Take Control of Your Life & Career

Of late I have been contemplating what I should really do when I grow up, now that I have taken 2+ years from the rat race. It is remarkable how time flies when you are having fun, even when you do not have any income coming in! Alas I also recognize that all the things I love doing require money and don't make any money: writing, traveling, eating and drinking! Though I would not trade any of the moments in the past 2+ years for anything else, in the recess of my brain I often felt a constant urge to go back to work to have a greater purpose in life, in addition to repadding my diminished nest egg should I live to 100 yrs old, the other truth be told!!.

But now I want to work in an environment where I will truly want to get up every morning and look forward to going there, as oppose to doing it because I have to. That, I also come to realize, is a lofty proposition and a luxury that most people in the world do not have and may never attain, for most people need to put a roof over their heads, put food on their tables, and to look after their family. I recall the latter years that I spent on Wall Street being on auto pilot, not really cognizant of what day of the week or what time of the day it was, I was just rushing from one place to another, in the name of making the most amount of revenue for the firm and in turn, hopefully for myself in the form of a big bonus. All of this because I felt I had to - to pay for my mortgages and for material things.

Now for my next chapter, what is it that I really want to do and how do I find a happy medium?

In discussing my quandary with a friend, who had at one point taken 3 years off to travel and re-energize her life, she suggests that I watch a series of workshop videos on Oprah.com , titled “Take Control of Your Life and Career” by Markus Buckingham. The opening video certainly resonated with me as the participants discussed why they were there to take the workshop, I identified with some of the responses given.

http://www.oprah.com/media/20080601_orig_151007004OCOMINTROECmix2_O_VIDEO_1

My general take away from the workshops:

1) No one has the perfect job

2) Really know your own strengths (usually things you enjoy) and weaknesses (usually things you hate about yourself)

3) You will never be great at something that you hate

4) FREE (Focus, Release, Educate and Expand) your Strengths: Highly successful people build their jobs and lives around the best of their strengths

5) STOP (Stop, Team Up, Offer up, Perceive) your Weaknesses, or suck it up and do it.  You must close one door before you can open another

Though the single most interesting take away that I took from the entire segment was when Markus said: “The world is ambivalent about you and your strengths, the world doesn’t really care about you and your strengths, the world wants you to get a job done, your family wants you to get a job done… ”

So in short, while it is great to understand your strengths, but if you can’t get a job done, all the strengths and passions you have are for not, whether it is working for someone else or working for yourself.

So back to the drawing table: What is it that I want to get done with all the strengths that I have?

3 Difficult Questions

The economic crisis has done one thing positive in the last two years – allow us to reflect on what we do, how we do, and why we do certain things. Of late I am meeting more folks who are at a crossroad with respect to their career predicament, many are unfulfilled in what they do, and more so in a downturn where one has to take on more workload with greater pressure and less pay. Alas many are simply going through the motion because it is better to glue one’s bum to a chair with crazy glue (read have a job) than to deliberate the ponderous task of what is it that we really would like to do and allow us to make a decent living, if circumstances allow us?

I invite you to answer the following 3 questions silently or aloud (however it suits you), but honestly, in your spare moments. I recently went thru this exercise with a friend, and it was much harder than either one of us expected. And after you figure out the answers, you will know tangentially at least, what direction you need to take to marry your passion and your skills to achieve your own IEFF. The path to it may be a circuitous one but that is what makes it a worthwhile journey.   Now it will be tough if you have no answer to any of the following questions!!  Give it a try, you may be surprised!

1) What are the top 3 things YOU are passionate about (i.e. things that you would do everyday if you had to get up for it)?

2) What are the 3 talents or skills that YOU think you have?

3) What are the 3 talents or skills that OTHER people think you have?

Who Moved My Cheese?

I have over 200 books on my book shelves in my study, with disparate titles ranging from “The Idiot’s Guide to Dealing With Difficult Employees” (given to me as a gag gift at a team Christmas dinner by a former colleague, I found it very amusing but my team did not then!) to “The Reason for God” (given to me by a friend who believes I need to understand the enormity of faith). Yet thru the years whenever someone asks me to name my favorite book or recommend one, I invariably revert back to “Who Moved My Cheese?” authored by Spencer Johnson, M.D., published in 1998, given to me as a Christmas gift by the head of a dept at a former employer during the Asian Financial crisis (he gave one to everyone in the dept).

This book is compact (all of 94 pages); it has decent font size; it is an easy read; and it is profoundly enlightening. It is a very simple parable about 4 little characters who ran thru a maze looking for cheese to nourish them and make them happy daily. Two were mice named “Sniff” and “Scurry”, and two were little people named “Hem” and “Haw”, they were the size of the mice except they act like humans. Everyday each would put on their jogging suits and running shoes, left their little homes and raced out into the maze looking for their favorite cheese. Then one day the cheese disappeared, much to their surprise, dismay and chagrin!! The story went on to describe and contrast the differences in how each dealt with the situation. Dr. Johnson utilized brilliantly the metaphors of “Cheese” and “Maze” to illustrate the things that we each want in life; where we look for them; how we define success and happiness and what we would do in the face of unexpected changes. The WHAT: a good job, a loving relationship, money, material possessions, health or peace of mind. The WHERE: workplace, family, community, etc. The HOW: is entirely up to you!

It is a uniquely delightful book on dealing with changes, one that I reread over and over through the years.

As it states on the inside cover of the book: “Written for all ages, the story takes less than an hour to read, but its unique insights can last for a life time”.

Is IEFF Achievable?

Recently I sent an email to my friends pontificating about life and and my lofty goal of finding the Holy Grail of IEFF (Intellectual, Emotional and Financial Fulfillment) in the next chapter of my life. At the end of that email I asked a rhetorical question: What is your IEFF? Relatively few individuals have a clear answer, several friends wrote back "my children" (my heart melted when I read that), and many were in the same predicament as I am, still searching.

Rare is the occasion that one finds even one out of the three in one's life time, blessed are those who achieved all three. Is it possible to NOT sacrifice something in the I & E categories while one toils away pursuing F? My personal experience is that when one is singularly focused on one arena, something has to give in other areas. Intellectually I morphed into a finance specialist; I gave up reading anything outside of the Wall Street Journal and research reports because I had few spare hours outside of work. I allowed one exception - People magazine, where I luxuriated in living vicariously thru the lives of celebrities by day dreaming about what it would be like to become rich and famous one day while doing exactly what one wants! Emotionally I learned to shut out the world as I aspired to be a bigger rat in the corporate rat race; I got fatter along the way! I think I spent more time in the past two years bonding and reconnecting with loved ones than I did in the 15 years combined. It is not as if I didn't know that somewhere along the way I was devoid of intellectual or emotional fulfillment, but I thought one day they will find me when I make enough money (and that is always relative). Alas it didn't work like that. It is equally hard work to find I & E as it is to find F, none of them are easy. And there is never enough F if one starts comparing myself to the Jones or if one can not extricate oneself from the game, for it is very difficult to leave a well paying job no matter how miserable the working environment becomes, people tend to stick it out and loses the enjoyment from what they earned.

I am an optimist and I believe there is an IEFF out there for everyone; we just need to take a step back to realize what is important to us. I invite all the readers to share with each other any advice on finding your IEFF, inspirational stories and tools that will enrich our mind, soul and bank accounts!