Step One: Your Current Career

If we are going to plan out your career and where you want it to be in the future, the first thing you need to do is take a good, hard look at where you are currently. You need to know the good, the bad, and the ugly of the career you have created.

When you start taking a good look at your career, I hope you find positive career experiences; a great network of friends and associates; challenging, fun, and purposeful work; fair compensation; and progression with your skills and competencies. These are the things great careers are made of. Now if you are shaking your head and feeling like I am talking about the Land of Oz compared to your career, don't feel like you are alone in this. Nearly 85 percent of workers feel the same as you do! They are disengaged and dislike their jobs, so you have more company than you think.

One of the most difficult aspects of looking at your current life and career is that you get a glimpse of choices you have made that created a career or life you may not like or may not be proud of. It's discouraging to realize we may have taken a road or made choices that were not the best for us. You may have had a terrible event happen in your life that knocked you flat to the ground and it has taken some time to get back up.

Whatever the reason, you need to see a clear picture of your current situation so you can see what needs to be changed or improved. I want you to answer the questions below as honestly as you can. Write down quick bullet point answers. (Those are the best.) Don't overthink the answers or write a novel. Jot down answers as quickly as you can after reading the question. Ready to begin? Let's get started.

Step Two: Define Your Career

Defining your Best Ever career is a tricky proposition and it is important to understand why before you continue. I have found the exercise of choosing a career to be one of the most difficult assignments I ask my clients or those who attend my workshops to complete. This is because defining what you want for the future (which is an unknown) has some innate problems. First, it is hard to choose something you may not know everything about (promotion, new job, new boss, and so forth).

Second, you know everything you don't want in a career, but you haven't figured out what you do want. You know you don't want a psychotic, micromanaging boss,…you know you don't want to work 80 hours a week…and you are sure you don't want to sit next to Sheila, who talks nonstop. But you have no idea what job you would like in five years. Give it some thought. This is where you need to get specific. Do you want to go from making $9 an hour to $15, or own two stores instead of one? Do you want to run your department or division or are you happy in your current individual contributor position?

You have to be the one to figure out what YOU want, but I WILL help you get there since the process is similar for everyone!

Think of the last time you pulled out your earphones and they were tangled so badly you thought that it was going to be impossible to ever untangle them. What is the first thing that everyone does with a knotted mess? We shake it! We think if we violently shake the earphones, they will untangle. It never works, and more often than knot (yes, I just did that and if you didn't get the joke, go ask your three-year-old neighbor and he or she will explain it to you), it binds the knot even tighter. As soon as we realize this, something in our brain enlightens us and we carefully begin working the knot and detailing the path that we need to take to get it untied. We trace each section to see where it goes and where it needs to be and which parts of the cord that we need to tug, nudge, or push through a small opening in order to disentangle the dilemma. As we continue attempting to fix the earphones we end up with smaller knots or more minuscule issues, and gradually, as we work through those issues, the string becomes more and more its untangled self.

I always wonder how a string or cord sits dormant and becomes knotted in the first place. How sitting in my gym bag or backpack, the earphones get that horribly tangled. Your career is like the tangled earphones. As you sit dormant, you become more invested in your current rut and get more and more tangled, unable to see how to get untangled and straighten things out.

To become untangled, you are going to need small steps, nudges, and pulls in the right direction, and maybe even some violent shaking here and there to get you to your goal. So my desire through this chapter is to get you to assess the size of the knot you have created in your career.

Suppose that you are a shuttle driver making $10 an hour and you love everything about the company and your co-workers but you simply want to make more money. Your career evaluation definition will have to include questions such as: Do I want to always be a shuttle driver, but just make more money? Do I want a new position that will offer me more money but stay with the same company? Do I want to own the company? (Yes, I want you to think realistically but I also want you to understand that in this book I want you to think big.) Let's say the shuttle driver answered the question by stating that he wants to own the company. Good for him! There are going to be some questions that need to be answered to define his goals and ambitions of owning the company. He is going to have to work, act, and plan differently than if he were to decide he loves his job and only wants to increase his salary from $9 an hour to $12 an hour. Each goal would require different behaviors.

Step Two is divided into three separate questions sets: A, B, and C. To fully answer Step Two, we need to delve into several topics.

Step Two Question Set B

Now that you are on a roll, write down the perfect job in your current market segment or organization. If you work in sales, write down what you would consider the best job in sales. If you think of a current position in your organization or in a different company, great. If your dream job doesn't currently exist in your organization, then bullet-point between 5 and 10 aspects of a perfect position. Answer the same questions from Step Two Question Set A #5 “Describe your dream Best Job Ever” but this time you are talking about your dream job in the company you now work for or in your current market segment.

Let's return back to the story of Claire and the career workshop.

The discussion amongst the group was becoming lively. A young man, no older than 30, asked a question that I could tell was important by his very serious face and concerned tone. His question was one of the catalysts for me to begin creating the Career and Life Revolution:

“Dr. Bray, you work with lots of people. Do you know of anyone who really loves his or her job? Is it possible to have a job that you love and enjoy, while still making a good living and not working your life away?”

I am a firm believer in the idea of “no dumb questions” but I will admit this one bothered me—not that it was dumb but because it made me reflect back on certain times in my life when I had the same questions. Like the young man, most of the workshop attendees believed this was asking for something impossible from their careers.

The young man was dressed in what I am sure was his nicest suit, and I could tell he was honestly eager to learn how to climb the corporate ladder and progress in his career. His question had no malice, but it left me wondering how many of us really believe we can find a job that we like, that produces a good income, that has a larger purpose that includes working with people we enjoy. This young man had been in the working world for less than a decade and already had resigned himself to work at a job he didn't really like, maybe even hated, just so he could earn a dollar.

So he could…

• Have insurance.
• Tell people he worked at that really cool office downtown that gave him free lunch each day. (Yes, I do hear that quite often.)
• Afford to drive the nice car.
• Feel like he was keeping up with his friends by getting a job that paid more than $35,000 a year right out of college.
• Tell his parents he “managed people” and was a leader.

We all have reasons why we work—many of which are valid. But oftentimes, as I have learned from clients, we work for very different reasons. As most of us would agree, we work to pay for food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other bills. But we also work for numerous other reasons of which we may not even be aware. We work certain jobs because that may be the expectation of others—mom and dad love that you are a pharmacist because it was always their dream! Or we choose a certain career because of the self-worth we gain from our job and job title. Or we choose a job based on the social network of friends we can make at work.

I have six kids and you better believe I need insurance when they get sick or crash on their bikes and break an arm. That is a necessity at my house and I have to find a way to always have insurance. But I have learned to not make career decisions based on one benefit or perk. I can find a job with insurance in many places while there would be few jobs that would provide career fulfillment for me. I can find ways to make money, but career happiness is much more difficult to come by.

“But none of those things matter if you have bills to pay!”

One of my clients said this to me…and he wasn't the only one who has made that declaration over the years. It is a commonly repeated statement about careers and I would consider it one of the most valid. How do you balance the desire to have a dream career with all of the financial responsibilities you have in life? The argument of chasing your dreams versus being responsible is a reasonable point. But deep inside—don't you think it is possible to create a career that is able to do both: pay the bills and give meaning and fulfillment? That is what this book is all about! By answering the questions in this and other chapters, you will begin to create a plan that will map out your path to your Best Job Ever.

So if you want to run a scuba shop on the beach in Costa Rica or you want to be a vice president in corporate America, you need to have a clear vision and plan for your career. This plan will need to include a financial strategy, an understanding of your skill sets and competencies (what you are good at doing), and a dash of passion (meaning purpose and fun) to complete your career soup of success.