Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.
—Mahatma Gandhi
It does matter what you do with the life you have been given. You might have experienced a terrible upbringing, told by teachers that you would never amount to anything, or you might have had the opposite experience, encouraged to achieve great things and loaded down with expectations about what you should be doing. We cannot change what has happened in the past. We cannot change our upbringing or wave a magic wand to take away experiences that have hurt us or damaged us in anyway. There is no going back. But what happens from here on is, in your decision, your choice, and in your power to make different. It doesn’t matter if you are a complete screw up, and you have made bad decisions and huge mistakes. Whether you have self-destructed or pushed the implode button. What is done, cannot be undone. There is, however, time to do something different, to make different choices. Regardless of your age, your life choices, or your career history, you can start afresh. There is time to step out and step up, for no other reason than because you can, and because who you are matters.
For many people trying to work out what it is that we are here to do is a major question. If you are stuck in a job you don’t like, working long hours and working extremely hard trying to prove your value to an organization that doesn’t appreciate the talent you have, the experience can be demoralizing and demotivating. Worse still is if the manager or organization doesn’t treat people as anything more than a resource to be deployed and measured. It can feel like you have no worth, no talent, and nothing that you do or say really matters. Every person who ends up believing this lie is a loss to the world. Imagine if Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, or Charles Babbage believed that they had nothing to offer. Sometimes, we can look at the greats and think that our lives don’t matter as much as theirs did, but every person has a unique and special contribution to make to the world we live in. Even if you are not the next Einstein, it may be that the part you have to play in life creates the opportunity or touch point that galvanizes the next Einstein to achieve something amazing. You might never know how much the role you play mattered in the creation of something that is awesome. A word at the right time, a smile when someone felt that no one cared, the provision of coffee that fuels the innovator, the drive in the cab to that all-important meeting, the accident that led to a happenstance. You don’t know what impact your life interacting with others will lead to and that is why you matter. It isn’t just about what you do, but who you are in every little moment that creates magic.
A Waste of Talent
Too often we play our lives as if we don’t matter and in situations where you are treated like you don’t, it is hard work trying to find your value where you aren’t valued. We might not all be presidents or leaders. We might not command the world stage or invent a world-changing product or service, but we were all put on earth for a reason. Regardless of your religious beliefs, your birth was not an accident. You are the result of billions of interactions and events that led to your conception. That isn’t luck or chance. You are here, right now, because this is the right time for you to be here. We live in a world where people are made to feel like they don’t matter and that their lives are worthless than someone else’s by fate of fortune and circumstance. The levels of depression are higher now than at any other time, even during the war years. Individuals feel that they are stuck in jobs because there appears to be no other option. The War for Talent is only being fought for the top two per cent of employees in an organization, which leaves 98 percent of people with talents that are ignored by the organization where we spend a large proportion of our lives. What a waste. Personally, I think that performance management and talent management in organizations spend most of its time on wasting the talent that is available to the organization. Strategic Talent Management has such a limited focus on future leaders’ programs that it forgets that the rest of their employee population has a huge amount of talent that isn’t even close to being tapped into, and even worse, is being destroyed as people lose the opportunity and confidence to be everything that they are made to be. Imagine if you owned a property where you only invested in one room. Of all the rooms in the entire house there is only this one room that ever gets decorated or maintained. What happens to the rest of the rooms in the house? To begin with, not a lot, they might get a bit dusty, and fusty, but they are still usable and serve their purpose. Now, fast forward five years, what does the room look like now, or how about in ten years? Unrecognized talent in people is like the unused rooms in the house. Without investment or use, the talent sits collecting dust, and if skills and knowledge aren’t invested in, they begin to decay.
Organizations should invest in all their people, and although some people who are key strategic talent may get a greater level of investment, it would be criminal to leave any talent unused or underutilized. Some organizations are waking up to that fact and realizing that they need to prioritize people development, but for many organizations, developing their employees isn’t even on the agenda, let alone a priority. If an organization were to manage its other resources the same way it manages its people, it wouldn’t be in business very long, and the shareholders would be appalled at the small percentage of return on assets. The problem is that people aren’t like capital equipment. For a start, we aren’t standardized and we also evolve over time, so the person an organization recruits will not be the same as the person who is still working for the organization three years later. There are also a lot of variables outside the control of the organization; the external environmental factors that impact an individual’s performance are very difficult to scan for. A rogue boyfriend, a pregnant wife, a cheating partner, the loss of a loved one—don’t need to be factored into the risk analysis for a piece of equipment.
You Need to Own Your Talent Development
The emphasis for liberating talent, therefore, falls on the individual. For the majority of employees, the only way in which their true potential can be released is either if they realize for themselves how great they are or they are fortunate enough to be managed by a rare breed, a line manager who is interested in developing their people. The first stage of course is to take ownership of your talent development. Firstly, you have talent, even if you don’t know the full extent of it yet. Secondly, it is within your power to develop it. The rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the growth of forums, how-to videos, and free training activities means that you do not need a student loan big enough to buy a house to develop your knowledge or skills set. What you do need is a determination that you will develop yourself, and a willingness to put time resource aside to achieve it. If you are working two jobs and have a family to look after, this is hard. I’m not going to pretend that adding one more thing to your million and one things to do isn’t burdensome. If you do choose to go to college and study for a qualification or attend a night school course, it eats into your personal down time and your personal finances. Therefore, investing in your talent is a decision you have to make, realizing that there is a cost associated with that decision. It might mean several years of struggling by, making sacrifices to get where you want to get to. However, if you choose not to make that commitment, then you are choosing to stand still. Not making a decision is still a choice. Waiting for someone else to develop you might result in the slim chance that an organization will be willing to invest in you. In my experience though, it is usually those people who invest in themselves that attack investment from organizations.
There are many reasons why you wouldn’t take part in self-development activities, and most of them are valid reasons. Very often when developing individuals, I find that they feel paralyzed by their circumstances, feeling stuck, and with no options. We aren’t taught how to identify, develop, and manage our talent potential and managers are rarely taught how to identify, develop, and manage the talent potential of the people they are managing. One of the first things an individual needs to develop is an understanding of what and how to develop the areas they need to develop. My personal view on this is that it requires communication with other people. Mentoring has often got a bad reputation, mainly because executive coaches like to point out the difference between mentoring and coaching with the emphasis on how great coaching is as an intervention, and coaching is a great intervention, if you have access to a coach. But first things first, a mentor can be anyone. Ideally, it will be someone who has some sway and influence in helping you achieve your dreams. This might be a senior leader in your organization or someone with a good reputation in your industry. Equally, it might be a former teacher that you found helpful at high school, a valued ex-employer who helped you get your foot on a ladder, a friend of the family, or a respected person in your community. There is no one size or shape of a mentor that makes them right or wrong. What does make them right for you is that they are someone you get on with personally, that they will give you wise council, they have experience that you can learn from (even if it’s not directly related to your field) and, in an ideal world, they have connections which can open doors for you. Finally, they must be willing to give time for mentoring you, meeting for coffee and conversation on a regular basis. By coopting a mentor at the beginning of your development journey, you will be able ask questions, get support, and receive guidance, which helps with the next steps.
Finding Talent Directions
In Career Tool#2, we explored how to identify strengths, but strengths are only part of the equation. You can be very good at something, even enjoy doing it, but you wouldn’t want to make it a full-time job. For example, I am very good at lecturing, and, when I am lecturing I enjoy the interaction with students. However, although I occasionally work at the local university, it’s not what I want to do as a career. There is a lot of peripheral things around the teaching profession that I don’t enjoy at all, and I don’t feel a calling to be a full-time lecturer. Although not always the case, talent directions are usually linked to those things that we are passionate about; but very often passion is left for our spare time or dreams and rarely considered as being a career option. When I work as a career coach with people, I am often struck by how our dreams are sucked out of us from an early age, and we consign our dreams to get a proper job. It seems strange to me that we give up on doing what we dream of doing because it isn’t a real option and yet, there are people in world who are doing what you want to do.
From the age of seven, I wanted nothing more than to write. I’d spend hours writing in exercise books, making up stories and even, during my teenage years, writing poetry. Whether it was that I had watched too much Wonder Woman on television, I had a dream to be a journalist and drive a burgundy open top car. I don’t know why the car was important, but it was part of my vision for my career. Throughout my education, I pursued this dream. I sought out opportunities to get involved with journalism, doing work experience at the local newspaper, and even interviewing the then British Prime Minister, John Major, when he came to visit my school. I was focused and determined on my goal. Then, during the summer between school and university, I worked at the Sunday Times, a well-respected newspaper in the UK. After I finished my work experience, I realized that, if this was the pinnacle of my chosen career, it wasn’t for me. I went off to university without a plan, having laid down writing as a career choice and no longer clear on what future I was working toward. I fell into a sales career after university and then made a career change into people development. It was only when I began my own business that I started writing again. Nearly twenty years had passed without me doing any writing beyond that required for writing reports and presentations. It began with blogging, then a conversation with a colleague at the university led to a journal article, which was published, and then another, and another, and here were are, I am a published author, this is my day job, and I am living the driving. Okay, so the burgundy open top car is a Toyota Auris and its Tokyo Red. My path may have diverged from the one I had planned, but everything that I have done in the intervening years makes the writer I am today.
It could be argued that I got lucky, but those twenty years were filled with ups and downs, risks taken, failure and, at times, despair about whether I would ever do anything my life. I speak as someone who decided at the age of 30, well into a successful career, that if I was going to live my life, then I was going to be Carrie Foster instead of do a job. It didn’t happen overnight, and there were times where my nose was so close to the hitting a brick wall, I wondered if I had destroyed everything. The question I ponder is whether it was worth it? as I sit here at my writing table, with an eye on a deadline, looking out at my garden, I am content that it was.
We Only Have One Life, and Yours Matters
Our lives are such a short period of time in the scheme of things, and our working lives take up a huge amount of the time we have on earth. If you are going to live this life, I mean really LIVE this life, why would you not want to spend your life doing something that makes you feel fulfilled? Why would you not choose to spend your life being everything you could be? Settling for the second best not only robs us of our opportunity to rise to our greatest level of potential, it robs the world of our brilliance played out in full. This isn’t something that is the preserve of the rich and lucky. My life as an author has not been handed to me on a plate. It was hard work, and I lost many battles along the way. Some people, they do get lucky, and they do achieve things with seemingly little effort and, yes those who come from a wealthy background have the luxury of making choices that the rest of us do not have. So, if you are from a disadvantaged background, the valleys are deeper and mountains are harder to climb. There will be times when you will wonder whether the effort required to demand that your life is worth something is too high a price to pay. I can only speak from experience in telling you that it is worth fighting for.
Another thing to consider is the wider society in which we live in. Our wrong job might be the right job for someone else. By remaining in it, not only are we miserable, we are also potentially stopping someone else from stepping into their perfect role. My best friend loves working with animals, especially reptiles; that type of work would be my idea of hell. It might seem strange to you, but there are people out there who love what you hate doing. There are people born to be administrators, who love nothing better than creating order. Just because I get no pleasure from it, doesn’t mean no one does. Equally, people will look at my chosen profession and can’t think of anything worse.
You have been given a precious gift. The potential you have is too amazing to keep hidden, and your life too important to spend it doing something you hate. It is time to step out and take ownership of your talent potential, own your destiny, and live life.
What are you going to do with the life you have been given?
What can you do, but live?
You have been given breath and strength
And every day live.
—Paraphrased from Matt Redman (2006)
Manage Your Career Tool #5 – Purposeful Endeavor
A good question to ask yourself if you feel stuck in knowing what your purpose is, is: “What would you do if money, geography, knowledge, and skills were no barrier?”
Usually, the answer to this question produces a destination that is close to what you really want to do. By removing the stuff that gets in the way, it becomes easier to shape the passion that lies in your heart, to unearth what really matters. You might not have a job role in mind, just a random collection of things “I want to work with helping people to . . .” but reflecting on these ideas will help you begin to shape what it is you were put here to do. I encourage you to keep revisiting these ideas and working on them until the random thoughts become a concrete idea. Once you have a clearer idea of what your purpose is, you can begin working on a plan to make it a reality.