How To Get What You Want Out Of Your Professional Life

You live at the most exciting of times: the dawn of a new era when change and opportunity are constant in professional life. If you’re truly committed to working towards your goals, you can develop the strategies and tactics that will deliver a meaningful and fulfilled life – you can learn to live life on your terms.

But no matter what you have been told, living in an era of change also means a successful career no longer comes with the purchase of your degree. Getting what you want out of life demands you take responsibility for your professional destiny now. Achieving success takes time and it’s already later than you think.

The Facts Of Professional Life

You’re likely to change jobs about every four years for the span of what will be a half-century worklife. In that time, you will quite possibly experience three or more distinct careers. So, in reality, your future is going to be full of unexpected twists and turns that will require some pretty savvy navigation skills.

Don’t Drink The Kool-Aid

You know people who drank the Kool-Aid of job security in return for blind loyalty, and you can see where it got them. Persist in believing that loyalty will be rewarded with job security and you will be an employer’s ideal pawn. Then one day you’ll look back on a career that was just a series of jobs that kept you psychologically shackled to a string of employers who greedily chewed you up and happily spat you out.

You need to replace outdated ideas with a commitment to a new philosophy of professional success: enlightened self-interest an approach that puts you and your long-term economic survival at the center of your career plans.

The Wisdom Of Self-Interest

If you want learn to get what you want out of life, start to think of yourself and the professional skills that define who you are as a professional commodity. Then think of this commodity as an economic entity, as MeInc: a corporation that, like any other, must operate solely in the best interests of its long-term economic success.

When you make the management of your career a more business-like proposition you dramatically improve your odds of living life on your own terms.

MeInc, The Engine Of Your Success

As MeInc, you need products and services that evolve to meet the changing needs of your customers. So just as a company has departments you’ll have ongoing initiatives to consistently meet the changing needs of your target market and keep your company profitable. You’ll need initiatives for

Product Research & Development

To keep your skills in sync with market demands.

Strategic Planning

To develop strategies and tactics for professional growth and diversification.

Accounting & Finance

To invest in the tools that will deliver your emancipation.

Marketing Communications

To establish a credible, desirable and most importantly, a discoverable brand.

To survive and succeed over the span of a long worklife, MeInc must consistently develop, differentiate and sell these skills to a constantly changing customer base: employers who hire the current manifestation of the professional commodity that is you.

Life’s Most Critical Survival And Success Skills

You know just how hard it is to find a job and the statistics say that you might well have suffer through 12 or more job and career changes over the years, so how come no one ever told you at school or at college that successful careers don’t happen by accident?

Looked at objectively, you can recognize that life’s most critical survival and success skills are career management skills. This includes resume creation, networking, job search, interview and negotiation skills, making a job secure, winning promotions, and strategizing job and career changes. These are the skills that will allow you to live life on your own terms by seeing the professional world more clearly and making strategic career moves on your timetable.

Make Your Life Shine

Professional success is determined by your ability to set a course and navigate the twists and turns along the way. It’s determined by your ability to survive and evolve in response to change, and it’s determined by calendars not clocks. But life also has a way of whizzing past while you watch “reality shows” instead – it’s always later than you think.

To make your dreams come true, start living those dreams today byinvesting yourself fully in the activities that will make Me, Inc. successful and help you get what you want out of life.

The P.E.P. Talk

This article is part of our P.E.P. Talk Series. Over the next month, some of the brightest and best authors, business professionals, and coaches are coming together to share their valuable advice for breaking free of “The Golden Handcuff Effect” so you can take full ownership of your careers and experience Professional Emancipation.

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