The Things We Carry

The Road to Success – Part 2

In the previous post, we explored the ways that we move through the journey of our careers by visualizing our personal roads to success. In particular, how important it is to pay attention to the road signs that guide the direction of our goals: how we connect with our colleagues, how we treat our passengers and those looking for a ride, and how we respond to the roadblocks and detours we encounter along the way.

Packed and Ready – This post is about what we packed when we first set out on our career paths and what we picked up along the way. In this reflection, the challenge is to think about what things continue to support, energize, and motivate us, and what things are holding us back or weighing us down. What comes to mind for things we carry are our knowledge, skills, abilities, education, and credentials, but, also, our mindset, career plans, references, contacts and, of course, our professional reputations. 

Pack & Purge – These things need to be revisited and reflected upon often to ensure that we actively build and strengthen them. Knowledge can become outdated without ongoing professional development, credentials can become obsolete as industry moves forward (or they can expire), mindsets can be challenged, and plans can change to meet shifting needs.  Our ability to maintain mutually beneficial working relationships keeps our contacts supportive and collaborative, and our professional reputations can both open doors to new opportunities or close them if we stray from our values, lose credibility, or prioritize personal success above all else. 

The roads we have traveled instilled upon us unique formative influences and life experiences, and because the road ahead is both exciting and unknown, our packs also contain things like our hopes and dreams, our imaginations, our goals and intentions, and our gratitude, as well as our triggers, mistakes, anxieties, unconscious biases, and, if we are honest, some regrets and resentment. It’s important to check our personal inventory and decide what is important to keep and what we need to leave behind. Letting go can be challenging, painful, and may even feel disloyal to our egos, but it is an important part of our forward momentum and should never be ignored or avoided. Carrying these things just weighs us down. Lucy Maud Montgomery, a well-known author, sums it up perfectly, “We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.”

First Aid – There will be times when we hit an unexpected dead end as we travel forward on our chosen career paths. What do we have packed that will get us through the disappointment and frustration when we find we can’t go any further on a specific path?  

The U-Turn – For me, I both welcome and embrace the U-turn because it helps me practice patience and strengthen my resilience and adaptability. Returning to a place we just came from to chart a new course can be a great opportunity to reassess where we want to go and find the un-explored options for how we get there. Sometimes you have to go backwards to move forward! 

Hitchhikers – A career well-traveled provides opportunities to lift others up along the way. Don’t miss them. It is important to pay our success forward by mentoring those who will follow. We can ensure they are ready by actively involving them in our day-to-day, and by sharing both our knowledge and experience and our successes and failures. This is how we establish continuity for a career well served.

New Horizons – When the current career journey ends or changes, what begins? For those who are looking forward to a new professional path or, even, retirement, the future is waiting to be explored in new ways. This ending takes us right back to where we began in Part 1 where, once again, we can close our eyes and visualize that we are now on a road to a successful and fulfilling new venture. Does the upcoming sign indicate a new role, new place, new activities, new priorities, or, in the case of retirement, personal projects for which we never found the time? This is our story to write. We can enter this new beginning by reflecting on the importance of packing what you need, paying attention to who is on the journey, and allowing grace and gratitude to be your personal travel companions.