The idea of designing and building a career that you can feel good about and be proud of can be down right overwhelming.  You might think, “I’ll start putting a plan together this weekend.”  But you never do.  Bob had that thought twenty years ago.  He never did anything about it either.  Instead he just went to work everyday.  And everyday he did what the boss told him to do.  He never advanced his knowledge.  And his skill level never increased.  If Bob were to leave his company today, no one would care…not his boss, not his coworkers and not the customers.

Do you want to end up like Bob?  No?  We don’t want you to either.

The key to avoiding Bob-a-nitis is to take small actions.

We’ll be talking more in depth about designing a career that you can be proud of.  For now however, we just need to take a few small steps to get going.

Double secret probationary undercover big time secret – the fact that you have decided to design a career has put you ahead of ninety percent of the folks in your profession.  Congratulations!

You need to be a specialist on something within your company.  Lets say you decide to be a boiler specialist.  Do you know that you’ve already accomplished two things here?  You’re designing your career and you’ve decided to be a boiler specialist.  The next small step is to identify a couple of resources.  Just write them down.  It could be a teacher, a book or a Web site like Heating Help.  You could then spend six minutes a day on study.  In a week you would have logged thirty minutes.  At this pace, minus two weeks vacation, you would have logged twenty-five hours in one year.  At six minutes a day of study, you would have totaled five hundred hours more of education than Bob, throughout his career.  That’s six minutes a day.  No weekends.  And no studying on vacation.

Take small actions and reap big rewards.

Author Robert Maurer utilizes Mind Sculpture, a technique developed by Ian Robertson, to facilitate change.  Mind sculpting is similar to visualizing or pretending to be engaged in an action.  In addition however, it calls upon all of our senses – hearing, smelling, tasting and touching.

Ian says that when we use this technique, the brain doesn’t realize that it is really not performing the imagined activity.

Lets say that you need to devote so many minutes a day to study a work related subject.  Use mind sculpting.  Set aside thirty seconds everyday to prepare.  See yourself reading a book.  Feel yourself highlighting text.  Smell the book.  Listen to the page turn and taste that fresh brewed coffee.  Imagine yourself making more money because you’ve mastered certain knowledge.  You can do this in thirty seconds a day or less!  Now, do it for one month.  Spend thirty seconds per day imagining all of this.

That’s it.  Of course there is more, but for now this is all you have to do.

Small questions act to program and engage our brain.  Larger questions tend to create fear, inaction and loss of creativity.  Lets say that you need to clean the cab of your truck.  You open the door.  Once you side step the can of tuna fish that is still rolling in the parking lot, you look at a sea of papers, parts, books and something that smells pretty bad.  You say to yourself, “how am I going to clean all of this?”  You shudder, gather up the tuna fish and climb into the truck.  “Too much, I’ll do it another time.”  Instead, try asking yourself, “what one thing can I throw away?”  And then do it.  Ask another small question and do that as well.  Pretty soon you’ll have your task done.

Robert refers to the hippocampus, a part of our brain that decides what information to store and what to retreive.  The hippocampus’ main criterion for storage is repetition.  If we repetively ask ourself a small question like, “what one small step could I take to improve my appearance?” our brain will soon provide an answer – like, “shave every single day Dan.”