You are smart, ambitious, and growth-oriented. That’s why you are reading things like this blog.
Chances are, your job doesn’t support that ambition as well as it could. Your organization may not make it easy to grow your responsibilities.
New challenges may be hard to come by.
Unless you look at things a bit differently.
You see, you are not your job. And your job is not you.
You have a career. And that career likely spans more than one job.
Maybe you’ve held a few jobs. Perhaps many. You almost definitely have changed roles, even if you’ve stayed at the same company for a long time.
Taking a Career View
The way to look at your job is through the lens of your career. Because that’s the larger story.
And when you look at it that way, you are more likely to see a path from the past that shows growth.
You probably also get a better sense of the future possibilities from this perspective.
Here is where many people get a little bummed out. Because they tie their future possibilities to the current job they have today.
That’s the wrong way to consider things.
Because your job is only one aspect of you. And it is only part of your career story.
You and your career will always be bigger than your current job.
You Have More Control Than You Think
You also almost certainly have far more control than you think over how you use this particular job to grow your career.
You can feel stuck and boxed in. Or you can step back and realize that there are probably TONS of things you can do, right here, right now, to advance your career forward.
To make your story bigger.
Small steps now are what lead to big changes down the road.
You can, for instance, volunteer to take on new responsibilities. Even seemingly little ones. To slowly expand your capacity and influence over time.
You can, for instance, decide to re-examine how you process certain types of work. You can find ways to be more efficient. To be more productive so that you can volunteer to do more.
As you do that, you might come up with new ideas on how you can be more effective at certain things. Improving your own emotional intelligence, for instance, will help you right now as well as help you to grow into future roles.
You might challenge yourself to get better at organizing and running meetings. Because any job pretty much requires that these days. And bigger jobs will probably require more of it.
If you start pondering this, you might think up lots more ways you can do things in your current job that will advance your career over the long time.
It’s always a good idea to develop your skills.
That can happen in all sorts of ways.
Going Deep is an Option Too
You might decide that you want to dig deeper into your area of expertise than ever before. Maybe you want to take things to a new level.
You could write a paper. Or give a presentation. Work to get published. Or interviewed.
You might just start networking more actively with other professionals in your field. Maybe you could setup a peer group or small consortium. That’s the sort of thing you could start working on today.
Maybe you will read some books. Take a class. Get a new certification.
Going deep in any topic will almost certainly help you more broadly than you think. A deeper understanding of something seems to always uncover some universal insights.
At a minimum, you’d gain experience in digging deeper into a topic. Which could help you dig deeper into other topics down the road.
It’s Mostly a Matter of Mindset
The thing is, it’s probably less about what you do and more about how you think about yourself, your job, your career, your life.
You are growth minded. Ambitious. Smart.
Start embracing that mindset more and looking for ways to grow faster than your job.
I know you will find them. And be successful in growing more. Faster, maybe, than you thought possible.
