Know Exactly What You Want
It sounds limiting to choose a specialty as a professional, and often, it sounds even more so to narrow your focus as a pre-professional. We’re often told the value of being well-rounded and take that to mean it’s wrong or limiting to own a specialty in something, or to express a specific preference about where we want to be in five years, one year, or six months. As a career coach, I’m here to share that there is power in knowing exactly what you want and owning it, and I’m not alone.
During my tenure as the first full-time career coach at The New York Public Library’s Job Search Central, I had the pleasure of introducing several of John Crant’s workshops. If you aren’t from New York City, you might not recognize his name, but he is an excellent coach, speaker, and human being who translated his background in corporate recruiting to teach job seekers how to do the same thing for themselves. On one evening, he asked the audience for a show of hands of how many people knew exactly what they wanted. Guess what percentage of the audience raised their hands. It was around 5%.
We were at 34th and Madison in the midst of the great recession. Even at that, beyond wanting to get off unemployment, hardly anyone there knew exactly what they wanted, and these were people who had come to Manhattan from across the country and the world to be there to do . . . something, but what?
Dare to Dream
When I sit down with people, they often will say what they want right off the bat. Sure, I get the initial, “Oh, I don’t really know.” But when it becomes clear that nobody they know will find out, people eventually come out with whatever “silly” dream they happen to have. While I can’t share the details of every session, I can share this much: these dreams aren’t particularly over the top or silly.
Usually, the problem is we think that if we tell people close to us what we really want to do, they’ll laugh or say we can’t do it. Worse yet, committing to a goal and failing could end the dream.
Defining Success and Failure
If you’re considering anything remotely competitive, which pretty much everything is, can you be rejected? Of course, but that’s not failure. The minute you give up on your dreams or give up on yourself, that’s potential failure, but when we get right down to it, you might experience some bumps in the road, false starts, or obstacles, but that rarely means you can’t fulfill a dream you have.
Adam Gorlitzky is paralyzed from the waist down and he recently broke a marathon world record. Yes, he had an exoskeleton suit, but in order to get that and to achieve that goal, he had something we all can have: determination. He also had a clear goal.
Plus, I could provide tons of examples of famous people who were all told that they were “failures” and never could go on and pursue their dreams. I won’t bother here because this YouTube video does it better than I ever could.
It’s actually hard to totally fail.
When it comes to success, it’s important to define for yourself what that looks like and feels like. The naysayers in your life will always be happy to point out that you’re not doing as well as someone else. If you get a Masters degree, someone else has a PhD. If you get an executive position at a Fortune 500 company, someone they know will be in the top 50 companies or in a higher position. So what? Who cares? What matters is what you want. What someone else decides to say that makes you feel like garbage isn’t your concern.
Simple Wins
As humans, we strive for a sense of mastery. This is a concept typically studied in developmental psychology and most of us associate it with early development, but it persists throughout the lifespan. It feels good to do something well and all of us feel a boost when something that started out as a difficult task becomes easier—-if it’s something that matters to us.
If you’re like me, you might be great at business operations, but hate using those skills. However, learning a new chord on the ukulele is magical!
When you know exactly what you want, you can act on your priorities and make informed choices about which special projects make sense for you to work on, which classes are worth taking, which people are worth networking with, and what’s worth trying again. Also, it makes it easier to craft those intimidating things like responses to “Tell me about yourself,” resume objectives, and elevator pitches.
Lastly, having a concrete long-term goal means you can map your path to success and celebrate all those steps that bring you closer to that goal because you probably are already doing a lot of things every day and don’t even realize it yet.
You Are the One You’re Waiting For
Nobody else will ever be you. Even though it’s probably hard to believe when you spill coffee all over yourself and run late for every meeting you have scheduled, it is actually a huge gift to be yourself because you’re unique and you have gifts that only you can offer. The key is figuring out what those are and how to share them.
It’s great to have role models and other people to look up to. We all need that, and those people can be great sources of inspiration, but trying to be a copy of them is always going to leave you wanting. Oprah is the famous influencer she is because she embraced her unique qualities. The same goes for Lady Gaga, Lucille Ball, or any number of other famous people. It’s not about being classically beautiful, being the “smartest” in a specific way, or the “best” at something. It’s about figuring out how to make what you have work. Also, lest we forget, most of us really don’t want to be famous, and that’s okay too. You can still be successful. For my part, I’d rather not have paparazzi camping out in my backyard.
If you want to figure out what you really want, start thinking about what that would look and feel like to you. Be as specific as possible. If you want to take your journey to the next level, consider setting up some career coaching sessions.
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