Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs

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Chapter Two

Channel Your Passion

That knot or sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you feel on Sunday night as you look ahead to another week at work and the dread that envelopes you as you perform the mundane tasks that fill your days at the office are the career equivalent of flashing red lights. They are sure signs that you haven’t discovered and channeled your passion – that you haven’t taken the steps necessary to move toward your goals and achieve your dreams.

When you assume responsibility for your career, you will move into the driver’s seat and take control of your destiny. When you overcome the fears that keep your career stuck in neutral, you can accelerate toward your goals. When you clearly understand the impact of your decisions and actions, you have a roadmap to success. Ultimately, you become driven by an unstoppable force that is, in essence, Career Intensity.

Once you have made the commitment to value creation through the process of continuous improvement, you are on your way to becoming an intense, driven person who will stop at nothing until you are living your dream. At this point, you must carefully exorcise the self-doubt that will drive your career into a ditch.

You will achieve all of your goals. It will happen. Whenever a doubt creeps into your mind, you need to banish it as if it were the enemy. Doubt is the enemy of success. As long as you have the ability to draw breath you have the ability to achieve your goals. You are smart enough and you have as much ability to become successful as anyone else.

To reinforce this thinking, get a rubber band and put it around your wrist. Any type of rubber band will do. Now, when you find yourself daydreaming about your goals or your future success and a doubt creeps into your thoughts, snap the rubber band. When you feel the sting, tell yourself that self-doubt can only hurt your progress and that, as you move forward, there is no room for it in your life. Immediately think about a positive action you can take to make your daydream a reality. The trick is to associate pain with the negative thought and replace it immediately will a positive image. Practice this exercise for a week, or until you find yourself immediately replacing negative thoughts and self-doubt with possibilities.

Your mind has the ability to create any world that you can imagine. Perspective is simply the way you see things, and not necessarily the way they really are. The first step in developing Career Intensity lies in taking control of your own mind by controlling your thoughts. It’s your responsibility.

Taking Control through Assuming Responsibility

Your life is a sum of your experiences, and you have the ability to impact every experience. Yes, you can have an impact on each and every experience in your life. People often say, “There was nothing I could do,” or “I was a victim of circumstance.” Those are statements made by people who do not want to control their own destinies. Each one of us has the ability to control how we react to challenging situations. It is critical that you take immediate responsibility for your own future. Every action you take involves a choice. Take a deep breath and assume responsibility for your future.

When I talk about assuming responsibility for the future, often someone will describe a situation that appears to be out of her control, such as a car accident. It is true that things happen to all of us that cannot be foreseen, let alone prevented. Yet, there is still an element of the situation that we do control. In the face of adversity, we control our reaction to that challenge. No matter what the situation, each of us has the ability to control our reaction. One person may allow the adversity of a difficult situation to drive her down a path of negativity. Another will use adversity as an opportunity to become stronger. In each case, the individual made a choice.

Taking responsibility begins with giving up the drudgery of everyday tasks that you hate. It means leaving the temporary job that has become your career. The assumption of responsibility should empower you to shape your destiny. I often ask people the question, “If money was not an issue for you but you needed to be employed, what would you be doing?” Most people respond with occupations that are dramatically different than their current positions. When I ask a person why he doesn’t move into the role he desires, his answer is often related to his financial situation. I then ask, “If you had a plan to move into that occupation and make more money doing it, but that plan took a year to execute, would you do it?” His answer is always, “Yes!” Even if I extend the question to reflect a five- or ten-year period, he will often respond affirmatively.

The point of this line of questioning is to help him understand where his true passion lies. Successful people begin to take responsibility for their future by following their passion and making their passion their career. People who are passionate about what they do often find that the time they spend at work passes very quickly. Instead of feeling drained at the end of their workday, they are energized by what they have accomplished. On a Sunday night, they feel a sense of anticipation toward the week ahead. They are driven by an almost unstoppable force that gives them the energy and enthusiasm that infects everyone they meet during the course of their workday. Assuming responsibility is the key to unlocking this power. Assume responsibility for each and every action you take. Start by assuming responsibility for your career.