For most of my career, people would probably have described me as reliable. I didn’t miss deadlines, I delivered, I held a lot together, and people knew they could depend on me – years at Accenture and Avanade, senior roles, three children, a very full life. You don’t hold all that together by being a procrastinator, right?
What I didn’t fully see at the time was why I was so reliable. It was less discipline than perhaps I imagined, and rather more based on a need to achieve. The world I was in with its constant deadlines and performance cycles fed that relentlessly. The deadline mattered because a client, a boss, a stakeholder or a team member was waiting on it. I wasn’t pushing against my own willpower so much as responding to a system that was set up, at every turn, to keep me on track.
It was only when I left the corporate world to build my own business that I really discovered how I operated without that system – take it away, and a lot of that reliability was then in jeopardy. The client stuff still got done, but the same drive that made me deliver the tasks no-one else was waiting on had very little to push against when the only person setting the deadline was me.
I see a version of this at home, too. Watching my sons revise, left to themselves the work can drift, but an imminent exam date turns it all around – just leaving the anxiety as to whether the turnaround was soon enough. The discipline can be there, but it needs the outside driver to switch it on – all too familiar.
From my own experiences and working with clients, I think many of us are perhaps not quite as self-disciplined as we thought or hoped. We’ve often spent our education and working days responding to structure, and it has worked beautifully when the deadlines are attached.
The bit I frequently see slip is career thinking, figuring out where our careers are actually heading more strategically. Most organisations do create opportunities to talk about careers. You’ll probably have a development plan, career conversations and promotion discussions, but they rarely carry the same weight as an important client deadline. If you turn up to a career conversation having given very little thought to your longer-term direction, the consequences are often personal and fairly invisible. Turn up unprepared for an important client meeting, miss a key deadline or deliver work below the expected standard, however, and people notice. It’s hardly surprising that career thinking slips behind all the things that do have harder deadlines attached – which is more or less everything else.
The machinery that so often makes us dependable for everyone else is rarely pointed at our own thinking.
If making time for this kind of thinking feels difficult, you may also enjoy my article Finding Time for Your Career When Life Never Seems to Slow Down, which explores why career thinking is often the first thing to disappear when work and life get busy.
What actually helps
Creating even a small amount of structure can change more than we tend to give it credit for. This can be something as ordinary as a date in the diary, and the simple expectation that you’ll have done the thing by the time it comes around.
What helps make career thinking happen:
- Schedule the thinking, not just the doing – block recurring time for your own career the way you’d protect a meeting with someone who really matters, and treat it as every bit as unmissable. An hour a quarter, properly defended, can really kick start a more strategic approach.
- Borrow someone else’s eyes – it can be hard to read the label from inside the jar, and seeing yourself clearly and objectively, figuring out your direction, can be tough to do on your own. A mentor, a trusted colleague, a coach, can really help here in terms of holding you to account, giving you someone to produce answers for, co-designing a structure – turning a private intention into a commitment you’re more likely to stick to.
A couple of questions worth a think:
- What’s the one piece of thinking you keep meaning to do, and keep postponing, simply because nothing is forcing it?
- Where in your career are you relying on structure that either no longer exists, or perhaps never really did?
We sometimes think of self-discipline as though it were a trait certain people are lucky enough to be born with, but I don’t think it often is. It’s structure we’ve built around ourselves, sometimes without noticing, and the real trick is learning to point that at your own thinking more, rather than only at the work other people are waiting for. You can build that structure, borrow it, and ask for it – you don’t need to be in solo pursuit of that clarity.
You might also find this article helpful:
- Feeling Stuck in Your Career When Everything May Look Fine– why dissatisfaction can creep in even when, on paper, nothing is wrong.
Stepping back like this is much easier before you reach a crisis point – something I explore in Lifting Your Gaze – Why Strategic Career Thinking Shouldn’t Wait. If thinking properly about your own next chapter is exactly the sort of thing that keeps sliding down the list, that’s a good deal of what I do with clients – creating the space, the structure and the outside perspective to do it well. You’re welcome to send me a message or book a call via my website.