The Make-Or-Break Career Skill No One Talks About

It goes without saying that you have to be responsible and alert to succeed in your career, no matter what your career path is.

You have to be reliable, of course, and you have to be a good team member. No one can really act surprised if they miss out on a promotion and their boss says "We all like you, Stan, but you have a tendency to let us down when it matters, and that's not something a supervisor can do. I gave the promotion to Anjali, because I can always rely on her in the clinch."

There is another, critical career skill that makes or breaks careers and that we don't talk about as often as we should. It's a muscle that we don't grow just by getting older or by going to school or even by taking on more and more responsibility over time. It is possible to reach a ripe old age without growing this muscle, and it always a shame when that happens.

At Human Workplace we call this must-have career muscle "Fast Learning." What does it mean? When you grow your Fast Learning muscles, you grab the lesson that every experience brings with it.

You learn from every triumph and every slip-up. You collect "Ahas!" and integrate them quickly. That way, you learn to anticipate roadblocks and tarpits on your path and get around them or get over them.

When something gets in your way, trips you up or frustrates you, people with Fast Learning muscles grab the learning from those experiences and immediately apply that learning to their lives. They might get bitten by a particular snake once, but that same snake won't bite them again.

If you can get a powerful lesson from everything that happens to you, you will get stronger every day whether your experiences are positive or negative. It doesn't matter which kinds of experiences you have -- they all provide learning, if we are smart enough to grab it!

Many people don't learn from their experiences. They end up in the same jams over and over again. Because they don't see their part in the mishaps they encounter, they think "The world world is against me!" They don't want to look at their piece of the puzzle.

You probably have friends or family members who think this way. They don't want advice, but they want to tell you how tough they've got it. They don't see how they walk into the same unfortunate and painful situations again and again.

Matthew is a university professor. He worked hard for five years at his last job and didn't get tenure. He missed a lot of cues. He had strife with his dean and had regular conflicts with the rest of the faculty. When Matthew was told he wasn't getting tenure, he was very bitter.

Matthew got a new job at another school. He said "These people had better be smarter than the people at my last university were."

Matthew's wife Clara asked him "What are you going to do differently this time around? How can you use the feedback from your old colleagues to avoid having the same thing happen again?"

"Those people at my last college were idiots!" thundered Matthew. Maybe they were idiots but if so, why did Matthew stick around for five years only to let the idiots turn him down for tenure? If the whole reason for Matthew's disappointing tenure bid was that his teammates were idiots, what does that make him?

It is hard to look in the mirror at first to see our own starring role in our adventures, but it gets easier every time we do it. As little kids we learn not to touch a hot stove after we've been burned once. 

That kind of learning doesn't stop as we get older, but we can easily tune it out. We can get defensive and say "I have nothing to learn! Other people have to change - I won't."

Mother Nature is the best teacher. She only sends us painful lessons to help us. We can accept her lessons and get stronger, or reject them and say "That was just bad luck! I always get the short end of the stick!"

Smart job-seekers invest a few months lobbing applications into faceless online job-search portals, and then they wise up and realize that there is no cheese in that end of the mouse maze.

They take their job search into their own hands and start writing to hiring managers directly, sending them Pain Letters through the mail. Their luck changes and they realize "Luck had nothing to do with it!" They tuned into the Reality Channel and adjusted course.

Other people work for lousy bosses and get so frustrated that they narrowly avoid road-rage incidents whenever someone cuts them off on the drive home. Eventually they wake up and say "Why am I letting my no-account boss dictate my career progress, not to mention my well-being?"  

People who cannot take that step, who can't look in the mirror, will say "My boss is a jerk -- that's the whole story!" If your boss is a jerk but you keep working for him anyway, what does that make you?

Luckily for all of us, "my boss is a jerk" is not the whole story. There is always something we can do. We are always in control of our own lives.

We each control our destiny -- but not until the moment we pick up the car keys and put them in the ignition! Until that moment, the tired wheeze "I can't catch a break!" will feel like a warm blanket against harsh reality. The instant we realize we are driving the car, we gain power.

The minute you take control of the vehicle called Your Life, you will feel the engine beneath you and realize that you get to pick your destination and the road to get there. No lousy boss can slow you down.

No obnoxious recruiting site can delay you for long. You've got a career to drive and talents that the world needs to see.

Can you stay open and grateful for the lessons Mother Nature is sending you, both the pleasant and the harsh ones, and show your gratitude by using every one of those lessons to change gears or shift course as the situation requires?

Everyone who can receive life lessons and apply them quickly can get what they want in their lives and their careers. Three or six months after an upsetting incident they 'll laugh when they tell the story.

They'll say "That was a harsh lesson for a moment, but boy, did it help me in the long run!" Can you step out of Excuse Land, tune into the Reality Channel and do the same thing?

Questions and Answers

Liz, the story about Matthew the disgruntled professor rings true. Can you tell a story about a person who took control of his or her own life and career, and learned from a harsh experience?

Dorothy is looking for a new job. She worked for seven years at a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) company before she got laid off. Dorothy got three job interviews quickly, so she figured "I'll get one of these jobs and be back working again in a few weeks!"

Dorothy went on the three job interviews, and she surprised herself, but not in a good way. She realized that she was not prepared to go on interviews quite yet. She stumbled through the conversations. She was so nervous her palms were sweaty.

She didn't get any of the jobs she applied for. She didn't get any second interviews. She got the learning, instead! Dorothy enlisted two friends of hers to mock-interview her until she was sick of mock-interviewing.

Dorothy's kind friends mock-interviewed her three times each. After six practice interviews Dorothy was ready to go on real interviews without the nerves that had plagued her the first time around.

By then Dorothy could answer any interview question with a calm and thoughtful response. She wasn't nervous anymore. She sent out more Pain Letters, got two more job interviews and ended up with competing job offers. No one can say that Dorothy is resisting the lessons Mother Nature is sending her! 

Learning about yourself is the best kind of learning. This kind of learning never gets stale of out-of-date. This technology never changes! You don't need to memorize the answers to questions on a test to get certified in this topic, and the learning never stops!

What is happening in the picture at the top of this story?

The fellow with the red shorts is growing muscles under the watchful eye of Mother Nature, who sends him lessons to help him grow!

I understand what you are saying, Liz, but age discrimination is real. In some areas unemployment is a real problem. These are not made-up obstacles.

You are right! Every road has obstacles on it. You get to choose whether to let the obstacle in your path be bigger than you are and stop you in your tracks, or to find a way around, under or over it! We all get to make that choice, and we have to choose -- because it's our life we're talking about.

I have to take control of my career this year because I don't like the way my career is headed. Where can I start?

Tamer El Sagheer

Skillinside