Will You Leverage Professional Purpose in 2021?

Will you leverage professional purpose as a key component in your 2021 career strategy? And consequently, the major reason for how you, yourself, always deliver human capital value as you serve colleagues and clients.

Many professionals I present to, or consult for, view their profession as a linear series of accomplishments. For them, all accomplishments are linked to demonstrated ROI. Thus, their career strategy is accomplishment-based. As a result, the target becomes their next departmental promotion and then the next promotion, and so on. End of professional story.

Have I just described you?

Because if this is your own story, there are a lot of people just like you doing the same things, the same way. They hope to be recognized and rewarded in the same homogeneous, assembly-line manner.

Unless you absolutely adore fulfilling your professional function in a linear manner, you understand that professional function is not the same as professional purpose. Also, you do not have an assembly-line professional mindset, do you?

In speaking to, and consulting for, professionals like you, we’ve focused on how 2020 became their year of re-discovering their professional purpose. Courtesy, of course, of the global pandemic.

So here we are, together. You have a unique opportunity, as well. Because moving forward, you share a common story with everyone: your pandemic professional journey. How will you leverage insights gained and skills discovered as a result of your unique, painful and common shared experience?.

What have you learned about your professional why, where, how, when and with whom since January 2020? And yes, the story you tell probably is not a perfect fairy tale either. 

Perhaps you realized you are in the wrong job or working for the wrong employer. Or you adapted as you applied new technology and worked virtually with colleagues. Then again, did you explore professional virtual relationships that resulted from basic necessity? Yet, these resulted in highly successful and rewarding collaborations with people you would never have met otherwise.

And just perhaps you realized that your brain has the capacity to connect the dots very effectively across the organization. Thus you began to feel professionally confined by yesterday’s professional mindset as you worked within departmental silos.

When you leverage professional purpose, it’s because you experience a professional epiphany. Often, that realization translates into a career trajectory that is more cross-functional than you imagine.

Will 2021 be the year you move one millimeter beyond what is considered as your professional “norm?” And, instead, discover how to walk the talk of your cross-functional insights as you target leading, rather than continuing to follow?

Then let’s take the next steps. To get to where you really need to go. Together.

Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Searching for a one-on-one catalyst to get you unstuck? Engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person. Contact me here.

My One Millimeter Mindset™  virtual and in-person keynotes, workshops, coaching and mastermind programs translate across strategic communication and collaboration disconnects between people and professional disciplines. Build trust. Retain employees and clients. Optimize strategic business and human capital value in your organizations. Get everyone to where they need to go. Together. One millimeter at a time.  My playbook of communication tools and methods, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Image source: Adobe Stock.