The “experts” clamor about the importance of being innovative.
There’s a constant appeal to write your career story around all of the forward-thinking, enterprising and unconventional ideas you have generated. Thought leaders compete for footing among the top rungs of the influencer network–whether on LinkedIn, Twitter or other major media platform.
If you are not disrupting, it seems, you are not doing it right.
Words and images bounce around an echo chamber as big-picture ideators spin ideas, competing for captive audiences and attention.
With all of this innovative thinking, however, who is doing the executing?
More than likely it is you.
Schedule in hand, task list hammered out, virtual toolkit sharpened, you get to work each day, implementing plans, articulating marketing solutions, building budgets, selling products, consulting with customers, analyzing problems, and the list goes on and on.
Amid the flurry of action steps, you intuitively and silently innovate and disrupt, but you don’t get the credit because it naturally happens, without fanfare.
Amid the task at hand, where you quietly create new market share or triple profit margins, you don’t have time to write a blog or send out a press release or post your success story to LinkedIn. Instead, you swiftly move on to the next initiative in your in-box and get to work.
This is why you must occasionally take time to:
- Extract yourself from your daily grind and look inward.
- Start with your 3 Resume Pools (i.e., get in touch with your key areas of value). Begin here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKtCg2PmZ1g
- Step away from the noise of digital media and center on your processes and goals and needs.
- Know that your value begins with the simplest of actions you took to help your boss, your team, your company, your clients, and need not compare with the visionaries or thought leaders on LinkedIn.
- Know that your value is equally relevant, and in some ways more so than the clamorers demanding your attention. You are the do-er, the thinker-in-action, because you make things happen versus talking about it or telling others how to be, act, implement, etc.
- Take the reins of your career, now, and every day. It evolves; it is not a one-and-done. Constantly be looking for that next position, equipping your talent arsenal with new skills and proof of performance.
- Interact with others, threading together a fabric of fellow careerists, networks interwoven with synergistic interests and goals. Buoy one another. Support others’ needs, but also ensure you don’t lose yourself in the process of giving; when things get out of synch, pull back inward.
- Rinse and repeat.
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I am only one of only 50 master resume writers who has crafted more than 1,500 career stories.
I own a boutique career writing company that smashes perceptions of what a resume should be. My clients hire me for the extremely thoughtful processes we undergo + the eloquent content I deliver.
While it is popular in my industry to say, ‘No worksheets here!’, my clients seek me out for the meticulously tailored homework + reflective conversations required to ensure elegant, high-performing results. There are no shortcuts to excellence.
Image: Dennis Skley, Flickr
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