Career Cartography: Mapping Your Way to Success
A friend was recently lamenting the fact that they felt “stuck” in their current job…
Feeling that their day-to-day activities had become uninspiring with little to suggest that the light at the end of this long tunnel would ever appear. When I asked them if they could visualize an image of their successful future self – they struggled and then followed with “it really doesn’t matter because I wouldn’t know how to get there anyway.”
This is something I see quite often – good, smart people who feel rudderless, having little direction and without a vision of success. And feeling worse that they wouldn’t have a clue how to approach that vision for themselves
As I mentioned in my prior post, “Your Definition of Success: An Inside-Out Approach,” understanding your own version of success is important – particularly when it is your definition, representing your values and interests rather than those of others’. Getting there is possible by using a three-step process:
Work Backward
Establish Interim Goals
Plan the Implementation
Work backward from the desired destination
A technique that can be effective in determining steps toward your ultimate goal is to work backwards. If you can envision yourself “there” then you can also assess whatever obstacles exist between you “here” and you “there” - what Gabriele Oettingen defines as “mental contrasting”. The resulting path becomes clearer and more defined.
A critical part of this exercise is to ask oneself repeatedly, “what needs to happen just before achieving this?”, to correctly identify that you are creating the appropriate set of steps. This also reveals a critical aspect of the process, where you are right now – for the result is knowing where you want to go, but also your starting point – what work you need to do, your mind state to do it and what resources you have (and what resources you lack).
Establish interim goals
It is important that we do not confuse activity with progress – and even with the destination mapping identified, there is still the risk that we default into our day-to-day mindset our business as momentum – when we haven’t moved forward toward our successful self. This is where interim goals can be helpful. If we can break down larger objectives into smaller, manageable waypoints, our daily work can be integrated into our larger plan.
These interim goals must be clearly defined and relevant to the journey. They must also be achievable and measurable – why bother setting goals that could never be achieved? That only leads to disappointment and frustration. They should be “stretches” – effort and growth producing with some metric attached – can you quantify what the goal would involve? Finally, they should be time bound with realistic deadlines – determined outside of any prescribed external views. This is our own journey.
These waypoints must have some connectivity – logically sequential to match our mapping. They should also be designed to build upon one another, creating momentum that builds additional energy to foster process.
Plan for implementation
Moving forward requires action plans for each waypoint. Remember the consideration of our starting point and existing resources? This is where we consider where and when those resources would be deployed. This affords an opportunity to contemplate what we might do if things do not go exactly to plan. One interim goal might, after doing some work, be unrealistic in the then current circumstances – what do we do? Start over? Or is there an alternative route we can take – one that we might have considered at the beginning of the process – that would solve the problem.
Obviously, some of this work can only be done once the process is underway – so it is critical that we schedule regular reviews – to assess how things are going and to adjust waypoints and re-evaluate the mapping to match the existing reality – resulting from our experience and learning to that point.
Some might say that this is not only daunting but also sets us up for disappointment if our journey takes longer (see “The Perils of Imposed Timelines) or becomes unachievable. True, this is a risk – but we also must guard ourselves against the defeatist attitude of accepting our current situation “as is”- as Thomas Edison once said, “I haven’t failed, I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Remember that all of this is possible and within our control, all of it - the design, planning and implementation. We also control how we react to our progress – by celebrating our wins, our completion of interim goals as real progress and use this as motivation to spur us forward.
