This is the final part of our three-part lesson on Formulating a Career Strategy. In this part of the lesson, we will explain how to go about executing your career strategy so that you can achieve the greatest level of success.

They say that success is where preparation meets opportunity. When you have completed this lesson, you should be on your way to acquiring the skills and the knowledge you’ll need to take advantage of the opportunities you are going to encounter throughout your chosen career path.

Before we continue, let’s review where we are. After completing Part 1 and Part 2 of this lesson:

1) You should know the type and level of wealth and success you want to achieve.
2) You should have chosen a career you find fascinating and exhilarating.
3) You should have decided that through the career you’ve chosen, you can reach the type and level of wealth and success you desire.
4) You should know what your strengths are.
5) You should have identified your weaknesses and ways to improve them.
6) You should have laid out a career roadmap, so you have a list of things to get started on.

Initiative: Taking the Big Plunge - A Little at a Time

One of hardest things for people to do is to change what they are used to doing. Our actions tend to fall into patterns that yield predictable results. It is in our nature to repeat actions where we know what the outcome will be. After all, for our ancestors, patterns and predictability of events brought safety and reliable sources of nourishment.

These tendencies follow us to the current day, where they cause us to hesitate when taking on something new due to the unpredictability of the outcome and the uncomfortableness that comes with not knowing the future.

Because making changes is uncomfortable and because we want to make it as easy as possible for you to achieve your career goals, we recommend starting with easy tasks that will allow you to gain a sense of comfort with what you’re planning to do and then building up to the commitment step.

For example, if your next career move involves going back to school to get a degree that’s necessary for the career you’ve chosen, applying to the schools would be the commitment step in the process. However, in order to work your way up to that step you can:

1) Research different programs at different schools
2) Find out what the requirements are for getting into those programs
3) Choose which programs you want to apply to
4) Take any tests that are required and gather any references you’ll need

Then you would apply to the programs at the schools you’d like to go to.

See how the first 4 actions build up to the committment step of applying to the programs? They also help make you more comfortable with the decision you’ve made so that when the time comes to actually apply to the schools, you’re already used to the idea that you’re going to go back to school.

You can apply this to most of the steps in your career roadmap. Just think about how you can take small steps that will make you more comfortable with a change, and then follow a series of steps like the ones we went through to build comfort and momentum toward completing the next step.

Before you know it, you’ll be pretty far down the road to achieving what you set out to achieve.

Perseverance: Keep Progressing Despite Obstacles

Although breaking the major steps in your career roadmap down into smaller, more manageable steps will help you get things done, you will probably run into some sort of obstacles along the way. In our example, maybe you didn’t score high enough on the tests to get into any of the programs you applied for.

When confronted with an obstacle such as this, it’s easy to get discouraged, decide it wasn’t meant to be, and fall back into complacency. Here’s where perseverance comes in.

When this happens, you need to remind yourself that this is only an obstacle and that there are ways to get around every obstacle. You should also remind yourself of what you’re working toward and remember how bad you want to achieve this life for yourself.

Then, once you’ve gotten over the fact that an obstacle isn’t indestructible and have gotten your motivation back, you should start thinking of ways to get around the obstacle. If you didn’t score high enough on the test this time, you can study harder, retake the test, and get a better score.

The solutions won’t always be this obvious, but the points we want to drive home here are not to get discouraged and that obstacles can be overcome. Don’t just take our word for it, read what John D. Rockefeller has to say about perseverance.

“I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost anything, even nature.” – John D. Rockefeller

Steer Your Course and Make Adjustments

As you grow older and go through different stages in your life, you may find that your outlook will change regarding where you want to end up or how you want to get there. This is to be expected, and it is perfectly fine to redefine wealth and success for yourself and/or to modify your career roadmap so that it is aligned with your new outlook.

However, when doing this, be honest with yourself. Are you changing your plans because your new plans are going to make you happier, or just because you’ve decided to settle for a lower level of wealth and success?

If your new plan is going to make you happier, then by all means make the changes. If you’re doing this to settle, you need to take a look at your situation and really decide if this is what is best for you.

So the bottom line here is that you should make adjustments to your career strategy if you find some part of it is not going to make you happy or if you thought you would enjoy it, but now you’re finding out that you don’t. What you shouldn’t do is use this as an excuse not to do something simply because it is difficult.

If you take initiative, persevere, and steer your course like we have shown you here, you should be on your way to being able to successfully execute your career strategy.

This completes our three-part lesson on Formulating a Career Strategy. Feel free to come back and review these from time to time to refresh your memory about what you should be doing to effectively plan and execute your way to a successful career.

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