Restarting Requires A Mindset

Does your skill set align with the daily requirements you face for meeting or exceeding expectations in the work you do under the title your company gave you and operating under the set of guidelines the company has established? That’s when they started to laugh. You’re a talented guy, the younger partner said to me, but let us put you through a brief exercise. He dialed his assistant and asked if she could bring two senior analysts into the interview. All right, Jason, the partner said to me. This is the role we would slot you in, and here are two guys in the role, so ask them whatever you want to know about our work here. So I asked a few questions, the guys answered them, and the partner dismissed them. Now the older partner took over again. We see who you are, he said to me. We caught your energy, and we see that you’re someone who will go out there, find business deals, build a network, get the deals done, execute the deals. He pointed to the door that had just closed on the guys I had questioned. But you are not those guys, he said to me, and those guys are not you. Those guys are desk jockeys.

Dark As A Dungeon

They sit still for twelve to sixteen hours a day. They analyze numbers, they build models, they work Excel from morning to night. It taught me to listen to my inner autopilot, and it gave me clarity about the skill set I really do have. Which of your skills align well with the work assigned to you and which are underused or just not in the picture? The answer is in the alignment. Are you going to find either career satisfaction or personal fulfillment if you leave your best shot outside the office door when you go to work in the morning? If your unique skill set doesn’t align with the work you’re doing, you are wasting your time and the boss’s money. You want to know what avoiding misalignment looks like? In her late twenties she felt lost and depressed, was using painkillers, and was actually living in her parents’ basement. Kaitlyn has even added the role of cohost of The Bachelorette to her extensive résumé of successes. I did it very scared, but I did it, says Kaitlyn. Yes, it can be scary to realign yourself and your skill set, but just look at the change it created for her! If you are looking for a restart because your skill set is not clicking with your career, it’s not your skill set that needs changing. Restarting requires a mindset that won’t accept the status quo but challenges you to think in new ways. There simply is no future in a career in which you are throwing away your shot every day. If that sounds like you, start looking for restart options in areas where your skill set aligns with the actual work.

See Yourself

And that’s too bad, because the numbers you’re so good at are showing you that the workflow dysfunctions in the organization are growing worse. That’s bad news for the organization, but it is really bad for you and for your ability to achieve the career success you crave. The answer is to get out of that present position and find where and how you can apply your full skill set maximally to achieve and surpass expectations. That’s the only way you can arrive at the pinnacle of what should be your professional journey. And it opens a number of options. It could mean you’re in the wrong job, the wrong organization, or the wrong industry. Maybe you own the wrong company. On the other hand, it could mean you’re just in the wrong slot or the wrong department of an organization. If that’s the case, move over to the compliance function and leave recruiting to others. If skill set alignment is the core issue of your career dissatisfaction, keep meeting expectations at work, but start building your plan to find the right alignment of your skill set to your career and the work you’re doing. What are you afraid of? That probably includes tomorrow when your schedule looks horrific. Will you get through tomorrow? After all, you got through today.

You Wanted More

Will you succeed in this career? Will you succeed as well as your classmates, who, to hear them tell it, are succeeding by leaps and bounds? Will you succeed as well as your sister or brother, your cousin or best friend? Maybe worse, if you don’t succeed, will that be okay with you? After all, being afraid is supposed to be a driver of a great career. Don’t they tell you that the door marked fear is the one you have to walk through to success? You would plug along each day at the job, and your expectations would never veer out of range of a job is a job, and it pays the rent. But you can’t seem to get into that groove or to stop thinking about what tomorrow may bring and worrying about whether you’ll be ready for it. I could tell you that nobody is ready for what tomorrow brings, but you won’t believe it, and you’ll be right. The market is efficient to the degree to which its prices reflect all the information that is relevant and available as well as information not available but that still plays into the market. That’s the theory of market efficiency. I like to transfer that to the efficiency of being human. Human survival, like the market, reflects all the information that is relevant and available about each of us, and therefore about you. That same brain is brilliantly equipped to bring all those skills to the fore when needed. So there are two things you need to do if you fear for your future. The first is to tell yourself that being born healthy and with a brain is the ultimate gift.