Time to Level Up

Q: How do you know it’s time to level up in your career?

A: It’s always time.

Most people hate updating their resume, applying for jobs, and going on interviews. These are reason alone to avoid thinking about a career change, retraining, or aiming for a promotion. Unfortunately, coasting is not a permanent option. The workplace is always changing, and not just job positions but entire industries can quickly be made obsolete.

I was 19 the first time I became aware of this. It was my first day on a new temp job, at a time when I thought of myself as “a data entry clerk.” My trainer walked me through the forms I would be typing into the system, and offhandedly explained that they were transitioning to a bar code system. “One day all of this will be done by computer.” Huh. I grew up in Oregon, during the recession of the early 1980s, and even as a teenager I was aware that a lot of loggers lost their jobs when the trees went away. Not much left to log! I also knew that a lot of people had new jobs in the tech sector, not that I knew to call it that back then. I just shrugged and accepted that it would be easier to train for a new job than to try to hang on to one that was going away. As a 19-year-old, it felt a bit like a continuation of high school.

Of course, there were other reasons to think about leveling up and doing something other than data entry. One, the poor pay. Two, the chronic pain of repetitive stress injury.

The path upward was confusing and not obvious, not at all. In retrospect, I can say that my biggest hidden obstacles were my wardrobe, grooming, and chronic punctuality problems. It truly didn’t matter how hard I worked, how much I improved my skills, how many operating systems or software applications I mastered, or how many degrees I got, because I didn’t look the part, didn’t know it, and didn’t care. I didn’t understand that for the clock-obsessed, being five minutes late is proof of moral dissolution, and being fifteen minutes late is like setting the building on fire. I felt that my low income trapped me at the level of wearing thrift store clothing and relying on the bus to get to work. It is what it is, right?

The real problem was that I had a subservient support role. Nobody else was ever going to pull me up, create a position for me, or even explain what I needed to do to climb up a rung. I had to figure it out for myself.

As a young woman, I took whatever job I could get and did my best to flail along. I thought I’d be fine if I followed orders, worked hard, and shared my ideas on how to improve anything I could. Then I’d be stymied when I constantly had to answer the question: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Um, making more money? All I knew was that I wanted something more, and I’d certainly take it as soon as someone offered it.

What successful people do is to set their sights on something extremely specific, figure out how to get it, and then work on those steps.

This is how my husband did it, and it still boggles my mind. He 1. took a career assessment at school 2. Looked at the results and compared the incomes of ‘history teacher’ and ‘engineer’ 3. Applied to engineering school, figuring he could study history on his own time 4. Got in and crushed the work, even as 80% of his fellow students washed out.

...Doesn’t it seem so... OBVIOUS? So... STRAIGHT-FORWARD???

(I took the same test and it gave me ‘massage therapist’ and ‘cab driver.’)

Where we get into trouble is in trying to form the initial vision. What DO we want? What WOULD we be good at?

Please won’t someone just tell me exactly what to do so I can do it?

What I know now is that my super-skill is ideation. It’s something that most people don’t particularly do well, and I’m quite brilliant at it. My natural state is to wake up in the morning with my brain already churning out ideas. Inventions, song lyrics, ad campaigns, B-corp structures, business plans, articles, book titles, limericks, workshops, recipes, cartoons, futurist predictions, you name it! The problem is more slowing down or stopping the flow than trying to get started.

How would I have figured this out, though? What convergent path could I have followed in school or entry-level service positions that would have indicated: ‘YOU have a rare and valuable talent!’?

I also know that I’m extremely productive, as long as I can work on my own priorities. I published over a thousand pages in 2017, in addition to other writing projects and articles that went into the Ready to Post folder. The week before this post, I had six meetings, gave three speeches and wrote another, formatted and scheduled two weeks’ worth of blog posts, produced a newsletter, worked on our new podcast, deep-cleaned our apartment, worked on my headstand, passed my three-hour Muay Thai belt promotion, and still managed to get my hair cut. On Tuesday, I walked 6 miles, rode my bike 4 miles, and did two back-to-back martial arts classes, followed by walking 7 miles on Wednesday and carrying four loads of laundry up and down a flight of stairs. Nothing can stop me when the plan is my own.

The signs of burnout, stasis, and stalling are feelings of low energy, frustration, sadness, resentment, and dread. Sleep procrastination - staying up late even when you’re chronically exhausted because you feel owed more personal private time. Recreational eating - eating snacks and junk food, especially late at night, because it’s one of the few pleasures in your life. Money worries. Envy of other people, because their success feels unattainable, and why should anyone get anything when your life is so hard? Fixating and perseverating on wretched things that happened at work, because you can’t shake it and even thinking about your boss or your customers makes you want to cry. Just feeling stuck and having no idea what to do.

If any of that feels familiar, hey, it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be that way. Staying at a job you hate, a job that’s beneath your abilities, isn’t doing anyone any favors. You deserve more, your coworkers deserve someone who actually wants to be there, and your customers and clients - well, who knows what they deserve, but surely someone out there deserves your best, not your mediocre most average. What would you do if you had something awesome, a job you loved, a job where every time you finished something, someone was excited? What if that someone were you?

Time to level up!