Time to Review Your Career Direction
 
Develop a Vision and Do Better

 People tend towards inertia, and take action only when the ax is ready to fall. There is a better way—the Five O’Clock Club way.

            Through the Seven Stories Exercise® and the Forty-Year Vision®, Five O’Clock Clubbers develop possible long-term scenarios for their futures. Then they research each scenario to see which is most satisfying and most likely to work. When new ideas come along, they ask themselves if those ideas “fit in with their Forty-Year Vision.” If the answer is “no,” they can move on. This keeps Five O’Clock Clubbers on track.

            People are happy when they have goals and take steps to fulfill those goals. People are unhappy when they don’t know where they are going. Take time to strategize for the long term. It’s better than forever having unfulfilled wishes and hopes—or not knowing what your wishes and hopes are. 

What Should I Do When I Grow Up?

            Clients often come to us with reams and reams of paper, the results of personality tests that counseling services have charged thousands of dollars for. These clients may have developed a deeper understanding of themselves, but usually they still have no idea what to do with their lives. These psychological tests often don’t help as much in career planning as the simple exercises we insist on.

            Skills exercises may tell an unhappy accountant that he or she is skilled with numbers. But the accountant is unhappy and needs a new field. The “answers” from a psychological test may be relatively clear-cut as well, but the Seven Stories provide deeper, richer information. You can continue to think about the threads that run through your stories and mine information that will help you decide what you need to be happy in a job.

            The Forty-Year Vision exercise doesn’t provide an exact blue-print, but having a vision of yourself in the future often gets rid of the clutter, and narrows your focus realistically. For example, a marketing manager (or an attorney, or an accountant) may say, “The industry I wind up in really does not matter to me.” Okay, five years from now, would you like to wind up in a tire manufacturing company? “Of course not!” my client is likely to respond. (I pick industries the client would have no interest in.) “Well then, we’ve eliminated one industry.” The environment you work in matters enormously—the Forty-Year Vision helps you imagine concretely and realistically.

            After solid assessment, try to get three concurrent offers to give you some perspective. A single offer may look very good—until you have others to compare it with.

Notice Where Your Feet Are Taking You

            Today, the name of the game is continual career management—taking small, ongoing steps in the right direction.

            Changing direction—even when you know where you’re going —is a long process. Life takes time. Just about everything we try to do well—in both our personal and professional lives—takes more time than we had expected.

            The good news is that we all have the time. The Forty-Year Vision was developed to give you the perspective you need to dream big dreams. You do have the time to implement them. And twenty years from now, you will still be twenty years older—whether you decide to develop a plan and follow it or not. So why not get started?

            First, notice where your feet are taking you. What do you enjoy most and do best? The exercises in the Targeting book (Seven Stories, Interests, etc.) are key.

            Then develop your vision: your Forty-Year Vision—even if you change it later. Write out your best-case scenario—five or ten years at a time. You must write it so you will take yourself seriously—or nothing will happen. Rethink what you want, and go for it. Day in and day out, gloriously live the life you planned and ride the shock waves you meet. It’s never easy, and it does takes time. But what else are you doing the next twenty years?

You Write the Script

The backlash started quietly in 1992. You won’t read about it in Department of Labor statistics or in the New York Times. We saw it at The Five O’Clock Club because we’re on the front lines. In 1992, more workers decided to write their own scripts rather than trust their lives to unfriendly management.                                           Let’s go back a bit. 1989 through 1991 were stagnant years in the labor market. For example, in New York, the 1987 stock market crash had a delayed effect, and people in many industries lost their jobs. Those who were employed, even if unhappily, decided to stay put. Employers expected them to be quiet, do their jobs and feel lucky that they were even working. The labor market was in gridlock.

            By January of 1992, newspapers said that the economy wasn’t any better, but workers had grown tired of being mistreated. Employed workers decided to look, and surprise! They found jobs. Musical chairs began. As employed people moved to other companies, the gridlock lifted, and the unemployed started looking again. New jobs were created, I believe—not because of management and not because of the market—but because of workers’ initiative. I believe that workers changed the market by taking matters into their own hands. For a change, workers wrote the script.

            Fast-forward to a depressing start for 1996: In the very first week, AT&T announced its brutal plan to lay off 40,000 workers, and the Federal government was being shut down. Companies continued to treat workers like pawns on a chessboard in the process of reshaping their organizations—without regard to the individual and his or her contributions and loyalty to the company. But things had gone too far. AT&T’s stock did not increase as they expected, and the government shutdown was seen as a fiasco. The backlash had grown.

            In addition to the anxiety companies were causing workers in 1996, there were new complexities to deal with as well. A confluence of important trends occurred that year. These trends merged and resulted in job changes more unsettling than anything anyone had seen before. For years, changes had been developing momentum in computers, health care, telecommunications, entertainment/ new media, the international marketplace, the aging population, the changing family structure, and the shift from working full-time for one employer to pursuing any number of employment possibilities.

            In 1996, the convergence of these trends could have overwhelmed workers. But many Five O’Clock Clubbers had been developing a new mindset. They now started to accept that all jobs—excuse me, all assignments—were temporary. If they were going to have good careers, they would have to take charge of career management themselves. More changes came, of course, and people were worried, but change itself no longer shocked us. We didn’t know what lay ahead, but we now expected it.

            The years 1996 thorough 2000 were good ones. The Internet boomed and the economy roared. It was a hyper time—and a correction was expected. The year 2001 started out with bad news—again: dot.coms fired workers in droves (venture capital dried up); Lucent laid off 10,000; Daimler Benz planned to lay off 26,000. The major layoffs were concentrated in manufacturing, and many of the jobs were overseas. But the headlines blared.

            Five O’Clock Club attendance rose dramatically. People may think things are tough now. But in 1991, the average professional took 8.1 months to find a job! (The average professional, manager or executive at the Five O’Clock Club took 10 weeks to find a new job.)

Today’s professional may not feel great about the economy—and it’s never great if you’re the one who has to do the job hunting—but our members are still finding great jobs quickly, despite the bad news in the press.

            Still, the economy at its core is strong despite a downturn. Now is the time to take control of your career. You know that you need to review your career direction. You now believe in the Forty-Year Vision because you know your future is in your own hands. Read the articles in this issue, and start taking control of your career. Imagine the kind of life you want. Fight to make sure it turns out the way you want it to be. It’s 2001, folks. Ignore any negative newspaper headlines you may see. You write the script for your own life.

                        May you thrive, and may we be there when you need us. Working together, we can help to write the scripts that influence America—and the scripts that drive our own lives. God bless you and yours. 

            Kate Wendleton                                                                                   President, Editor-in-Chief