Do you know your personal value proposition? If you don’t, sooner than later you’ll have a career wake up call. Your abilities, career direction, or work are not aligned with your employer’s business strategies or customer’s market requirements. You may have less authority, new boss, new position, marginal performance review, or even a job loss. Your employer may want to outsource. Your employer sees employees and contractors as expendable. Your employer may see employee as an expense, not an asset. These result in stress.
Each of these is a stimulus to examine what you do right, what should be different, and to conduct a career gap analysis. This is hard because you may have to stare at the mirror and conduct an objective analysis. I call this the ‘career ledger sheet.’ What are your career assets and liabilities? You want to enhance your assets and minimize your liabilities. It isn’t an easy process to assume new roles, establish new relationships, establish new directions, offer new ideas, be proactive, learn new behaviors, or work more effectively. This requires time, effort, resources, and resiliency. All of which take time away from other activities. But, it’s your life and career resiliency!
For example, Mary Lynn Pulley in Losing Your Job – Reclaiming Your Soul calls the ability to bounce back from adversity, ‘work resilience.’ We all have an inner life force to bounce back and carry on. We become resilient by developing and nourishing positive relationships. Also, you may reach the stage in your career when options are fewer, career choices are limited and you don’t know where to go or what to do. This is a time for reflection, for repositioning yourself if necessary and for learning resilience.
Life Lesson Earned: Address these important life questions: Where are you going? How are you going to get there? Will the journey or the destination make you happy? What are the tradeoffs along the way and are you willing to make the required sacrifices? What do you need to learn to get where you want?