Get an “end in mind” perspective in order to get what you want
Recently, I have found myself quoting Stephen Covey a lot… “begin with the end in mind.” This is vital to the success of getting anywhere… or, rather, it’s vital to getting anywhere that you consciously want to go. To reach a particular destination, you need to identify the destination first. Then you need to plot the course.
I love how this is so analogous to a GPS or a mapping program like GoogleMap or Mapquest. You put in the address of the place you’re trying to find. Then you’re given a course or set of directions to follow in order to reach it.
But, in the case of a career, life often throws in bridges and detours that weren’t necessarily on the map. Doesn’t ultimately matter, though, because you at least have an end in mind, and you’re motivated to get there.
Sometimes, you might only have a general destination rather than a specific address to plug in. If you simply put in the city and state rather than the street address, you can still get moving down the road in an overall right direction. For example you might say, “I want to work in the medical field.” Or you might say, “I want to work in the medical field as a surgical technician.” Either way, you get my point… you still need a vision of what you want in order to get what you want.
By the way, these are not random examples that I’ve just given you. They happen to be the desired destinations of my daughter and her best friend. My daughter and her best friend are graduating from high school at the end of May. They’ve already plotted the next steps on their career courses. Both are moving into higher education to study medical science. The difference is that my daughter is going to a four-year college as a pre-med student and her best friend is going to community college to pursue an educational credential in a specifically-focused health area.
My daughter has a vague inkling of her future specialty in the medical field, which she thinks might be in the healing of bones and muscles. She is unclear if she will one day be a doctor, a physician’s assistant, a physical therapist, etc. On the other hand, her friend knows she wants to have a career as a surgical technician.
So, looking at their choices from a “begin with the end in mind” perspective, you can see that they both have envisioned a destination, allowing them to consciously move forward. My daughter has a very general end in mind while her friend has a more specific, well-defined end in mind.
Like I said earlier, you need to identify the destination if you have any hope of daring to reach it. Then you need to plot the course to get you there. Otherwise, you’ll end up like I did, wandering into this circumstance and into that sorta opportunity without full awareness of where your life is going. I did this until I hit my thirties, which is when I decided, at last, that it was high time to come up with an end in mind. I put on a rudder and a sail and began to actively participate in the course plotting.
This suddenly reminds me of a pin button I used to have as a teenager – the significance of which I obviously did not truly understand back then. It said, “Life. It’s not a spectator sport.”
My kiddo and her friend… they are light years ahead of where I was at that age. And amen to that!
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Angela Loëb helps people rediscover and use their gifts so they can bring who they are to what they do. To learn more, please visit: www.insyncresources.com
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