Good vs Bad: How Are You Assigning Value To Career Experiences?

Positives and Negatives In Your Career

via GIPHY

As you've had experiences, you have decided whether or not they have served you, whether you felt pain or joy. You assigned value and said, "Hey, that was a good experience," or "That was a bad experience."

From that, you've made decisions about your career going forward. That can often mean that we've avoided situations because we've assigned a negative value to something in our career. This is such a career limiting move.

Assessing Your Career Story

When I work with people inside the Work It Daily platform, we start to dig into their career story. One of the things we do is teach them a technique. They go through and objectively assess value, how they've been assigning value to their career story, and then we actually have them tally it up. They're able to look at it and understand how that's impacting their overall career success. It's really amazing.

The reason I want you to think about that is because sometimes something happens to us and we think it's the worst thing in the world.

Change How You Think About Negative Career Events

We're so upset about these negative events when they happen to us, only to find out a week, a month, a year, 10 years later, that it was probably one of the most powerful, impactful, positive things that could ever happen to us.

I personally understand this because before I became a career coach, I was in HR and recruiting and my specialty was restructuring divisions of companies. If any of you have ever watched the movie Up in the Air with George Clooney, that was my job. I have outsourced, restructured, and laid off hundreds of people in my former career and it was a very painful and difficult thing to do.

But, looking back, it's actually where I learned to become a career coach. I was so focused on those people needing help, support, resources, and helping them find that next job. Also, I really sat them down and said, "Look, this is the beginning of your life, a new chapter in your life."

I was career coaching them right out of the gate. It would always inspire me when I would get an email, a phone call, or I would run into them later on and they would say, "You know, I was sure that that was my darkest day, the day that you had to let me go. But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me."

See what I mean there? You can't define value. You can't assign positive and negatives, especially negative, to career situations because they limit you.