Thinking Through Your Career

I am writing about a presentation I gave to 1,100 international employees last week. The topic was "Thinking Through Your Career." The premise of my topic was rooted in an issue I have seen a lot of, particularly lately: people moving through their careers without reflection and thought.

It is an issue for everyone, but especially those who find themselves in roles but have not considered what will enable them to truly flourish.

The issue at hand is that, often, we find ourselves in roles that we are comfortable with but lack something we need. The result is getting stuck or into a rut. At Forrest & Company , we refer to this as the “boiling frog syndrome”. The analogy was made popular by Al Gore – the premise being that if you have a pot of boiling water on a stove, and you throw a frog into it, the frog will jump out, but, if you put a frog in a pot and gradually turn the heat up, the frog will boil to death. While a grizzly (and likely apocryphal) analogy, it represents what happens to people if they don't think through their careers.

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We often stay in roles because they are comfortable. In the past, I have discussed anaklesis as the core cause of this. We stay because we are used to it and lean on our experiences and beliefs to make us feel whole. Far too often, this is the cause of why we stay. It is what we know.

My attempt with the group was to get them to truly consider, think through, and make decisions about their careers. And the key to considering your career is understanding how to make decisions.

In past missives, I have explained that the decision-making process starts with decisions about your criteria. The same is true for deciding on a career; it starts not by gathering information but rather by choosing what you need and want.

Because of anaklesis and environmental factors, we don't stop and think through what we want and need. We don't take the time to explore this aspect of our lives. Once we are clear on what we need and want, then we look at options, and, as related in the presentation, this is where networking becomes essential. Networking helps us to both generate options and amass the data about how well those options satisfy our wants and needs. ?

These are the foundations of decision-making, but we need to teach our people how to make decisions because, very often, nobody else has.

The real shadow hanging over exploring our careers is risk , and unexplored risk becomes fear. This is at the heart of why we don't explore our careers. Again, except for risk experts, the average employee has no framework for exploring risk. They often leave it to a gut reaction, and this is where the fear spreads. I have written about risk in past missives, but it comes home to roost when thinking about one's career. Risk, combined with anaklesis and environmental circumstances, creates fear that often leads to boiling frogs.

So, the key to thinking through your career is to have clarity of what you need and want, but then comes that other very important part: the courage to go after it.

Far too many times, clients of ours are caught out when the organization they belong to deselects them, and they are faced for the first time having to get that clarity and then screw up the courage to move on.

The title Thinking Through Your Career is a double entendre. The same decision-making process you use to decide on your career is the same process you must apply to all aspects of your job and work. It is about using cognitive frameworks to help you think through the most important parts of your life.

I have distilled my hour-long presentation, but if you want more information and details, please feel free to reach out.