know about yourself – your strengths, character, passions and principles – and match them up with a vision for your future.
Having a long-term vision for your career gives you focus. It helps you to come up with short term goals and plan your longer term career as well as respond positively to opportunities that come your way.
A study in the 1970s in America asked students about their future goals. Only a tiny percentage had a vision of their future over the coming years and an even smaller percentage had written their goals down. Years later the researchers returned and discovered that those students who had written down their goals had achieved more material and career success than all the other students put together.
Goals start with a big vision. What are the things you want to do, be and have in your career? Let your mind roam free and brainstorm some ideas.
one minute wonder Look to the past for clues to the future. Come up with three to five times in your life when you felt totally successful. Write them down. Describe what you did that made you succeed and what made you feel successful. What could you add into your vision?
“The future you see is the future you get”
Robert G Allen, author of One Minute Millionnaire
• Do a ‘brain dump’. Write down all the job options you have ever considered. Now rank them in order of desirability.
• Think about the skills and knowledge you enjoy using. What industries and jobs use these?
• Create your ideal day. Who would be involved? What would you do? How would it begin? Where would you go?
• Design your perfect environment. Where would you be? What people would you have around you?
• Consider lesses and mores. What could you do in future to create less of what you don’t want and more of what you do want in your life?
Spend time doing this and ideas start to flow. Think way out into the future. Where do you want to be in your career 20 years from now or 30 years from now?
Don’t censor yourself when you first want to do this. Think about all the things you would be proud to achieve in your career. The only limitations are ones you’ve created in your mind. Ok, you can’t be an Olympic champion diver at 80 probably, but many other visions are feasible and therefore potentially achievable.
Give yourself a vision and it will provide a focus point for you to guide your whole career.
Having set a big vision for your future, you can start breaking it down into goal or outcomes. Decide your short and long term goals and make them SMART.
Breaking your vision down into smaller goals means that you can use them as milestones over the coming years. This makes your goals achievable. SMART goals are:
• S = Specific. What you want specifically. Be as detailed as possible. Where, when, how, and with whom do you want this?
• M = Measurable. How will you know when you have reached your goal? What is going to be your evidence of success?
• A = Achievable. What actions will you need to take to achieve these goals? Give them more time? Gain more resources?
one minute wonder A great starting point when you first set your goals is to ask. “How is it possible that I don’t have it now?” If you want it so much what is it that you need to do or change to get it? This question will throw up very useful answers.
“Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor” BC Forbes
• R = Realistic. What makes these goals possible and probable? Do you need to change anything?
• T = Timed. If you attach a time to your goals it will make you much more focused on taking action.
Have a guess at when you would expect to reach those outcomes: six months, one year, two years, 10 years, 20 years? The ideal situation is to end up with a balance of long and short term goals.
Pick out the four most important goals for you this year. Write down why you absolutely will achieve them. Be clear, concise and positive. Tell yourself why you’re sure you can reach those outcomes and why it’s important that you do.
What will your goals allow you to do? Think about what purpose they serve. What will you gain or lose if you achieve them? It takes effort to take action over a long period of time. Are you willing to make sacrifices in other parts of your life?
Remember that goals have to be really desirable and compelling, otherwise you are more likely to give up early.
Make sure your goals are SMART, which means specific, measurable, achievble, realistic and timed.
A plan is great, but nothing can happen unless you take the first step, and then another. What are some things you can do today, this week, this month, this year to produce the results? Every journey, however long, starts with a single step.
Having set yourself some goals, the secret is to start taking action as quickly as possible on them. Identify your first steps.
1 Ask yourself, what is the gap between your current situation and what you want to achieve? Will it take training, discipline, study? What would you have to do first to accomplish each goal?
case study Ben decided on a 10-year goal for his career. The first actions he took were to write down details of what he wanted to achieve in terms of his qualifications, job title and degree. He also made a list of the skills, attitudes and beliefs he would need to have in order to achieve what he wanted. Then he made a list of how he had sabotaged himself in the past and what he could do to solve these patterns of behaviour. Because the job he wanted was in a different work area, he also asked his boss if he could do some work shadowing in another department in order to gain some new skills. This gave him valuable experience with direct relevance to his long-term goal.
“Strong, deeply rooted desire is the starting point of all achievement” Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich
2 Now decide on the smallest action that can immediately commit you to your plan. Is it applying for a course? Ringing a friend for information? Writing your CV?
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a complete plan and some of your later steps are a little hazy when you start out to achieve your new career vision. You can fill in the later steps as you go on in your career. The important thing is to commit to heading off in the right direction. If necessary, you can always revise some of the milestones along the way.
Think of a first step you could take immediately for each goal.
Nobody can make things happen by being passive. It is no good setting wonderful goals without doing anything about them. Equally it is pointless just doing one thing. Spending a lot of time getting to know what you want will help you commit 100% to going after what you want to achieve.
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