Hello Reader and Happy Thanksgiving to our US readers! In today’s issue:
Two questions that bring clarity to your career journey
A “Gratitude Saturday” 10% off coupon for newsletter subscribers
New site area opened for clients
Do you try to practice gratitude? In my continuing efforts to develop as a healthy, happy and impactful human being, gratitude is a virtue that I try to cultivate daily. I’m far from perfect and often lose the thread when I need it most. Can you relate?
A key realization is that what I am most grateful for correlates to what’s most important to me. Which gives me clarity going forward. To protect and expand these things.
Today, I share two ways of thinking about gratitude that will bring you some clarity about what’s important to you in your career and act as a measure of how much career capital you’ve built. The first is identifying your professional freedoms. And the second is identifying what you “get” to do in your work role.
What Professional Freedoms Do You Value?
A measure of a well-managed career is your degrees of professional freedom - e.g. your work and where you do it, the people you work with, your ability to direct your work, and the professional opportunities you have.
To illustrate, I’ll share five freedoms that I value:
1/ Freedom of Time Flexibility: As a business owner, I can work out, run errands, quit work early or plan a day off. (Work in progress!)
2/ Freedom of Place & Work Environment: Ability to change where I work based on energy, area of focus and schedule.
3/ Freedom of Whom I Work With: I get to choose my team. And as a service provider, we’re also careful to serve and partner with those that are a great fit with what we do. This is gold.
4/ Freedom of Focus: For me, perhaps the greatest gift is being able to pursue my obsession (Helping you lead a more successful and fulfilling professional journey) and the projects that I pursue around that. Hugely important for me.
5/ Freedom of Being Responsible: I am responsible for performance. There are no excuses, but also no politics or influencing factors outside of my control (beyond the big macro stuff we face). Having had both, I choose this.
One way to think of degrees of professional freedom is as a measure of how much career capital you’ve built. The better job you’ve done building your career capital, the greater degrees of freedom you have or will have in the future.
What do you GET to do?
The second part of this is a question that naturally puts you in an appreciative mindset. Here it is:
”In my role, I get to {fill in blank}
The frame of the question presumes that you are fortunate and privileged to do a certain kind of work, serve a customer, solve key problems, use your strengths, work with great colleagues, make a specific kind of impact, and more. Here and now.
Reflection Exercise
Facing a career decision? Planning your next professional step? Needing a refresh of your mindset? How you respond to these questions will clarify what is important to you and bring some much-needed gratitude to how you feel and show up at work.
Examine your professional situation. What areas of professional freedom do you enjoy today?
What do you GET to do?
What do you want more of?
How do you take advantage of those freedoms, and what’s the positive impact on your life?
Anytime is a good time for gratitude, especially with US Thanksgiving this weekend.
Black Friday/Gratitude Saturday Coupon
I know. Like me, you are probably tired of Black Friday deal announcements. So, I’ll call our deal Gratitude Saturday. In appreciation of your support, here’s a coupon for 10% off any of our services (LinkedIn profiles, resume writing, career transition packages, career coaching) (expires Dec 2 at Midnight). Use GRATITUDE-8M3Q at checkout. Just head to BoldCareer and click the Services menu in the top navigation.
New Client & Member Logged-In Site
In April, we transitioned our site, CRM and products to an all-in-one platform called Simplero. More recently, we re-started email newsletters. Yesterday, we opened the logged-in content area for clients. Super excited to be offering our training and course materials as well as client experience through this new area of the site.
Have a fantastic weekend.
Ian Christie
CEO & Chief Career Strategist - Bold Career