Page 70 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

58 COACH YOURSELF TO A NEW CAREER

Second, you will learn how to ask directly for what you need.
The best way to get your needs met is to be very specific and clear
about what you want others to do and say to you and around you.
You will also create an automatic system to permanently and
effortlessly satisfy your top four needs. Initially, there is work to
do to put the system in place, but once it’s established, you will
reap the benefits for the rest of your life.
After completing the exercises in this section, you will be much
more attractive to your current and potential employers (and your
clients, if you own a business) and will have eliminated any needi-
ness you might have had, whether you were consciously aware of
it or not. The exercises are challenging, and you may resist doing
them. I encourage you to do them regardless, especially if you don’t
feel like it—because that is precisely where you will gain the most
benefit. If it were easy, you wouldn’t have these needs in the first
place, since you would have already fulfilled them. Put in the effort
now and you will be rewarded with a profound sense of inner sat-
isfaction and confidence that might have eluded you all your life.

Establish Bigger Boundaries than
You Think You Need

The first action in getting your needs fulfilled is putting firm
boundaries in place to make sure you are treated with respect. A
lot of people find it hard to do this in the workplace, but with-
out sufficient boundaries, you have no chance of fulfilling your
needs permanently. To put it simply, a boundary is something
that no one may do to you or around you. Most people already
have boundaries in place, even if they aren’t aware of them. For
example, most of us have the boundary “People can’t hit me.” If
someone hit us, we’d call the police and immediately end the rela-
tionship. This is a basic physical boundary. Some people, however,
don’t even have this boundary and stay in relationships in which
they get hit or worse.