What you can start doing today to improve your career (and your life)
I still remember the first time I was asked: “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”. A very simple question yet often very hard to answer. Naturally, I had lots of ideas, passion and drive to get better and better, but it was difficult to visualize where I would be and what I would be doing. As for most things in life, knowing where you’d like to go is often the hardest part: once you’ve figured that out, you “only” need to work hard towards the goal.
Over time I developed this simple method to come up with an answer:
- write down what gives you energy and what takes it away, as often as you can — or whenever you feel particularly happy or unhappy. Try to be specific: don’t say “It was a great day cos we had high sales” or “I really wanted to launch this product but we had to delay it” but try to ask yourself why you felt like that. Using the 5 Whys method might help you to get to the root of it.
- talk to as many people as possible and ask them about their job: again, try to dig deeper, to get details of what it means “working with customers” or “being a project manager”. You might find out what you had in mind about a job is very far off from what the reality is.
- look back regularly at what you wrote and start looking for a pattern. You’ll be surprised how much you will be learning about yourself if you have been consistent in writing things down.
How much will it take this to be useful? It all depends on how much you listen to yourself: it might take you as short as a few months or as long as a couple of years, and yes, it does depend on how many swings of positive and negative experiences you have in a certain time — you will need to go through both positive and negative moments to learn the most.
From a career perspective, when asked “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” focus on visualizing what things/tasks/situations/colleagues you would like to immerse yourself in more and what on the contrary reduce you’d like to reduce. The job title and position will follow and, in today’s fluid and uncertain market, it is honestly a much less important point. Performing well is much easier when doing mostly what gives us energy. And, no, it won’t be all perfect, but hey, any step in the right direction is better than no change at all, right?
You can apply this in a much broader way, though. I don’t believe in the concept of Work-Life balance, each of us is one person with one energy level: ensuring you maximize the moments in your day in which you get energy and limit the ones from which you get deflated is a safe way to feel better.
As most tricks, this is not something really new, we are all already implicitly using the same method at some level: seeing a certain friend after a bad day, eating comfort food, going to our favorite spot outside the city to “reconnect”. Being more systematic about it simply allows you to become more aware of the way “you work”.
We are all different, so the secret recipe for you might be very different from mine — the better you’ll get to know your energy flow, and act upon it, the better you will feel over time. After all,
investing in getting to know yourself is the safest investment you can make
Curious to know what you think!
