FINDING YOURSELF

As professional outplacement and career management consultants, we are helping individuals  to make fresh career decisions and reposition themselves, every day.  Many have been successful and so could you.  Here′s how you might start.

Observe yourself for a week.  Live your life as you normally do.  Don′t change, just because you are observing yourself.  Set aside a few minutes in the morning, whilst having a coffee.   Start thinking as you go home on the bus, Tube or train or just before you go to sleep.  Take note and make notes.  Don′t obsess but be aware of your day.

What do you do in those seven days that you:
1.  Like to do.
2.  Must do.
3.  Avoid doing but do anyway.
4.  Avoid doing and don′t do though you will have to sometime.
Again, be ruthless with yourself.  don′t observe the person you think you are.  Observe who you are.  Be honest.

At the end of the week, look at your notes.  Arrange events, tasks, meetings and pleasures into the four categories above.  Is it a reasonable pattern?  Where are you generating your income?  Is it from the things you like to do or from the things you must do...or even worse, the things you avoid?

If you feel it is too big a step to say goodbye to the industry you know, that you are, for example, educated and trained in supply-chain but find yourself day-dreaming over the spreadsheets when your talent is dealing with people, why not consider the sales-side of your industry?  Sell yours firm′s services instead!  That way, your hard work getting to where you are now isn′t thrown away but your success is bound to increase because you like what you are doing.

Sometimes changing your job doesn′t have to mean changing the firm or the industry.  Maybe you are in the right industry but the wrong  department.

What would you have to do to get where you would like to be?  Be brave.

Dale Carnegie′s belief that by changing your actions, you change the REaction of others holds true now as it did then, 72 years after he wrote his famous book, How To Win Friends And Influence People.