One great way to make your life unnecessarily hard and difficult is to assume that the world revolves around you.

Sure, such a belief is seductive in the way that it makes you someone who must be very important. If everyone is looking at you and talking about you all the time then that feeds the ego.

The ego wants to play the comparison game. So you may identify with a position where you are more than someone else. It may be that you are prettier than someone else. But it may also be something like you thinking you are stupider or uglier than someone else. As long as you are more than someone in some way the ego gets fed.

This belief about how the world revolves around you may be based partly in how when you are young the world kinda revolves around you. Your parents, siblings and a lot of grown ups are tending to your needs and whims all the time. However, now that we are adults such beliefs can become limiting.

Thinking that the world revolves around you doesn’t just mean that someone is behaving like an annoying, spoiled brat. It can be much more subtle than that. For me this has been about sitting down and really thinking about it and my reactions to different things in everyday life. You may find it useful to do the same. This belief can be a bit sneaky.

But why should you give it up though? Well, here are four good reasons that I use for motivation.

1. Decreased shyness.

Everyone may not agree with me here. But from my own personal experience with being shy it does to a large part come from a belief that people care a great deal about what you are about to say or do. Perhaps you are afraid that people will laugh or analyze what you said/did for the rest of the week.

Well, guess what. People have their own lives. I’m not saying that people closest to you doesn’t care about you. But that people mostly may think about you for a few minutes. Then they return to their lives. People have their challenges at home, at work, with the economy and so on. Yes, in your head you may be the most important person in the world. But don’t project that onto other people. Because in their world the most important person is probably them or their kid(s).

Now, the thing here is that people tend to care if you care though. Emotions are contagious. So if you feel nervous or act that way people will feel it too. If you don’t care then they won’t usually care that much either. Your new belief – that it’s not all about you – makes you less self-conscious. You become less shy. And people will sense less of those negative feelings coming from you too.

2. You become more open to try new things.

Well, this is an off-shot to the previous point I guess. When you give up the belief that it’s all about you experience a bigger social freedom since you know that feeling constrained by how people may react is just to a large part an illusion.

Trying new things is of course not only fun and a great way to grow. It will also provide you with proof that people don’t really care that much as you try something you may think will bring out a negative reaction from your surroundings. And then you are met by feedback like the disinterested “oh, that’s nice” or the eager questions from curious friends/co-workers/family.

3. It makes it easier to deal with criticism and negativity from other people.

If someone makes a personal attack or just let the destructive words flow then remember that criticism isn’t always about you. Criticism is a way for the one critiquing to release pent up anger, frustration or jealousy. Or a way to reinforce that his/her viewpoint or belief is the right one. Or s/he may have habit of getting others involved emotionally – baiting them – to build a negative spiral, an argument/fight or to get attention. It’s about him/her. Not about something you did.

It can have a calming effect to remember this.

4. It makes you more open and understanding towards others.

This is surely one of the best benefits of realizing that you are perhaps not the centre of the universe. It’s very easy to misinterpret people when you are stuck in that old mindset. You get some criticism and you think: “wow, I suck”. While it may be about the other person being human and having a bad day or week.

Let’s say that the waitress at a cafe is very rude. You may take this personally and get angry or irritated for the rest of the afternoon. Or feel like you are having a bad day and get down about yourself. But perhaps it wasn’t about you? Maybe she’s worried about her job. Maybe she is going through a divorce. Maybe her dog was run over yesterday.

You just don’t know what is going on in her life.

When you stop thinking that it all revolves around you experience a larger openness and instead of going into a powerful negative reaction when someone does something you are more understanding. Yes, reacting negatively gives you a temporary emotional rush as you feel right and poorly treated by the waitress. It’s the ego popping up again.

However, personally I don’t think that short emotional boost is worth it since it’s always followed by negative thought loops and emotions going around and around in your mind and body. Being open and understanding can be harder. But it makes you and your normal day much more pleasant.

How to put a stop to this belief

I don’t have many fancy tips on how to replace your old belief with your new one.

Just keep in mind that it’s not all about you as much as you can in your daily life. Make it a mental habit by reinforcing it. A written reminder here and there in your daily environment – such as post-it notes on your computer and bathroom mirror – can be very helpful.

The more you view the world through your new belief and get proof from experiences in your life the more comfortable you’ll be with the belief. The physical proof in your world solidifies the belief and “makes it real” to you. Instead of something you may have read on some blog.

You can also try acting as you would like to feel when you feel self-conscious and like everyone’s attention is focused on you. In such situation or on such days act as if the world doesn’t revolve around you and people don’t care that much about what you do. After a while and after taking action you will actually start to feel that way for real. It’s a way to jump-start yourself in your daily life and lead yourself onto a more helpful.

Note: This is a guest post by Kacper Wrzesniewski.

Each day we are dreaming about our goals. Each day we are moving forward, step closer to the success. Sometimes we are so focused on our objectives that we don’t have time to think why we desire success.

What is the reason? Do we really need it? Is it coming from the conscious or unconscious part of our mind?

I have a simple exercise for you, my friend. Don’t worry; it doesn’t require you to move away from screen and it will take no more than few minutes.

Just relax and focus thoughts on your latest success you have achieved. It doesn’t have to be something really big and outstanding. A small success that you have recently experienced is absolutely enough.

Ok, got it?

Imagine that achieving success is like a journey; sometimes it can be quite easy, sometimes really tough, can be also short or very long. Let’s figure out why you took this journey and what helped you to accomplish it.

Jump in your memories to the point where your journey began. Recall feelings and emotions connected to this moment. What was the reason you decided to set yourself this goal?

How did you take your first step?

While moving your thoughts on the path toward your goal, try to identify factors that motivated you and increased your energy to go forward. Look also for those who obstructed your journey.

How did you cope with them?

Finally, arrive to your destination point.

What did you feel when you succeed? Were you truly happy or maybe disappointed as the goal didn’t bring you satisfaction and fulfillment?

Don’t worry if above questions was difficult for you. To help you answering them, I share with you the six main reasons, which I identify why we want to achieve success.

1. We want to achieve success because it is a part of our life plans.

Success is strongly related with our life plans. We can distinguish certain milestones in our plans, like graduating, getting a desired job, starting our own business or new relationship.

Achieving these milestones are successes for us. Each of these goals brings us positive feelings and emotions because we know that our life plans are fulfilling and that we are making visible progress.

2. We want the output related with certain success.

In many cases we want to experience benefits related with the achievement of a certain goal. In our minds, we have a strong association between these benefits and a state when we are successful.

This association causes our success to be desirable and enjoyable.

3. We love the taste of winning.

Achieving success is a very positive experience also because it adds value to us and pumps our egos. Achieving success is like personal victory.

People love winning. It is very natural. When two children play a game, each of them want to win. It is not important if there is any material prize.

They don’t need any additional purpose.

It is deep in our nature that we love the taste of winning.

4. We need stimulation.

Knowing that there is a purpose, a goal we want to achieve, it stimulates us to act. The more challenging goal, the stronger success feeling is related to it.

This way, we can get a better motivation to achieve bigger goals and we get additional stimulus to self-improve, grow personally and learn to handle challenging goal.

5. We want to compensate lacks and failures from the past.

We all make mistakes.

Failures are definitely not nice, but they are unavoidable in our lives and they should always provide valuable feedback.

They also raise a strong force that will push us toward further goals.

We lost, but in the end we want to win. This victory, preceded by many failures, can compensate all previous unpleasant experiences. This pattern is very often responsible for a reason why we want to achieve success.

6. We find success as a solution for our problems.

Enjoying success is a very positive experience.

It can weaken influence of other, bad experiences in our life. We often find it easier to act in one direction, when we expect success, while we avoid handling different, unpleasant problems in our life.

What is important is that we are often unaware of this mechanism as it mostly works on unconscious level.

Now, one more time ask yourself questions from the first part of this article. Is it easier now to answer them and identify your reasons?

I’m sure you have just achieved higher level of consciousness, as far as achieving success is concerned.

Kacper Wrzesniewski writes on KacperWrzesniewski.com

“The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships.”
Anthony Robbins

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one”
C.S Lewis

I think the Tony Robbins quote above is pretty accurate. The quality of your relationships – no matter in what form they may exist – obviously has a huge impact on your life. But what can we do to create new relationships and improve our existing ones?

Well, here are 7 timeless tips that people have used throughout the ages. Hopefully you’ll find something useful.

1. Be open to new people.

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
Anais Nin

It’s easy to get comfortable with what you have and what you know. It feels familiar and safe. But being open to new meetings and being open in those meetings can also be a great thing.

One of the best and quickest ways to grow and experience new things is simply to meet new people with an open mind. You may feel some inner resistance before the meeting, but just like when you don’t feel like going to the gym it’s a good thing to not take that feeling too seriously. It’s there because it makes it easier for you in the short run and because it keeps things as they are. But just ignoring it and going ahead anyways is oftentimes much more rewarding.

2. Be wary of building walls.

“People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.”
Joseph F. Newton Men

The ego wants to divide your world. It wants to create barriers, separation and loves to play the comparison game. The game where people are different compared to you, the game where you are better than someone and worse than someone else. All of that creates fear. And so we build walls. But putting up walls tends to in the end hurt you more than protect you.

So how can you start building bridges instead? One way is to choose to be curious about people. Curiosity is filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. It opens you up. And when you are open and enthusiastic then you have more fun things to think about than focusing on your fear.

Another is to start to see yourself in other people. To get that there is no real separation between you and other people.

That may sound vague. So one practical suggestion and thought you may want to try for a day is that everyone you meet is your friend.

Another one is to see what parts of yourself you can see in someone you meet.

3. Learn to like yourself.

“It is of practical value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship.”
Norman Vincent Peale

As Peale says, you will have to spend a lot of time with yourself so you might as well make it pleasant. This is also important because how you feel about yourself is often how people will tend to treat you. If you like yourself then that comes through via your body language, voice tonality and words. You will, for example, send out positive and confident signals. Two things that people generally like and appreciate in other people.

How do you learn to like yourself? Well, that seems to be a challenge with many answers.

But one of the most important things is to do what you feel is the right thing to do consistently. When you think and act as you would like and at least go for what you want – even though you may fail from time to time – you tend to feel good about yourself. You live in alignment with what you think is right. You are being “the best you”.

Another thing is to some way down the road realize that adding more to yourself will never be enough. It’s just the voice of the ego wanting more, more, more! It’s like trying to fill up a bucket with hole in it.

A far better mindset is that you are already complete. This makes you feel good about yourself and gives you more emotional stability. What you add to your life – people, gadgets, food – can bring great experiences but you are already complete. This mindset allows you to stop chasing “the next thing” for the rest of your life.

However, to be able to take such a mindset seriously you may have to chase things and people for a while longer. When the suffering has become enough, when you’ve tried over and over again without finding what you look for then that is often the right time. The time when you open up to trying a new perspective. When you have suffered enough you will often take the leap and change.

You can read more about this in books by Eckhart Tolle like A New Earth and Stillness Speaks.

4. Your relationships are in your mind.

“As you think so shall you be! Since you cannot physically experience another person, you can only experience them in your mind. Conclusion: All of the other people in your life are simply thoughts in your mind. Not physical beings to you, but thoughts. Your relationships are all in how you think about the other people of your life. Your experience of all those people is only in your mind. Your feelings about your lovers come from your thoughts. For example, they may in fact behave in ways that you find offensive. However, your relationship to them when they behave offensively is not determined by their behavior, it is determined only by how you choose to relate to that behavior. Their actions are theirs, you cannot own them, you cannot be them, you can only process them in your mind.”
Wayne Dyer

“It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.”
Epictetus

How you choose to interpret people and your relationships makes a huge difference. So much of our relationships may be perceived to happen out there somewhere.

But as mentioned in tip #2 in this article, your underlying frame of mind – do you build bridges or walls? – will determine much about your interactions both new people and people you know.

So you really have to go inside. You have to realize that your interpretations from the past are interpretations. Not reality. You have to take a look at your assumptions and expectations and thought habits. Find patterns that may be hurting you (and others). This isn’t easy. Or always pleasant. You may discover that you have had some negative underlying habits of thought for many years.

But to change you have to do it. Instead of just keep looking at yourself as some sort of unmoving and objective observer of the world and reality. A change in you could – over time – change your whole world.

5. Give value instead of the other way around.

“Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they’re trying to find someone who’s going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.”
Anthony Robbins

As mentioned above, it’s useful to like yourself and see yourself as already complete. Otherwise you may go chasing new relationships to get that kick of feeling good over and over again. When you on the other hand like yourself, you spend less of your focus on what you can take and more on what you can give. The desperate craving to get more, more, more and fill yourself up isn’t there anymore.

Creating a habit of giving value in your everyday life and in your relationships is pretty awesome. And it’s something anyone can start to develop today. Some of the things you can do to give value are:

• Bringing a positive attitude and vibe into interactions.
• Offering useful advice or knowledge to someone.
• Giving a genuine compliment.
• Just offering a listening ear to someone who needs it.
• Cheering someone up.
• Hugs.
• Helping someone out with moving, cooking, cleaning up etc.
• Taking the lead and creating a fun situation for your friends such as a picnic or a night out on the town.
• Being totally present in conversation and focused on the other person.

It’s important to do this without hidden agendas. If you do something just to get something back that often shines through. A genuine compliment is powerful because you really and honestly mean it. It backfires when you are just out to get something from the other person.

But of course, people who give a lot of value tend to get a lot of value back. In the long run things tend to even out and you get what you give.

6. Share with someone.

“Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.”
Swedish Proverb

Simple but easy to forget sometimes. Sharing makes life and relationships a lot more fun. And your hard times at least a bit easier.

7. Genuineness is the key.

“Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations. Don’t over-analyse your relationships. Stop playing games. A growing relationship can only be nurtured by genuineness.”
Leo F. Buscaglia

I think that one of the most important things in a relationship of any kind is to be genuine. Few things are as powerful as genuine communication and letting the genuine you shine through. Without incongruency, mixed messages or perhaps a sort of phoniness.

It’s you to 100%.

It’s you with not only your words but you with your voice tonality and body language – which some say is over 90% of communication – on the same wavelength as your words. It’s you coming through on all channels of communication.

Being your authentic self – the one where you build bridges, the one where your ego is not running the show and trying to get something from someone – will give you better results and more satisfaction in your day to day life because you are in alignment with yourself. And because people really like genuineness and people really like authenticity.

Note: This is a guest post by Mike King of Learn This.

Work Branding

I’ve written on a few topics before about presenting with passion, finding your passions in life and also looking at your online portfolio as each of these things reveal important things about you in your life.  They are just portions of what makes you up however and the image you present to others as a whole package is also known as your personal brand.

Many people talk about branding yourself for a specific purpose or for work, but I believe people should ONLY brand themselves from the perspective they want to portray for their entire life.  Work is really just a portion of our lives since working for 40 hours a week and 50 weeks a year for up to 40 years (about 80,000 hours) is actually only about 11.4% of our entire lives (700,000 hours) if you expect to live to an age of 80 years old. 

Even if you took 1/3 of your life away to account for sleeping, you still only work about 17% of your waking hours in a lifetime. Think about that for a minute. Is work really that important in the whole scheme of things if it is such a small portion of our lives from birth to death?  I’d say not.

Life Branding

Whether that work centric focus is most important to you or not, this article is a guide to brand yourself in your life in a way that is consistent and congruent with how you live, what you believe in and it is intended for all areas of your life, not just your work life.  Happiness is up for grabs when you can live with consistent values and be true to yourself in all aspects of your life which massively reinforces and demonstrates your life brand!  So, here are 10 ways that can specifically help you to actually be the brand you want in life.

1. Know Your Own Brand

Obviously if you want to be the brand you want in life, you also need to know what you want that to be. Take time to think about this. What are the things that are important to you? What would you want to leave as a lasting impression on others when you meet them, know them well and part ways from them? Exploring this and really understanding yourself is important here to start this process off.

If you need help to do this, the best advice is to get out on your own, in complete solitude and think about what you live for. What is your purpose in life and do you want others to know that purpose about you? What are the things you are living for now?  Are they different than the things you want them to be?

This is one of the hardest steps in the process if you don’t already know this about yourself because it takes a lot of time to realize.  Take all the time you need, talk to close friends and family about the things that are meaningful to you.  Examine yourself to know your own brand that you want to live.  The items you want in your brand should be long term and stand the test of time. A brand should not be changing all the time!

2. Eliminate Any Ego Based Perception

Egos unfortunately get in the way with branding far too easily. Everything around us trains us to live a materialistic life where ego drives it all. We chase status, money, power and fame without really having any reason or determination for things that are more lasting in our souls.  To kill this you must truly kill the ego driven branding that is so easily reinforced in life.  Ignore those temporary things in life and focus on the areas that have real lasting impact:

• Relationships
• Faith
• Spirituality
• Service
• Values and Morals
• Health
• Legacy
• Happiness

Create a sense of self without having to advertise to the world the temporary things you acquire. Show the importance for areas in the list above and work to overcome any bad habits you have where you currently present a selfish or egocentric attitude.  Simple comments and attitudes can make a big difference to other people’s perspective of you and so small changes can also make a vast improvement in this area.  Its important to not simply suppress those ego builders from others, but to really change the thinking behind it to eliminate it in your own mind.  If you don’t believe it yourself, you will certainly not present to others.

3. Hold True Your Background

Your background is often a large part of who you are.  This could be where you grew up, what kind of schooling or childhood you had, your family, your heritage, your religious beliefs, whatever the things are that have been a big part of your life, don’t abandon them. 

Take the things from your background that makes you who you are and who you want to be and hold true to those learned things. Continue to value them and don’t hide from your past.  Embrace it and take life lessons from it. You can’t change your past so you might as well gain by it and be honest about it with yourself and others.  Your background can often be an important part of branding who you are today and who you want to be.

4. Live and Reinforce Your Morals

Do you have and know your morals? Do you live by them and make decisions by them? Everyone does, it’s just that the decisions and choices in life are not always in line with the morals we think we have!  If you want to be the brand you want in life, you need to live your life according to your morals and have the integrity to stick to them.  Don’t shift towards and away from them depending on who you are with, or what situation you are in. Knowing your morals and living by them are an important part of knowing yourself and your brand.

5. Make Your Core Values Known

Core values are also an important area of life to use, to learn about yourself and to understand your brand in life. There are many advantages of truly understanding your core values and sharing them and when it comes to branding, they are a strong part of a person’s makeup and living by them should help you align yourself with the brand you want.

Of course, your core values need to align with the brand you want as well so taking the time to examine your core values is a great way to create and understand your brand. Validating that to ensure it’s in line with what you want it to be is then the next step. Sharing those values with others is a way to describe yourself and a powerful set of attributes to stick to.  This can really help to build your brand let alone live by it.

6. Practice What You Preach

If you want to have a brand that others can believe, you have to make it believable.  You do this by demonstrating and showing that you are true to the brand you portray and that you actually do practice what you preach.  If you say one thing about yourself, yet go and do the opposite, that brand is nothing but words and will likely never hold true.

A brand must be connected to the actions, descriptions and message it delivers and the proof of that is in your actions. You have to keep the things you do within the confines of your brand and the more you do this, the more accurate your brand will be to others. Practicing what you preach delivers a powerful message to others about who you are and it makes you and your brand seem genuine and authentic!

7. Strengthen Your Unique Attributes

Identify all the things about yourself that make you unique.  Is it your attitude, style, humor, work ethic, learning, motivation, energy, empathy, helpfulness, ability to focus, kindness, honesty, responsibility, cooperation, acceptance/tolerance or your perseverance! Of course there are more attributes then that but those tend to fit into the category of liked attributes in the workplace and relationships.

Identify those attributes you match and look to work to strengthen them. Make them obvious, demonstrate them, practice them and master them in your life so that you would always be describes as having them if others asked to describe you.  You want these attributes to match the brand you are building and showing them often so that they stand out above other attributes will reinforce them in your brand.

Not only are your character attributes a great way to build your brand but also your life activities, beliefs, hobbies and experiences.  All those things can be part of your brand attributes and the unique ones are easier to talk about and certainly easier for other people to remember you by and to remember your brand associated with it. 

I just wrote an article about how engaging mountain unicycling is for me and it is an example that I use as one of my unique attributes.  While that activity is very common for me as I ride every week, to others, it’s an engaging activity and a great way to help people remember me and my brand. I can show massive passion and enthusiasm for that sport since I enjoy it so much. If you have your own unique attributes, use them to describe yourself and build your brand!

8. Demonstrate Your Most Wanted Traits

For similar reasons you should show the attributes you have that are your most wanted traits.  Perhaps the most wanted by you or perhaps that of others.  If you want your brand to demonstrate that, you need to work on them, and practice them so they are visible in many areas of your life.  Spending time on mastering your skills for something you want to show will definitely improve it and often just focusing on the one or two attributes you want will allow you to develop it quickly and make it stronger than other attributes.

Look for resources here that can help you as well. Ask others who have it how they developed it and how they demonstrate it. Read about it and do research to ensure you understand all the related bits of knowledge for that attribute. Study builds interest in things which can also give motivation and momentum to master particular areas. Using examples, stories, articles and others’ experiences is an easy way to learn to demonstrate it yourself.

9. Write About and Share With Others

Writing is unfortunately seen by most people as a waste of time, however, there is HUGE value in it. If you want to show and learn more yourself about any content or subject, then writing about it is an excellent way to do that.

I’ve written before how teaching is a great way to learn and writing is often seen as a way to teach something. Look at writing letters, articles or stories about the areas of life you’ve learned or are working to master and you can easily develop that yourself and convince others of your applied knowledge with those areas.

Sharing your brand, the image you want and how you are doing it is very valuable as well.  Not only for building it and reinforcing it, but to also work with others to get help. Whether it’s through learning from them or building connections that help you get involved where you are most effective, sharing things with others will help you stay encouraged, continually get new ideas and be challenged. This helps you see progress with your branding and that is vital to keeping yourself motivated to keep on working towards being the brand you want to be.

10. Be Consistent With Your Brand

It’s important to be consistent and true to yourself when delivering your Brand. Armen Shirvanian from Timeless Information commented recently on my article about protecting your online social media profile, in that he states how important is it to be congruent with a consistent brand for yourself. He’s absolutely right and this consistency with our online profiles or brand wherever it is displayed can only be done if it is consistent. Every area of this article and the brand you want to build has to be consistent from all areas of your life.  You can’t be a separate brand in your home life and another one in your work life. It doesn’t work and even if you manage to fake them, you will never make it last or reach your full potential having two separate brands.

Another great article I read recently on the subject is from Jonathan at Illuminated mind, where he wrote Don€™t be a Sellout: A Guide to Staying Real. This is an excellent article about how to be consistent and true to yourself in the perspective you portray to others. Again, I feel this really reinforces how important it is to be consistent and real with yourself in all areas of your life.  Your brand is something you should be happy to share with anyone, friends, colleagues, family or even strangers online.

Conclusion

So, I encourage you to take some time and follow this plan to build and be your own brand.  Put your ideas down on paper and decide how and what you want in each of these steps.  Look at applying them in your home life, relationships and work environment.

It will drastically improve your confidence in yourself and can really give you the boost you need to become happier, more effective and much more consistent in your life.  Don’t settle and be complacent with your current brand unless you can honestly be described in your life as the way you want to be and the best person you can possibly be.

Mike is the author of Learn This, a productivity blog for self learning career, leadership and life improvement tips. He’s written many articles about finding your passion in life, goal setting and many other ideas around learning to have a better and more positive life. Please subscribe to his RSS feed here to read more of his articles!

Note: This is a guest post by Hilary Jeanes of Purple Line Consulting.

How important to you is your career?

It is surprising how many people leave their careers to chance.  They seem to think that their career will just happen or that the organisation they work for will not only decide when their next step on the career ladder is but also what it will be.  If it doesn’t happen, then the organisation is perceived to be useless or not caring or not recognising/rewarding effort or hard work.  We spend a lot of time at work, so doing something we enjoy and find rewarding (both personally and financially) makes good sense.

From my own experience, both as an employee of large organisations and as an HR professional, here are 10 tips which make it much more likely that you will achieve the career you want.

1. What do you love doing?  Think about any type of work you have done – while you were at school or college, in your vacations or in your past or current jobs.  What is it that gave you a buzz?  What activities have you done where time passed without you even noticing?  This is likely to be where your natural strengths lie.  Ask your friends and colleagues what they think you are good at.  There are probably no surprises, but it’s good to find out what others think are your skills and attributes.
2. What did you dream about doing when you were a child?  If you are not doing that now, what aspects of being an astronaut, professional footballer, model, teacher or doctor etc etc appealed to you?
3. Think about what you’d like to be doing in 5 and 10 years’ time.  Working on your own or as part of a team? What sort of organisation (and which specific companies/organisations) do you want to work for? What type of work would you like to be doing?  At home or abroad?  At a desk or not?  What do you like about what you do now?  What would you like to be different?
4. Let’s go to the end of your working life now… Imagine you are at your own retirement party.  People are talking about what you achieved in your career and what they admired and will miss you for.  What would you like them to be saying?
5. What skills do you have that you are not using and would like to?  They may be writing skills that you used on your college magazine or being captain of the school hockey team.  Seek out opportunities to put them into practice now.
6. Look at job ads – in newspapers, journals and on websites.  Cut out or print off job ads that interest you, that you aspire to or that you are curious about.  Which organisations appeal and why?  Highlight the words that are most appealing.  Keep them in a special folder and every month or so, take them out, review them and write a list of the highlighted words.   What are the common themes?  What of the common themes you identify are you doing now?  What do you need to do to be able to fulfil the requirements of those ads in the future?
7. Who do you know?  Who can help you get to where you want to be?  Talk to as many people as possible about what they do and what they love about it.  Ask them how they got the career development they wanted or if you could shadow them for a day to find out how they do what they do.  Most people are flattered to be asked and are only too happy to help.  Find someone who is doing the job you aspire to or working in an organisation you’d like to work for and ask them if they would mentor you.  If you don’t know someone, ask your family, friends and contacts if they do – remember the 6 degrees of separation.
8. Grasp opportunities with both hands.  My big breaks in corporate life came at times when I was facing big challenges in my personal life – a new parent returning to work and separating from my partner.  I really doubted whether I could manage the jobs that were on offer given the other life challenges I was facing, but what I realised was that if I passed up those opportunities, they might not be there again.  It was tough at first, but they were two of the best career decisions I took.
9. What does your boss do that you could do for them?  Observe your boss in action.  What does he or she spend their time doing?  Are there regular activities that they engage in that you would like to try and that would save them time and energy?  If so, suggest that you do it for them.
10. Finding the right job takes time and effort.  Put the time and effort in and it will pay off.  Write down the answers to these questions and keep referring to them.  Find a coach and explore your future career aspirations with them.  One thing is certain – if you know where you are going you are much more likely to get there.  If you set off from home without knowing where you were headed you would drive around aimlessly. So it is with your career. Be clear about what you want and you will get it.

Hilary Jeanes is a coach, facilitator and HR consultant.  She is fascinated by people and loves supporting them to reach their potential. Visit her website at Purple Line Consulting.  You can read another article of hers here.