I started writing a new series of articles last month, out of which I am now publishing part 3 of 4. You may read part I here. And part II here.
5. Prioritize working with the appropriate limits.
If you have a problem, put into practice the opposite (go to goal). If you have too few options, get creative. If you have too many, reduce them. If you get overwhelmed, get some distance. Find the cause and get the right tool to move on! Still, instead of getting the appropriate internal and external resources, some people self-sabotage themselves by starting with the easiest or the most challenging thing, mislabeling the importance or the urgency of some issues. Thus, they manage to overwhelm themselves and get stuck. Of course, this can be done with the positive intention of feeling suitable for accomplishing some work. Still, this intention can be better served by learning to chunk the learning and the changing work into appropriate milestones for each.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, healing can’t be done in a session, brilliance doesn’t come overnight, and genius doesn’t (usually) knock on your door. Learn to take what you have/want to do step by step, bit by bit, and learn how to plan and evaluate what you’ve done by establishing training and development goals. This is the kind of inner work that will later bring great external results that show with time and last. Some people might notice your efforts. Most might not. But you are doing it for yourself. If you can’t prioritize, get at least 1-2 sessions from a consultant, coach, or career counselor. It saves you at least 10 times the money you pay for it. The keys here are balance and comparing oneself with their own better version, not others. Different people have different limits, and they shouldn’t be (too harshly) punished for it.
6. Express yourself through your talent(s) in the appropriate environment.
Let’s say you discovered your weak and strong points (like I’ve written here), worked on some of the significant issues, and had some experiences working through homework, projects, trials, and volunteering to practice what you’ve efficiently learned theoretically. This is when you may choose whether to start working for a non-profit, get hired, freelance, create a business as an entrepreneur, or invest in what precisely.
It is appropriate at this stage to find the right place for yourself inside an existing system that you will learn for a few years inside out. This is your road to taking the chance to become a specialist: the right person in the right place. If you want a job, you must search for the right one, prepare for it, hunt for it, and give it your best shot in the best organization you can.
Your chances can be highly influenced by what you accomplished in the previous steps; sometimes that doesn’t matter. What matters here is to get, besides the job content-related skills, also the labor market general skills (such as personal branding, time management, copywriting), the technological skills (software and hardware), and the proper procedures to integrate your work with already functioning practices, procedures, standards, and criteria.
You have to accept that you have limited control over a system you’re learning and that you must go through all (or most) of it before trying to change it. First, you accept, then you can work with what you’ve got and make the best of it. If you can put first your long-term goals, even if it means being paid less, that might well be on your path to professional success and personal fulfillment. Even if you get started as a freelancer or an entrepreneur, you must use the system you learned to get recognition, experience, and the beginning of your success. Here you need mentoring, modeling, coaching, or consulting. Labor market skills, specifically related training, also can make a significant difference.
This is the time to explore, express, drive and develop your unconscious resources and structures in directions, fields, positions, and roles through appreciated differentiation, testing, and respecting boundaries between self and others. Allow yourself now to quest for abundance through scalability and strategically develop performance in competition with similar and exceptional other individuals. Each person has talents. May each of them work best at what they wisely choose!
7. Get resources and make choices to increase your freedom
We are almost halfway on this road of personal and professional development and fulfillment. Right about now, many people stumble and try to compensate for what they didn’t have earlier in life. This is a “perfect” time to make life-ruining decisions by getting into debt, choosing the wrong life partner, wasting time indulging in distractions, buying useless toys, or spending more than you can. Usually, material success comes after years of trial and error and hard work in making the best of your opportunities. Initially, it might not be as you expected, and your career might not be on the straight-up arrow you hoped (hallucinated). But success is closer than you think.
If at this point, you stay satisfied by earning a fixed income no matter how much you work and don’t save much, chances are you won’t ever break out of this vicious financial circle. Of course, one of the labor market-related skills I was writing about in the previous points is financial intelligence (if you haven’t learned it until college). Getting resources means making more than you spend, saving up, or investing the difference, so that you have profit, not debt. You can increase, maintain or decrease your freedom based on your choices. Increasing financial intelligence through personal study, consulting and training, or even coaching definitely counts in this step. This is an appropriate moment to know that you can’t do everything and delegate what you can afford and don’t know too well/like too much. You may also use this tool.
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8. Let live and let go. Forgive yourself and others.
You’re not perfect. If you’ve gone through years of study and practice, you’ve likely had your failures and successes and, hopefully, more wins. But you have been confronting your limits and know each person has them. So now, after gearing yourself in the right field, the right place, the right tools, and the right environment forget about how you were affected by what didn’t work and keep just the good things and the knowledge from the previous failures, especially those which you might initially blame on others.
Now you are responsible for what happens in your life, meaning that you have the power to change. You can be a compassionate, level-headed adult. So forgive others who didn’t have your resources, vision, or “map”. Now you do, and you deserve to be a model. You know you are responsible for improving yourself, just like others are for themselves.
This might be a good moment, if you haven’t, until now, to cut some bad ties and to heal some old ones, given that it’s possible. You can’t change the past, and you can’t change others. The others are responsible for themselves. You are responsible for yourself. So ask forgiveness from those you have wronged.
You may be free to decide who to become and where to go from now on. Learn to love the ones who have hurt you and separate their behavior from their identities once and for all. Your heart is whole. They can’t hurt you anymore. If you have trouble with that, get help from a psychotherapist or a good NLP practitioner. If it helps you, write about your emotions. Express yourself authentically while becoming a better version of yourself. Creating a gratefulness list (to which people you thank and why) is also helpful.
Your road continues from here. Read the last part!
PS: Thanks to Corina Andreea Popa for the practical suggestions and feedback on this article before publishing.
Copyright © Marcus Victor Grant, 2016-present
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