 

But what if Jennifer’s dream is to work in HR or Marketing. She loves people and making an impact or wants to learn more about marketing and thinks it would be a lot more fun. Or maybe Jennifer likes finance but she is really into fitness and family and the long hours would potentially prevent her from spending time doing the things she loves. Would accepting this promotion still make sense? 

There is no right or wrong decision here. It comes down to personal values and preference. But knowing our values and having a vision can really help us make the best decision. And we can always pivot and change later if things don’t work out. But accepting that promotion and starting that new job as a director of finance would certainly make it harder to make that shift to HR or marketing later. Or if Jennifer is trying to grow a side business as a personal trainer or spend more time with family, this decision could cause stress as well. That’s why it’s so important to tap into personal values and vision to inform these decisions.

If Jennifer has spent time reflecting on her strengths and desires and where she wants to go in her career and she knows she wants to try moving to HR or Marketing, she could use this as an opportunity to have a real conversation with her boss and say something like “I am so grateful for this opportunity and I’m sure it would be really valuable for my career, but I have discovered I really love working with people and have been thinking about trying to get into HR or Marketing and I’m wondering if we can make a plan for me to do that instead.”

Now every company and situation is different and I don’t know how open Jennifer’s manager would be to this conversation, but the point is that Jennifer has a vision for what she wants to do and is taking ownership of her career by starting this conversation instead of just accepting whatever comes her way (as most people do). And sharing her goals with her manager will make it much easier for her manager to help her achieve her career goals.

So you can see that without a vision or plan, Jennifer probably accepts this promotion or blindly accepts advice from her boss or colleagues. But with a vision and plan, she can pause and decide if it fits into his plan and then make a more informed decision. 

I have plenty of my own examples from my career where I had opportunities come my way and sometimes I didn’t have a vision and had no idea what to do and on some occasions I did and the answer came easily. Recently a very successful and popular thought leader in the HR space reached to me to offer me what seemed like a pretty lucrative business opportunity to work with him. 

I was flattered and honored that he had thought specifically of me and felt compelled to at least consider it. But after giving it just a little bit of thought and talking with my wife and another good friend, I realized that accepting his offer would require a major shift in what I’m doing and a detour or departure from my personal vision for my career and life. 

As a result, I took less than 48 hours to consider it and then sent him an email to politely decline (while leaving the door open for future opportunities and partnerships). 

Had I not had a clear vision of where I wanted to go, I might’ve agonized for days about this and then second guessed myself no matter which option I chose. 

I don’t think there is ever a right or wrong decision in these situations but having a clear vision of where I want to go made it much easier for me to make the decision. 

A Vision Can Give Peace of Mind

Things can and will change (more on that in a moment) but until they do, it’s nice to know where you are going. I read once that tranquility and peace are often found in identifying our path and sticking to it (Daily Stoic). This means knowing where you want to go, staying the course, making adjustments as needed but not getting distracted by living a life suggested or demanded by society or other people. 

As in my example above, having a clear vision makes it easier for me to evaluate opportunities when they come my way. And I can promise you that the more successful, experienced and connected you become (especially if you follow my advice in this book), the more opportunities will come your way. And if you’re like me and have a hard time saying “no” or making big decisions, then having that clear vision of where you want to go will give you peace of mind and make those decisions so much easier. 

Things Change

As I mentioned previously, nothing is set in stone and things can change. Maybe Jennifer gets what she wants and moves to HR. And after a year or two working in HR, she decides that it’s not what she thought it would be and wants to move back to finance. Or maybe she gets bored and wants to try marketing or sales or start her own business. Or maybe she has children and decides to be a stay-at-home-mom. There is nothing wrong with any of these things as long as she’s intentional with her decisions. 

Some say the only constant in life is change. We know that the economy is going to change, your company will probably change leadership at some point, jobs will be eliminated or created, and your personal situation will change as well. The days of accepting a job at 22 and working in that role or function for 35 years until retirement are over. Studies show that most people will have at least 7-9 job or career changes in their lives. So don’t worry about things changing. Just because you decide at 25 that you want to be company CEO one day does not mean you have to keep pursuing that goal five years later when you have kids and decide you’d rather spend more time with them. 

The other thing about time is that it provides more clarity and wisdom. Time does not necessarily make people smarter or better looking but it does usually bring wisdom. Which means that with more experience, you can make more informed decisions. And I can tell you from my own experience that at 25 I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life or career, but at 40, I have a lot more clarity and know absolutely what I want to do. 

And even that might change. Because at 40 I know I’m still just getting started and 20 years from now I might be doing something completely different. That’s ok. 

The world and your life are going to continue to change and I want you to be ready for it. That means set a vision but remain flexible and be ready for change. 

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In my next post/article, we'll discuss how to set your vision.

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Thanks for reading. Would love your feedback and comments.