How well do your professional goals complement your sense of strategic purpose? Is your professional glass half empty or merely half full?
Consider that your strategic purpose is changing. It is time to re-write your Strategic Professional Purpose Playbook, together with me.
This change is in response to your collective professional experiences, regardless of how long you have been working. Your first goal becomes to continuously discover what are you truly meant to do, to better serve colleagues and clients, together. Then, your next goal continuously evaluates how well your current work environment or business model (or both) facilitates your accomplishing your goal.
- Are you feeling unsettled, as though you are in motion yet your co-workers seem to stand still?
- Do you sense that where you are today is not as relevant, valuable, and professionally fulfilling as it once felt?
- Plus, are you bored by your organization’s standardized competencies and group performance expectations? Why? “Their” standards represent only half of what your growing sense of strategic purpose tells you that you are capable of doing.
That is when you have an epiphany about your strategic purpose.
You know, that “uh-oh” moment during a meeting, while reading an email, or as you speak with a colleague. That is the moment where you get a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. You know you are not in the right place for you. Even though everyone else may be perfectly happy where they are.
What do you do next? Have another private intervention with yourself? Try (once again) to convince yourself to suck it up, fit in, and run with the pack? Continue to pursue what you perceive to be a half-empty glass? Yet, you already envision another glass that is half-full and waiting for your innovation.
Gradually, you begin to feel like an imposter: to them. At the same time, your unfulfilled strategic purpose causes you to short-sell yourself: to them. Yet, there are folks waiting for you to show up at their professional tables. They get it and get you. However, you cannot show up at their tables when your professional goals continue to conflict with your growing sense of strategic purpose.
It is time. You and I are reading lots of those traditional New Year’s articles about goal-setting and resignations. Do these articles truly align with what you, yourself, are experiencing? Why let others superimpose their trending observations and labels on you, once again? Plus, why continue to attempt to retrofit yourself into their observations and labels? These do not fit you, in the the first place. They never did.
Today is the day you move one millimeter forward, to get to where you really need to go. Start rewriting your own Strategic Purpose Playbook. Become more professionally fulfilled as you squeeze out what is professionally compromising and unsatisfying.
All it takes is a one millimeter moment to start asking the right questions, the right way, so you define and solve the right problems, in the first place. One millimeter at a time, together. Contact me here to get started today.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ keynotes, breakouts, workshops and coaching programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable. Create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. Babette is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). She is a member of SHRM, PMI and the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available in soft cover and digital formats on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.
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