A career resolution is exactly what it sounds like: a resolution for your career intended to help you grow into a better professional. At Work It DAILY, we believe that you need to work on your career every day (yes, you do, in fact, need to "work it daily"). So, everyone should make a career resolution or two along with those other ambitious personal resolutions. They can be little things like learning a new skill or growing your professional network, or bigger goals like landing a promotion or getting a new job.
But how do you know what kind of career resolutions to make?
You can begin by asking yourself, "Am I where I want to be in my career?" If your answer is "no," you need to take a closer look at your career goals.
Here are five more career questions you should be asking yourself this new year to figure out how to grow your career and become the professional you know you can be.
1. Am I Proud Of My Job Title?
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You could be a janitor or a neurosurgeon, it doesn't matter. If you aren't proud of what you do for a living, there's something missing: passion and purpose.
Career burnout is real, but sometimes it's deeper than that. Our passion at 25 won't necessarily be our passion at 40. And that's okay.
When we are passionate about what we do, we are proud because we are doing what we think is important, what we love doing. We feel a sense of purpose. We are adding value to and making a difference in this crazy world—in a small, but significant way.
Every job is important. No matter what your job title is, if you aren't proud of it, and don't feel like you can leverage your strengths as a professional in the position, you should absolutely change that. Identify that one problem you want to find a solution to and go after it. What are you waiting for?
Remember, the only bad job is the one you aren't passionate about, the one that isn't allowing you to leverage your professional strengths and reach your potential.
If you don't know what your professional strengths are or what kind of work you'd find purposeful and fulfilling, we recommend taking our free career quizzes.
Take the quizzes now to learn your unique combination of professional strengths and how they can help you get better career results so you can be proud of what you do.
2. Do I Feel Secure In My Career?
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This is a bit different from job security. Actually, job security doesn't exist. Every job is temporary. Think you can stay in the same job for decades and then retire? Think again. While that may have been commonplace for past generations, today's workforce and job market are completely different than what they were a decade or two ago.
So what does it mean to feel secure in our careers? When we believe as professionals that we can add value wherever we are.
You are a business-of-one. A company won't want to invest in you if they don't know the kinds of services you provide, the kind of value you could add to the organization, and the problems you could solve for them. Here are some examples of questions that will help you determine if you're secure in your career:
- Are you adding value at your current job?
- Are you honing your skills, expanding your network, and building your personal brand?
- Do you feel confident that if you lost your job, you'd be able to find a comparable one in the same field?
- Do you feel confident you'd be able to demonstrate to potential employers how you add value?
Since every job is temporary, it's extremely important to constantly work on our careers and ask ourselves these questions frequently so we always feel secure in our businesses-of-one.
3. Will I Be Able To Achieve Wealth?
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When most people think of "wealth," they think of dollar signs and anything that you can attach a monetary value to. Our jobs help us build wealth. We're not going to tell you that money isn't important. Of course it is! It allows you to live the life you want to live. In many ways, money equals freedom.
But the truth is, there are other forms of wealth that are more important that you can't attach any monetary value to.
Real wealth comes in the form of family, friends, hobbies, experiences, knowledge, and community. If you don't have these things, money will never fill that void.
So, is your career allowing you to build this type of wealth? The intangible kind? Or are your relationships suffering because of your job? Is your work-life balance nonexistent? Do you have any time to pursue hobbies, learn, or volunteer?
Your career should never inhibit you from achieving real wealth. The best job isn't the one that pays the most. It's the one that pays the bills and gives you enough time to live, too.
4. Do I Have Any Regrets?
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Just asking ourselves this question can be difficult because maybe we don't want to know the answer. Acknowledging that you regret something in your life is the first step to making a change. Guess what? There's still time to chase your dreams!
If you do have regrets, that doesn't mean you haven't been a successful professional. That also doesn't mean you haven't had a good career. You could be the most successful person, but if you never got up the courage to start that business, make that career change, or go back to school, you'll most likely think, "What if?" for the rest of your life.
You'll never know if you don't try. Don't be afraid of failure. Life is just one big experiment, and it's your job to learn from those experiments. That's how you discover what works and what doesn't. That's how you discover what's possible.
And even if you do "fail," that's an incredibly more valuable experience than waiting out the clock on a mediocre career. So, don't give up on your dreams just yet.
5. Can I Reach My Full Potential In This Role? In This Career?
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When we feel like we have more to contribute to society, that's a sign we haven't yet reached our full potential. Do you feel like you're wasting your potential at your current job? Do you think you'd reach your full potential in another career?
Really think about what you want your professional legacy to be. It's a lot harder to get up in the morning when you don't find fulfillment in your work. When it comes time for you to retire, are you going to look back on your career and feel like you could have accomplished much, much more with those 50 years?
Everyone has unique gifts, skills, and expertise. When we focus on developing ourselves as individuals, as businesses-of-one, it's a lot easier to share those things with the world. Give yourself a chance to reach your full potential. If you haven't taken our free quizzes yet, your results will help you do just that. You may be surprised by what you can accomplish.
Before you get back into the same routine at work this year, we hope you take a few minutes to ask yourself these career questions. Listen carefully to how you answer them. You may need to make a career resolution or two.
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Success Tweet: Success is a journey, not a destination. When you accomplish one goal, reach higher and set a new one.
You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – it’s a staple in undergraduate social psychology. In case you haven’t, or need a refresher, here is a quick recap.
In 1943, Dr. Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation” in which he described his ideas about what motivates humans. He suggested that human beings have a series of needs which we strive to meet and that the best way to motivate someone is to appeal to the need most relevant to him or her at a given time. He arranged these needs in a pyramid.
Physiological, or survival needs like breathing, food, water and sleep are at the base of the pyramid. Dr. Maslow suggested until these basic survival needs are met, human beings will not be motivated by any other needs.
Safety and security needs are the next up on the pyramid. Dr. Maslow suggests once people feel they will survive today, they will be motivated by the need to survive tomorrow, the next day and the long term.
Love and belonging needs are next. Dr. Maslow suggests that once human beings experience a reasonable level of security, their needs turn to developing friendship and family relations.
Esteem needs are next. Once people feel secure and loved, Dr. Maslow says they seek gratification that comes from achievement, self-respect and the respect of others.
Self-actualization needs are at the top of the pyramid. Dr. Maslow often described self -actualization as “being all that one can be.” And therefore, one can never be truly self-actualized. Dr. Maslow suggested self-actualization is the pursuit of perfection. In other words, once you accomplish something that you previously thought of as the pinnacle, you will find that there is more that you can accomplish. This is in keeping with Tweet 30 which suggests becoming self-actualized is a process in which you set new and higher goals whenever you accomplish one of your goals.
That’s why I say success is a journey, not a destination. Successful people see themselves as works in progress. Successful people are never finished becoming all that they can be. If you want the life and career success you deserve, you need to think of yourself this way.
I’m not suggesting that you take no time to celebrate your successes and look back at them with pride. I am saying however, if you want to build long term career success, you will use your successes as springboards to bigger and better things.
Set new goals. Develop plans for achieving these new goals. Work your plans. And then do it again. Think of yourself as someone who is “becoming” not as someone who is “complete.” Successful people realize there are always new challenges and opportunities. Some of the best career advice I ever received was from an early mentor who told me to see beyond the horizon, to keep actively looking for new ways to learn, grow and succeed.
The common sense career success coach point here is simple. Successful people never stop learning and growing. They follow the advice in Tweet 30 in Success Tweets: “Success is a journey, not a destination. When you accomplish one goal, reach higher and set a new one.” This is the idea embodied in the concept of self-actualization; you can never be all that you can be because there will always be new challenges ahead. Setting and achieving ever increasingly difficult goals is the best way to live a fulfilling life and to create the career success you deserve. Keep learning, keep growing, keep achieving, and you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Bud Bilanich, author of the FREE e-book called, "Success Tweets," is a motivational speaker and blogger who will help you create the life and career success you want and deserve. Read more » articles by this approved career expert | Click here » if you’re a career expert Image from Sergej Khakimullin/Shutterstock
