If life is a game, how do you play it? The rules seem to change on a daily basis. You're not even sure who the players are. You work and live in an economy where job turnover now averages less than 3.5 years and frequent news headlines announce layoffs of 7,000 people at a time. Your car salesman this past weekend was last month's airline pilot. Your financial planner is now in chef school. Your organization is being led by its third chief executive officer in two years. Stress levels are high. Your competition is working harder to grab your best customers. Your organization is asking you to do more with less. Your school and community are asking for more of your time. Your family life is out of balance. As you struggle to get a grip on the rules, you wonder what your next move should be.
You're at a turning point. You know you want to make a change. You've thought about the direction you want to go, but for some reason you haven't taken action. Do you want to move up, in, sideways, or even out? Or do you want to make a subtler move—one to simply enhance your current position? Whichever you choose, you know that every move you make is important if you want to succeed. It's important because there's not much time to test your ideas. Life is moving fast. You'd prefer to be on the next promotion list rather than the layoff list. You'd like to be more visible. You'd enjoy bigger challenges. You're searching for a boost, for meaning, for happiness. Whether It's Your Move: Dealing Yourself the Best Cards in Life and Work you're a seasoned manager, entrepreneur, recent retiree, salesperson, stay-at-home parent, outplaced executive, recent graduate, immigrant, or part-time professional, you want to make the right moves for you. You want to be an impact player in the game.
It might be difficult to think of yourself as an impact player. When you look at the playing field, it seems large, cold, and lonely. The players look different, too. If you're a Baby Boomer or a retiree, you could be feeling too old to play well. If you're a recent graduate or immigrant, you could be feeling inadequate on new turf. If you've been out of work for a long time, you could be feeling lost. If you're a full-time parent, you could be feeling isolated. All of these feelings could deter you, but you won't let them because you will use your strengths to overcome your fears.
Perhaps you haven't thought much about what makes you strong. Chances are, however, when you make moves in life, you're operating from an innate sense of what you do well. Everyone has unique ways to reach their goals. That's the reason people make moves differently, and that's all right. As an adult, you've collected unique life experiences to take out on that field with you. Use those strengths as well as your heart and mind to get comfortable on the playing field. Be a genuine player. You'll soon see that any game played successfully is played for real—with wisdom, courage, strategy, and timing. There are no false moves: There are only moves that are true for you.
The first time through a game, you're often testing your skill, but by the second and third time, you've learned from earlier mistakes. With experience, you win more frequently. As you plan your future in a fast-paced environment, trust your personal wisdom. Traditionally, society gives people credit for being wise when they are very old. Why not break from tradition and use your wisdom now?
There is indeed a wisdom for every age. The college student has new wisdom with each class, the parent with each child, the employee with each project, the senior with each year. It's important to listen to the wisdom of the experienced people in your life and to be energized by the wisdom of each day's growth.
Melissa, a registered nurse and graduate student in nutrition, keeps a journal of things she learns from her patients as she makes her internship rounds. Different from the official, required medical reports, her journal entries remind her of the humanity of her patients. She doesn't want to forget that. Ralph, an art gallery owner and father of two, is learning daily from the different behaviors of his two sons: One an introspective, thoughtful child, the other a nonstop talker and instigator. Ralph applies his learned tolerance to his difficult art buyers. Penny, a vibrant marketing director for a medical specialty clinic, brings eight years of marketing experience in pharmaceutical sales to her job. Her daily learning, though, comes from listening to the patient services staff members at each clinic who teach her what it's like to be on the inside.
Betty, a retired homemaker, combines the experience of both years and days in her life philosophy. When she rises each morning, she says out loud, “Well, new day, what am I going to do with you? What will I learn from you today?” At day's end, she takes her answer to heart as she looks forward to the next one. Ken, a widowed part-time worker in his early seventies, reads a daily prayer or spiritual poem every morning at the kitchen table while his toast browns and his coffee perks. People who know Ken say that he lives the words of his poems. Betty and Ken have ageless wisdom.
Your wisdom grows in unexpected moments: Your child turns to you and offers an insight on your mood in a way no adult ever has. Your most difficult client offers a critical comment that illuminates a flaw you've been avoiding too long. Your spouse tells you something that you cherish at the end of a long day. Your newest employee solves a problem on the shipping dock because you finally took a moment to really listen. Your reflection in a mirror tells you the truth. When you add the moments together, you realize that wisdom doesn't involve much talking at all. Wisdom involves a lot of listening.
The right move is not always the easiest move. Today's winners are making choices in challenging surroundings. Seldom in our history has the workplace been more unstable or the home front more frantic, thanks in large part to lightning-fast shifts in the economy and technology. You want to be able to meet the challenges with courage and confidence.
If you look, you will find people playing courageously everywhere. Robin, a sixty-two-year-old career strategist, realized that she needed a rest after working at a high pace for twenty-two years helping others find direction. She had helped clients take time off and now thought about taking a year for herself. Robin remembers, “At first, I was afraid a year would be too long—that people would forget me and that my business would die. I had so much of my identity tied up in my work. What would life be like as an unemployed middle-aged woman in the suburbs?” She chose not to listen to that frightened internal voice and courageously took off a full year. She decided to do the things she had long yearned to do: She visited national parks, appeared as a movie extra, and took cooking classes. Afterward, she felt renewed and enthusiastic about returning to work.
Gary, 45, a small town stockbroker, needing a new client base, bravely accepted a position miles away from his Midwestern home to work in the financial field with a commission-only base. The new location in the southern United States was both a cultural and distance shock for his close-knit family, but his charm and knowledge helped the new community warm to his financial advice. He became active in the Rotary, the church, and the arts council. His family is now one of the most popular in town, and his business is thriving. With a newfound southern lilt, Gary laughs, “There's a fine line between courage and desperation. As a native in my small town, people were slow to share their financial dealings with me. I was someone they grew up with. But to take the new job, I had to leave behind my wife and baby for a few months while I found us a place to live. That took the most courage. Once there, working in a cloud of anonymity was an advantage; I wasn't a threat. In the new location, I didn't do anything differently than back home, but the strange environment helped me position myself as an expert.”
J.J., twenty-four, a motivational speaker, played hockey with a passion until an accident during a game caused him to be quadriplegic at sixteen. Although he broke his neck, he overcame the odds not only by living but also by gaining more movement than the doctors ever believed he would. His will to walk again was strong and buoyed him for some time. His defining moment, though, came when a specialized hospital in Colorado deemed that there was no more it could do for him. Doctors told him to go home. Outside the hospital that day, he saw a dog running with his master; for a long moment, he felt that the dog was better off than he was. The dog could run and play. On a final goodbye trip to Pike's Peak, however, he adjusted his thinking. The majesty of the mountain renewed his perspective on life, and he courageously accepted life in a wheelchair. He'll tell you that he never really considered himself courageous. He will say, “I just kept thinking, this is what I have to do to move forward. This is what I have to do with my life. I won't let being in a wheelchair get me down.” J.J. is attending classes to professionalize his motivational speaking career. Everyone in the class has more work experience, but his energy and courage shine through, and he motivates them all.
Perhaps you're contemplating a major move, as Gary did. Maybe you, like Robin need a long break, or perhaps you're restructuring your life after adversity, like J.J. You could also be like Melissa, Penny, Betty, or Ken—someone who wants to stay where he or she is but not stagnate. Like Ralph, you could be a busy parent who just wants to make the most of your current position or life situation and your chance to excel. Making a move doesn't always mean a change of career or locale. Many moves are internal strategies that propel you forward. For Robin, it was acknowledging that she needed a full year away, for Gary it was needing client trust, and for J.J. it was accepting his condition while atop a mountain. In every case, the inspiration to change began internally.
If you're like most people, you value the rewards of personal growth and living a fulfilling life. To reap those rewards, you don't want to flounder too long with trials and errors. Your best plan is to blend creative inspiration with solid guidance and strategy. Think about the strategies you've used in the past—the times you've been a major player in a change on the job or in your personal life. What was the change? What was your role? What problems did you encounter? Consider the times in your life when you were caught between the status quo and change. What did you do and why? Did you have a plan? Did you listen to that inner positive voice or the negative one? Did you think calmly through the change?
When nine miners were stranded in a collapsed and flooded Pennsylvania coal mine in July 2002, they survived through strategy—not panic. It was a strategy to work as one that kept them alive. When two of the men experienced chest pains, the others grouped together and calmed everyone so nobody would have a heart attack. They shared the meager remains of a lunch pail that they found floating in the floodwater. They used their strengths—humor, experience, and technical knowledge—to think and rethink their situation. It was strategy above ground that saved them as well; someone thought to bang on a nearby pipe to get an accurate count of trapped miners and to send oxygen down first before drilling a rescue shaft. Strategy is guided inspiration: it is an all-important part of a successful move.
With today's fast-paced technology permeating every aspect of your life, you struggle to make the right moves quickly enough to make a difference. You no longer have the luxury of time to ease into change. You want to thrive without losing your sense of direction. If you remember the rotary telephone, the typewriter, or handwritten school papers, you've probably been amazed by the onslaught of handheld telecommunications and computer technology that have sped up the pace of just about everything we communicate.
Commerce, the economy, trends, travel, family life, and education—all of these aspects of life have new time frames. People take more twenty-four-hour getaway vacations than ever before. Families are eating many meals in restaurants. Fashion and dress codes change as rapidly as the stock market. Corporate decisions are based on the rapidly changing habits of the consumer or the global market.
Great moves happen with a great sense of timing. In the Pennsylvania mine incident, the quick thinking of one of the trapped men saved nine additional miners. In the first seconds of the turmoil and the flooding water, he picked up a phone to warn a second crew to get out. He knew what to do when. The fast pace of the world, just like the fast pace of the floodwater in the mine, doesn't have to get in the way of a clear, planned, intelligent use of time.
You can plan clearly and intelligently even when your routine is jarred by outside events. For example, Billie had been a line worker in a factory for thirteen years when the plant was forced into a major layoff and she found herself one of eighty-five employees without a job. She had been happy there; a little bored, perhaps, but she had never felt a sense of urgency to change. However, after losing her job, she knew she didn't want to do factory work any longer; she was thirty years old and wanted to make a move. Looking back on that period, Billie recalls that having no options made her brave. Even so, she remembers driving around in the parking lot of the local junior college, gathering up the courage to enter. Now an admissions adviser at that very junior college, she helps many who have been jarred out of their pattern as she once was. They have a choice about whether or not to do something different. Billie says now that she feels sorry for people who come to that moment of choice but don't take the step. They choose to stay in a life that they really don't want anymore. Billie firmly believes that the worst day in the professional life that you've chosen is better than your best day in a job that you hate.
Just as there are no false moves in a successful game, neither are there false players. Successful players are real people who are able to build lives and careers that are meaningful and rewarding. Throughout this book, you'll meet a number of people like yourself, learning with them in various situations. You'll also meet people who are different but who will provide valuable information from which you can learn. You'll learn from the first-hand experiences of the real people we've interviewed as well as from The Players who progress in their own unique game plans throughout the book. The Players represent composites of people like you who want to make moves.
These players represent a few of the many people who will help you learn what moves to make and when to make them. Finally, we know you'll enjoy meeting the people in the Key Player Profiles, successful real people in different work and life areas who share how they've overcome challenges and made moves that led them to where they are now. They will inspire you through their personal paths to success.