Plan Your Career From Here

Barbara Mistick: It's the end of the career track as you know it. Organizations today are going to need employees to be flexible in their career tracks, to really look at, perhaps, taking a sideway move or maybe even moving down and then moving back up.

Rachel Salaman: But career flexibility doesn't come easy. Sticking with what we know, and have always done, can seem like the safest way to be, even if it's not bringing us much joy. Entrepreneur Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones told me some of the reasons he hears for people "staying put."

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: "Well I've got to pay the mortgage, I've got kids, I've got responsibility." That tends to be the justification that people put forward for why they're not chasing their dreams, and I call that "survival mentality."

So there'll be many people sitting doing their job and they absolutely hate it, it's destroying their very soul, but they feel they have no choice, so therefore they've become survivalists. So, it's a perspective of only seeing what's in front of you, rather than having a perspective of a horizon, a future.

Rachel Salaman: In this podcast we'll explore ways to look to that horizon: to see beyond day-to-day survival to decide where you want to go in your career – and plan realistic ways to get there. That way, you get to follow your passions, in a purposeful career that also pays the bills!

Barbara Mistick: What we see today is so many surveys that show the percentage of people who are not engaged in their job.

Rachel Salaman: Barbara Mistick again – now President of the U.S. National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Barbara Mistick: If you can tap into your passion for work, then your level of engagement changes and your ability to be successful changes.

Rachel Salaman: So a big question to start with is, what's your dream? What will it mean for you to be a "success"?

April Rinne: We have been taught, on so many levels, that we will only really matter to the world, if you will, if we have more, more, more, more, more.

Rachel Salaman: That's leading futurist April Rinne, author of "Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change."

April Rinne: "I need to earn more income, I need to have more power, I need to have more love, more likes, more followers. More, just more." We're obsessed with it, and yet it's mostly making us miserable. When we're after more, or fixated, so to speak, on more, we will actually never find enough.

Yet, if you know your "enough," you will immediately begin to see abundance. And so, the challenge is we simply don't spend enough time talking about enough. And when we do, we start to reset what really matters and find happiness and contentedness much more quickly and much more easily than when we're constantly chasing more.

Robert S. Kaplan: What I've learned is every person needs to try the best they can to come up with their own definition, as opposed to take others' definition.

Rachel Salaman: Robert Kaplan again, the author of "What You're Really Meant to Do."

Robert S. Kaplan: My definition is: "am I making a positive impact on the world and on others, and using as best as I can my abilities to do that? Am I actually needed, wanted, adding value, and being able to bring not all my skills, but as much of my skills as possible to do that?"

Money… title… go a long way in this world. Pick up any magazine, the people that are being celebrated are "the winners." They are people that have achieved metrics and status and position in their careers. That does not necessarily mean they're reaching their potential.

Rachel Salaman: For Richard Shell, from the Wharton School, that "potential" has two key components: one that others can see, and one that only really matters to you.

G. Richard Shell: Whenever you begin scratching the surface of the word "success," it turns out you're really meaning two different things that have to somehow go together.

And the one is accomplishment, and achievement – that's an external recognition piece. And the other is an "internal-fulfillment-satisfaction" sense of happiness. And those two things have to be in some balance, or you have to make some decisions about how to put them together.

Rachel Salaman: Performance psychologist Dr Pippa Grange told me that those external wins tend to be easier to define and pursue than the internal ones. But it's vital to find our personal sense of purpose – which often emerges, she says, rather than being chosen or planned.

Pippa Grange: A purpose is something that we generally don't add, we reveal about ourselves. That might be your purpose as a parent and what kind of parent you want to be. It might be, you know, how much you want to invest in your team if you're a leader, and what matters to you, what's compelling to you about their experience at work every day. They're purpose things. You couldn't put them, necessarily, in a spreadsheet as a set of goals.

Rachel Salaman: For Pippa, purpose is valuable because it combats fear when you're planning your next steps.

Pippa Grange: Purpose is generally about doing something beyond yourself, for the greater good, for the world outside you, for other people. So when we focus on that we naturally dial down fear.

Rachel Salaman: And leading business thinker Dorie Clark also had some reassuring advice about this – especially if you're feeling pressurized to find your purpose at work.

Dorie Clark: There is so much cultural pressure to know your passion, follow your passion, you know, have a life of meaning, and those are great things, but it's often very high stress for people who are just not sure.

And so, instead of putting this super high-stakes frame on it, like, "Oh sorry, you can't actually do anything, you actually can't take any action in your life until you figure out what your passion is," I like to suggest we "optimize for interesting."

Because that I think, first of all, is a gentler frame. But secondly, you might not know what your passion in life is, but certainly, you know, things you find interesting. And the more we can gravitate toward that, the more it gives us an opportunity to learn by doing – which, in fact, is how we learn.

Rachel Salaman: Dorie's the author of "The Long Game" and "Reinventing You," and she was named as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world. By "optimizing for interesting," she told me, you can bring enjoyment and meaning to your work, without the pressure of finding a grand purpose.

Short-term changes can still take you toward long-term goals, as long as you're proactive – and prepared to make choices. If you're not, as Bill Wooditch explains, choices may be made on your behalf – and not always to your advantage.

Bill Wooditch: If you're in a company and you have an opportunity to create something for yourself, there's a short window of time that you can actually go through that, see it, and seize it. If you don't [and] you stand back, you're not making a choice – someone else is taking the opportunity. By default, the choice has already been made.

I'd rather be the one choosing and failing (and having the option to choose again based on, you know, learned experience) than to stand around and watch the world go by. And if you think about fear, just for a minute, maybe by avoiding, maybe by procrastinating, you're creating a much, much tougher fear for yourself than going after something.

Rachel Salaman: Bill Wooditch, the author of "Fail More." And Pippa Grange had some good advice for preventing fear from holding you back in your career – particularly fear of not being "good enough" to do anything different.

Pippa Grange: Firstly, see what's happening. Be able to stay with your fear, including your perfectionism, long enough to understand what's actually happening, and that it is fear showing up.

You know, if you decide that you're not going to put your hand up for that role or for that project because you might not be perfect at it, then how able are you to see that fear was part of that picture?

And then, you know, you have to look at what it's costing you. You have to create a compelling case for yourself to replace it with something that's stronger for you. The alternative is to stay stuck.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: The greatest problem that most people have in their lives is that they would say that their problems and their issues [are] to do with something outside of themselves.

Rachel Salaman: That's Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones again, the author of "Jeopardy: The Danger of Playing It Safe on the Path to Success." He's a big believer in determining your own success. And Pippa Grange agrees.

Pippa Grange: Life is made up of stories, narratives. Narratives inform us in extraordinarily dramatic ways, and I feel that perhaps we don't realize how often we have the pen in our own hand around those narratives. We kind of get swept up in the narratives – cultural narratives, our parents' narratives, our company's narratives – rather than really exploring our own.

We can't always change our own circumstances, but we certainly can change the way that we tell the story of those circumstances. And that is profoundly powerful, because it's stories that run our lives.

Rachel Salaman: Robert Kaplan also helps people to write their own career stories.

Robert S. Kaplan: You need to understand your life story, but you don't need to be a prisoner of your story. You want to be, as they say, "the author of your future." And there's a lot of people out there that have never moved beyond their past and traumas in their past. And then the question is, "What do you want to do about it?"

Rachel Salaman: Understanding your past should also let you learn from your mistakes as you plan a better future. Bill Wooditch told me that's vital for setting the right career goals.

Bill Wooditch: Ambition is a great word. It can be blind, and I think you take the blinders off when you understand that ambition is required, but ambition without knowledge, the knowledge that failure provides, is truly… it's a waste of energy.

And it can be misdirected: there are a lot of ambitious people who aren't successful. A ton of people who have a lot of activity, their activity is not directed toward or measured toward what is their goal, what is their real goal.

Robert S. Kaplan: It's about what are their strengths and weaknesses.

Rachel Salaman: Robert Kaplan again.

Robert S. Kaplan: And are they doing something that uses some of their skills, those strengths, and meets some of their passions? And it's never going to be perfect, but are they doing enough of it?

Now, for some people it may not mean changing jobs, it might mean delegating some things that they just hate, that are a necessary part of the job; or it may mean not changing jobs, but getting more actively involved in their community on a non-profit board; or broadening out their lives so that they can use more of their capabilities in a broader way. But it starts with being aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

Rachel Salaman: I also talked to Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard about this. He agrees that recognizing your weaknesses is as important as knowing your strengths. When you doubt your ability, or question what you're doing, it can provide evidence for what to do next.

Rich Karlgaard: Self-doubt is information. When you feel self-doubt, step aside, take a deep breath, don't imagine for a minute that self-doubt and your own self-worth are in any way connected – they're not.

"Why am I feeling this doubt? Well maybe I'm not quite on the right path, maybe I need to prepare a little more, maybe I need to look at this problem from a different perspective, maybe I need help." If you can use self-doubt as that kind of a tool, you listen to it (in a way that doesn't undermine your self-worth, that's key) and then you say, "OK, what did I learn from this bout of self-doubt? What is it telling me exactly?"

Rachel Salaman: So what appear to be sticking points may actually be opportunities to propel our careers forward – though maybe in new directions.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: Some people, they will think, "You're nuts!" Some people will be supportive.

Rachel Salaman: Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, again.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: And then, by talking about it, you'll be amazed, because you will find guardian angels – these vital people who will help to sort of set you on course. They're not going to hold your hand and take you through, but they'll be able to say, "Oh, how about speaking to so-and-so?" Or give you suggestions to start preparing you for that journey. So none of that is going to happen unless you start to talk about it.

Rachel Salaman: But for Nate Bennett, competitiveness is also key. Nate's a professor at Georgia Tech's College of Management, and he co-authored a book about using "game theory" to make winning moves in your career.

Nate Bennett: The first step we argue in using game theory, to understand your career, is to map out who are the players. So who are the other people who can impact your game? Once you understand who they are, you need to understand the options that are open to each of them, you need to understand their goals. And then from that analysis you can start to ascertain where you might be able to expect co-operation from other players, where you might expect resistance, and perhaps where you might need to enlist some people who want to see you win so that they become supportive of your goal.

Rachel Salaman: Nate draws a distinction between incidental moves and instrumental ones. Incidental moves help us to cover all bases and stay generally on track. But he says they mustn't distract us from the high-value moves that propel our plans forward.

Nate Bennett: An instrumental move is a move that takes you closer toward achieving your career game goal. So, simply put, an instrumental move is one that advances you towards your objective.

You can't leap ahead through a series of incidental moves; you can only leap ahead if you identify some instrumental moves to make. And I'm not saying that one or the other is preferable, right, but the player gets to make the choice about what sort of career they make. But if they don't ever try to seek and then execute one of these career-defining sorts of moves, their progress will be slow.

Rachel Salaman: Nate Bennett, author of "Your Career Game," with Stephen Miles. For futurist April Rinne, however, the key isn't to think about a linear career, where you can always move "forward" like this. Instead, she recommends collecting skills from a variety of roles.

After all, more people than ever now have "slash" jobs – like "writer-slash-yoga teacher" – and many of us combine positions like parent or carer, with our paid work. April says that we can use all these experiences, shift our focus when we choose, and keep improving our working life.

April Rinne: Have a portfolio career. It's a shift in how you think about what you're capable of doing, and what you want to do. So everything, every job, every skill, every role, whether it's been paid or unpaid, whether it's had a fancy title or no title… all of these things go into your portfolio.

At the same time, if you're a parent, the skills that you learn parenting, those are in your portfolio. And what I love is that a portfolio includes a lot of skills, and a lot of capabilities, that traditional CVs and résumés leave out, yet are actually what make you the most-qualified person for a particular role, or, you know, uniquely positioned in your sector or in your organization. So it's really empowering, at the end of the day.

Rachel Salaman: And Richard Shell also warns against the "linear" view of careers – the idea that you simply choose a job and then move onward and upward.

G. Richard Shell: I think life for most people is much more improvisational. I think you do what you think is the best next thing to do, you see where you are, you match up your skills and your passions and interests with what your opportunities are, and then do the next best thing that seems to be a good idea. And I think if you scratch the surface of most [of] what you would call successful people, I think you'd find that only rarely did they set out to do what they happened to be doing, and that there's a pretty windy path that got them there.

Rachel Salaman: So what's the best way to approach this "windy path" – through a world of work where there are more possibilities than ever. Best-selling author Rich Karlgaard told me about experimenting with where you work, as much as what you do. Just as plants do better in some environments than others, he advises people to try out different workplace cultures until they find one where they thrive. He calls this "repotting."

Rich Karlgaard: Repotting is this idea that there's an environment, a set of friends, a company culture, all of those things that you live with every day, some of them will nourish you more than others. And repotting is this decision that you make that you're going to find that pot of soil that is for you. Where the culture… it could be the company culture, it could be the political culture, it could be any kind of culture, but cultures where you feel at home and you feel like you can be yourself and you feel like you can thrive.

G. Richard Shell: It's very hard to catch a butterfly. But if you go someplace where there are butterflies and you just sit down and be still, a butterfly will very likely come and sit on your shoulder.

Rachel Salaman: Richard Shell again, the author of "Springboard: Launching your Personal Search for Success," on finding the best place to be successful and satisfied.

G. Richard Shell: And I think happiness is like that. If you spend your life chasing it, it's pretty hard to catch, but if you go to places where there's a good chance that your talents, your emotions, your relationships will be in resonance with that situation and just sit there, the chances are pretty good the happiness will find you.

Rachel Salaman: So we need to experiment with what we do and where we do it. We need to keep learning about ourselves, but also keep learning, period – to spot new opportunities and be ready to seize them.

Barbara Mistick: The skill set that you have is important, but layering on and continually developing that skill set is absolutely key.

Rachel Salaman: Barbara Mistick, again.

Barbara Mistick: Just going to the university and graduating is not the end of your learning experience. You're never finished learning. That is, you know, why you need options and why it's important to hold onto your dreams, and to find ways to constantly be learning over time, and to tap into your adaptability and resilience.

Rachel Salaman: So career planning takes some serious thought, to decide what you'll be good at, and how you'll feel happy at work. You need to define your own version of satisfaction and success, be strong about making your own choices – but also get advice and support from others. Grab the big opportunities when they arise, but don't underestimate all the smaller improvements you can make to your working life.

Draw on all your skills and experiences. Listen to your doubts, but experiment to see what might be good for you next. Keep learning and growing as you plan and replan your career. And keep asking questions as you work out what's next.

Bill Wooditch: Am I moving forward and is my ambition channeled in a place, in an environment, in a job? Or am I creating an opportunity and career that's best suited for me?

Barbara Mistick: If you take a very thoughtful approach, you can find ways to really continue to stay relevant. You can control your own future growth.

Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones: One of the things I tend to find when I talk to people is, "Oh, I would really love to do this, I would love to do that." So why aren't you doing that?

Rachel Salaman: Bill Wooditch, Barbara Mistick, and Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, ending this episode of Mind Tools Expert Voices: "Plan Your Career From Here."

Maybe you're asking questions now about where to go from here. If so, remember that there are in-depth interviews with everyone you heard here, in our Expert Interviews collection in the Mind Tools Club. And there are hundreds more conversations with leading writers and thinkers, all with insights and advice about being successful and happy at work – alongside a wealth of articles, videos and workbooks.

I'll be back soon to tackle another workplace topic, with the help of more expert voices. For now, I'm Rachel Salaman: thanks for listening.