Column Chronicles
 
Be careful, your career may be in jeopardy
 
 
Frank Cotolo
July 30, 2015
 
You have to be careful if you are feeling too confident about your career because overconfidence could make you convince yourself you are doing better than you are actually doing. If you think things are going well, be prepared to look at all aspects of your career to be sure you aren't sinking into a sea of loss.
 
Whatever position you may have while working, there are times when you are sure you have done the job you do excellently only to discover that someone else thinks otherwise. That's when you should evaluate your career to be sure it hasn't stalled.
 
Pitfalls in a career are common, especially for people who believe that once you are successful you will always be successful. It's a lie, like the old saying, "It's a lie."
 
Here are a few ways to evaluate your success.
 
You need to be honest with yourself. Are you committing to more than you can really do?
 
For instance, if you are usually successful doing two things, one after the other, have you accepted work to do more than two things? Can you handle three things? Four things? Five things? Six things? Seven things? Eight things? How many things can you do successfully if you promise to do things? Don't lie to yourself because if you don't do a lot of things as well as you do one or two things, then no things will be done well enough for you to continue to be successful.
 
You need to look around you for changes that could affect your performance. Have you kept up to date with altering conditions? Are you doing things the way they were done in the past while others are doing things in new ways, ways that you never thought about or that you don't like because the way you have been doing things has been working for you? Change is important to recognize and you have to stop resisting change. You do this by changing instead of resisting it.
 
How about problems? Have you been putting them aside, thinking that none of them were big or bad enough to hamper your success? Are you underestimating problems? Do you judge them incorrectly? Do you see a problem and say, "Hell, that isn't a big problem" when it is a big problem? Why deny any problem, big or small, when any sized problem can bite your career in half and plummet you into an abyss of failure and destitute. If you aren't facing problems, you have a bigger problem than any of the problems you aren't facing.
 
Are you becoming complacent? Do you think you are happy enough with what you have and what you earn and what you live to do each day and assume that is enough for you, that the success you have now is quite nice and very comfortable and it is all you ever wanted? Because if you feel that way then maybe you should just retire early and rock in a hammock somewhere and say to yourself, "I was successful enough and I don't want to be successful anymore."
 
It's your life, after all.
 
Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.
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