CAREER DEVELOPMENT
How To Transform Your Career in Just Minutes Every Day
The power of habits
ARE HUMANS REALLY “CREATURES OF HABIT?”
Most of us probably hate habits and don’t have any at all. If we do have a habit, it might be one of those pesky bad habits.
However, habits are an extremely important tool in getting us closer to achieving our goals. For many of us, career achievement may be one of our most important goals, but we don’t have the associated blueprint for starting our work towards achieving it.
How do people become so successful in their careers? How did they get there? Where did they start?
I have found that the continual nurturing of your career through the practice of habit building can help you achieve a goal that seems insurmountable in an organized and thoughtful way.
Now, how did I get here?
Well, I was really, really angry. At myself.
Early in my career, I would constantly critique myself for not moving fast enough in my advancement or being in the wrong role or job. There was rarely a day where I genuinely would pat myself on the back and celebrate any small victory. In my self-view, I was completely missing the mark on my career.
I don’t like to throw around terms like depression so easily, but I feel I battled with it during this time. My self-identity was so wrapped up in my career that I kept pushing myself down deeper and deeper into a hole of self-pity by criticizing myself over a lack of a career plan and achievement.
One day, I became just absolutely fed up with this self-pity. I realized that I didn’t have any goals. If you asked me what my career goal was, I didn’t have an answer. I probably would jump right to a compensation number or title I was chasing, but I had no rationale for wanting those things.
Beating myself up over a lack of career advancement was silly — I literally had no plan! That’s when I decided to take the first step towards building a true career planning practice by establishing habits and frameworks.
So if we are going to try this whole habit thing — how do we start?
When we zoom out and look at our careers over a 10–20–30 year horizon, we may have big lofty goals. Maybe we want to become the CEO of our own company or want to run a division of our current company. Maybe we just know we want success, but what exactly that manifests as is a little unclear.
Although it’s great to think big, those broad stroke goals are like boiling the ocean.
There are a lot of different ways to get there, and each requires a plan. Since we aren’t going to figure everything out overnight, creating a habit that enables you to work towards those goals continually, and distill them into bite-sized, achievable goals, will get you much farther in the long run.
Creating a mindset of urgency
It is important to get into a mindset of urgency. Moments not working on your habit is time wasted which will set you back. Don’t get caught up in the end game, and just start working on setting a habit for yourself.
If your eventual goal is to get a certain job or level of compensation, it won’t happen overnight. There will be a series of mini goals you will need to achieve to get you closer to that eventual big goal and end position.
Not using each moment where you sit and focus on this big goal is a missed opportunity of capturing time where you can be doing small, bite-sized actions to get you closer and closer to that larger outcome.
Start to train your mindset to understand that even just five minutes of working towards your big goal is money in the bank, so to speak. A continued sense of urgency will keep you motivated and productive, where eventually you’ll start to see concrete results of your work pushing towards something.
ACTION STEP:
I love putting pen to paper and find that the practice of writing down a commitment holds you accountable. When you are staring at your own handwriting and realize you didn’t complete the task you wrote, it’s a quick way to light that fire you might need and have an honest checkpoint with yourself.
Below is a template of a model seven-day week where I would encourage you to write down an amount of time each day you want to section off to focus on working on your career goal. No longer does the excuse “there are not enough hours in the day!” hold water.
The best part of this is that there are no rules! Whatever amount of time works for you each day is the only right answer just as long as you are planning and actioning each day. Each day you complete your allotted time, cross it out until you find yourself easily reaching a 7-day streak. You are actively building a habit.
Monday: Example:
10 minutes during the hours of 6 pm-9 pm
Tuesday: Example:
5 minutes during the hours of 11 am-2 pm
Wednesday…Thursday…Friday…Saturday…Sunday
Breaking Down your Goals
Now that we’ve committed to a new habit of dedicating time to work on our goals each day, our focus should turn to how we plan to structure our goals.
As humans, we crave seeing results and progress. If you begin to work out and start to see results, you will be more willing to keep up with your exercise. Our professional goals and career planning should be no different.
Aiming for results, whether small units of progress, is “progress” nonetheless and important in keeping our eyes on the prize to achieving our ultimate goal. The best way to see these small results is to break down our goal into micro-goals to create a strong foundation to build upon.
Let’s work through an example…
ACTION STEP:
Write down your ultimate career goal. “Become CEO of a company.”
Then write down three goals that you can work on in the next six months that you believe help you improve your aim to get to that ultimate goal.
- Lead a sales team
- Lead an entire product division
- Build out a business plan for a new product
Then write down three goals that you can work on in the next six weeks to help you get to your ultimate set of goals from above — the set you outlined for the next six months.
- Talk to 10 salespeople
- Understand each of the existing products
- Learn how to model financial statements
You can keep going more granular… goals for the next six days, hours… etc. It’s important you keep building upon the base of one layer that strengthens you to get to the next. Being highly specific and granular with your goal setting and planning will help in producing motivating results to keep you going.
PREPARE YOURSELF — BECAUSE THIS MAY SUCK.
Building a habit will be hard, and the fruits of your labor won’t be immediate. You will get frustrated, unmotivated, and tired.
But habits, over time, compound and get you closer to an achievement that once seemed so distant. Start building your strong habit today so you can thank yourself tomorrow.
You are building a new, healthy habit day by day, which is an investment in yourself that will pay dividends.
When keeping your habit starts to become tough, and you need motivation — which will happen — your past wins will help carry you forward. The second I began on this journey, even with one small step, a world of possibilities opened up to me.
My energy and time were no longer spent on the negative, but rather the positive by cultivating skills, networks, and opportunities that would bring me closer to my goals. The days of self-pity and anger are gone — and that has made all the difference in taking control of my own professional narrative.
Annie DeStefano has experience leading in Fortune 100 corporations on Wall Street and tech startups. She’s focused on early-mid career planning and strategy.
