Page 221 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

BONUS TIPS FOR CAREER SUCCESS 209

of my clients take just a few of these steps and get the careers or
businesses they want, so you may not have to do them all. As I
mentioned in Step 1, I’ve had clients
who just do a bit of clutter clearing and
attract a great job almost instantly. If, at Do what you can, with
the close of this book, you feel a strong what you have, with
inclination to do a particular step right where you are.
away, go ahead and do it, wherever it
appears in the formal sequence. I’m —THEODORE ROOSEVELT
also a big fan of following one’s natural
inclinations!
If you want a handy shortcut, here is a good one to try:

1. Take the Personal Requirements Quiz in Step 2. Write down your top
four personal requirements in Step 6. (This will take about twenty
minutes.)
2. Now go to Step 5 and do the work on your values and passions.
Write down your top four to ten values in Step 6.
3. Now do the envy exercise in Step 5. If there is one single, most
powerful assignment for identifying what it is you should do, this
is it. Envy is pointing the way to what you really want. By carefully
examining your envy, you can quickly identify the right career path.
Use your envy as your guide. In fact, the Envy Method could be the
whole book, except for the problem that most people don’t believe
they can go for what they envy until they’ve done all the other
steps. So, go figure. Follow that green-eyed monster and you’ll not
only eliminate your envy but also have the career or business of
your dreams.

There is one caveat: you need to do the personal requirements
and values work first so that you can be sure that your envy is hon-
est. You’ll never go wrong by orienting your work and life around
your values (Step 5), but you can go very, very wrong by orient-
ing your work around the pursuit of money or that neighbor’s new
Porsche. Remember the example of Melissa Todd, who spent the