Empower Yourself for an Amazing Career

Assessing the Journey of your Career
"Life is the sum of your choices." Albert Camus
How do you define career success? Is it becoming CEO, making it to middle or senior or management, income, that corner office?
If you define career success by your job title, position within the organization, or by where you end up at the end of your career, then you are missing the point your career experience.
Your career is not defined by where you end up, it is not a destination. Your career is a journey that is assessed by your integrity, how you travelled that road, the stops you made along the way, the people you met and inspired to reach their full potential, the lessons you learned that brought you full circle and made you the person you are today, and the one you will develop into tomorrow. A journey that is defined by your choices, actions, reactions, and inactions to the opportunities and challenges life presents to you.
I am about to introduce you to a very powerful person. This person will be your travel partner giving you all of the guidance and tools you need along the journey of your career to empower yourself to transform your job into an amazing career. This person is your inner self.
Life is about free will, options, and choices and no one but you can decide the ultimate path of your career and your life. Ultimately, the decision of your accomplishments and realization of your dreams is up to you because you can be all that your inner self has in store for you.
Only you can access what is inside of you, bring it forward, and make it a reality. There is nothing or no one that can change the path you have chosen for yourself. Your inner self has the ability to visualize and realize an amazing career because your true potential far exceeds what you have tapped into thus far. You can draw that full potential forth by focusing on your strengths. Intellectual, scholastic knowledge can take you up to a certain point by providing information and statistics which will help you weigh different options. However, we always seem to have this need to satisfy our inner voice by making sure that the decisions we make are directly aligned with our inner guidance. When our decisions are not aligned with our inner guidance, we get the nagging voice second guessing our decisions and motives.
As you assess the journey of your career you will look to many external sources for guidance, your spouse, friends, family, mentors, co-workers, even your boss. However, because of their differing backgrounds and life experiences, the guidance you get from each will conflict and be confusing to you as you strive to make informed career decisions.
Listen to all of the well-intentioned advice and gauge it with your intuition, your gut feelings. When it is right for you, it will ring true in your heart and your gut. Take what works for you and leave the rest behind. Ultimately you have to learn to trust your inner self, your inner compass to help you build a solid foundation for a rewarding career, help you move through significant transitions and barriers, and point you in the direction of your next step, the next path that will lead you to that next plateau.
The road may seem long, winding, and never-ending and reaching the end may seem difficult or even impossible but there is nothing that could impede the realization of your dreams. There is nothing that can separate you from your heart's desire and the path you have chosen to travel.
As you continue to patiently travel down your chosen path, your dreams may seem daunting, overwhelming, and at times illusive and it may be difficult to remain optimistic when you see no evidence of your dreams coming to fruition. However, you must continue to believe in yourself regardless of negative circumstances and input from those around you.
Your dreams may require time, energy, or other action on your part before they materialize. So stay positive, optimistic, and keep plugging away at your important goals. Chances are that you are doing much better than you think you are and success may be just around the corner.
Do not allow your boss, your coworkers, your parents' or siblings' negative programming make you lose your self-esteem or self-worth. Unfortunately, whether intentional or not, some relationships shape and engrain a negative reflection of ourselves into our consciousness through years of disappointments, uncertainties, and doubt. They tend to stay with us and form our overall perception of ourselves and life as a whole which tend to limit our experiences to what our ego based fears allow. The ego is shallow and fear based and its primary focus is all about 'me'. With this kind of focus you are bound to fail, making your worst fears come true.
Ego based fears can be very powerful and control our minds. If our self image is threatened, the ego diligently goes to work by partnering with fear to create a never-ending cycle of fearful thoughts, perceptions, and ideas.
The ego's role is to help you clearly understand your personal needs, values, and goals in life. The ego is constantly reminding us who we are supposed to be. As such, it is constantly evaluating and manipulating fear based emotions such as self preservation, inadequacies, humiliation, and failure. These fear based emotions can drown you in pool of your own negativity as your mind reminds you over and over again of your weaknesses, powerlessness, and hopelessness.
It is destructive to indulge in self-pitying thoughts and emotions so take the time to identify and heal all insecurities and stop being your own worst enemy and harshest critic.
When you feel worthless and powerless you begin to attract circumstances, relationships, and situations that affirm that belief. Your body language will manifest your thoughts and others will perceive your vulnerability and treat you as someone that does not deserve respect and can be pushed around. Replace those old insecurities and fears you picked over the years with new empowering thoughts and reclaim your self-worth and self-esteem so that you can realize the success you deserve.
Learning to accept and reaffirm your true powerful position in life and to remold your thinking will end your self-sabotaging behavioral pattern. New empowering thoughts will yield the benefit of knowing that life has equipped you with everything you need to succeed.
Stop looking into that rear-view mirror of your life and leave your hurts and insecurities behind. Look straight ahead with your head held high and get excited about your goals and where you want to go in your career and life will affirm all that you were born to be and do.
Your career should be about growing, expanding your horizons, and surfing on the cutting edge of your industry and environment. While in the midst of your career, you may arrive at plateaus where you enjoy taking it easy and relishing you’re your accomplishments and success, but the time will come when you will be ready to move on and do more. For every milestone you reach in your career, there is always that next plateau beyond it that will lead you to even greater career satisfaction.
Sometimes career satisfaction can be found in mentoring others, in giving back. Take the time to invest in someone else. All it takes is a few minutes of your day to help someone navigate their career. Think of this as helping someone who has stopped to ask for direction.
On the journey of your career I encourage you to take the time to give back, pay it forward and make a positive difference in someone else's life that can learn from your experience and you will be surprised at how it will positively impact your life and your career. True success can be defined as having reached back to help someone reach their full potential and career goals.