My Rx for Living

I found this very interesting Article on Career Development by Charles Martin and wanted to share it with all of you here at my Rx!

"B"
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The Elements of Career Mastery™: Living with Purpose and Working Effectively
by Charles R. Martin

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What is Career Mastery?

Is it possible to live your life in such a way that whatever you are doing in the world is part of a process of waking up to your true nature while also actualizing your unique talents in the world? Yes! A study of numerous traditions of inner and outer development suggests that the personal (our everyday life) and the essential (our deeper being) are not different. That they are both expressions of the same life energy. Thus, the very same practices that lead to our interior development can lead to happiness and effectiveness in our outer lives. That is - the tools for living consciously and for living well are the same tools. Grasping this general principle of personal mastery is the beginning of career mastery.

So what is Career Mastery?

Career Mastery is about living with purpose and working effectively.

Career Mastery is about discovering and walking your path of lifelong purpose, clarifying the career needs of your deeper self, honing your intent, about finding, creating and managing your career along the way, and about working effectively in any given job or role. Career Mastery is about bringing the principles and practices of personal mastery to your career development. Career development is one place when you can readily see the possibility of integrating your personal and inner development with your professional development and effectiveness. When career work integrates personal evolution and real-life effectiveness in this way, it is truly about career mastery.

Mastering your career means consciously engaging each of the Elements of Career Mastery™ - five processes that are essential to discovering and building a career as well as to enhancing your success and development in your current work role. The Elements of Career Mastery draw on fundamental processes involved in virtually every model of career development, and can be summarized as (1) Get active, (2) Get connected, (3), Get informed, (4) Get focused, and (5) Wake up. In this fifth element, you wake up to your habits of attention and energy use and you stretch yourself beyond those habits to realize the dreams of your true self.

Whether you are inside an organization or working for yourself, engaging the Elements of Career Mastery can help you to live more proactively and to successfully navigate life and career changes. People who can benefit from using the principles of career mastery include: college students facing a major or career choice, adults seeking a career change - midlife or otherwise, and executives and employees wanting development within their current organization

Are you ready to take charge of your career? Then don’t wait for someone else to find you, discover you, promote you, or give you the opportunity you need. If you aren’t proactive, then you are responding to what your environment offers you. Don’t wait. Take the responsibility to build the career that you want.

What are the Elements of Career Mastery™?

The Elements of Career Mastery represent one set of tools for Living Consciously and Living Well™. They are a set of tools for bringing the principles and practices of personal mastery to the realm of your career.

The Elements of Career Mastery are five processes that capture the qualities, skills, and activities commonly found in all career development work. You can think of the elements as behavioral options in your toolkit of Career Mastery. You can’t be a master craftsman if you use only one tool – you need to use all the tools that are available to you, each at the appropriate time. Career Mastery is about doing what is needed, when it is needed. The Elements of Career Mastery also describe practices that can help you increase your satisfaction and effectiveness in your current work role.

The tools are very simple, and the first four elements address attitudes and behaviors you have probably heard of before – although perhaps not in the same time and place. But why don’t we do them? This is the province of the fifth element – the practices for waking up to your true self and waking up to habits of your everyday personality. We don’t engage all of the Elements of Career Mastery because we have habits of perceiving, reasoning, and behaving that keep us from trying on the different behavior that could get us closer to what we truly want.

The Elements of Career Mastery are linked to the Elements of Power™, a model of personal development and effectiveness that builds on the insights, experiences and research of both traditional and modern psychologies.


In a bit more detail, the five Elements of Career Mastery ask you to:

(1) Get Active
Be proactive and take concerted action
In this element you take responsibility to get motivated, to go after what you want, you clarify your sense of purpose, and you take consistent direct concrete action every day and you push through perceived barriers.
(2) Get Connected
Know yourself and connect with others
In this element you learn more about who you are, you build and draw on your network of relationships, and you pay attention to your style of interacting with others. You draw on the power of emotional intelligence to connect with your self and with others
(3) Get Informed
Identify options and gather information
In this element you explore the actual career options available to you, generate career and job ideas, and learn more about your options by gathering information.
(4) Get Focused
Make decisions and set goals
In this element you analyze and evaluate your options to determine your fit with each, you settle on a direction to take, and you set concrete goals.
(5) Wake Up!
Wake up to your potential – know your habits and draw on all elements as needed
In this element you commit to waking up to and awakening from your habits of style and you uncover how your style may impact how you engage the other four essential Elements of Career Mastery™. You take personal responsibility to develop the awareness and intent needed to work with the habits that may support or hinder the realization of your career dreams.

Throughout your career development, you draw on each of the elements repeatedly, and cycle back through each one at various points. Being proactive and taking action, for example, are not limited to the first stages of career development. Just so are decisions and goals an ongoing part of your career development.

The fifth element – the most critical element for career mastery - is about waking up. It’s about waking up to your habits, and waking up to your potential. The fifth element encompasses and underlies the others, and represents your ability to pay conscious attention to, and to draw on, the four elements as needed, when needed. In a sense it is a measure of your willingness and ability to step outside of yourself and assess the degree to which you are really drawing of the potentials of all four steps. It also represents your willingness and ability to grow and develop yourself, as opposed to simply building on and acting out on what you’ve always done. In the fifth element, you awaken to your habits of personality, and push through the discomfort of those habits to help you realize your career dreams – personal mastery becomes career mastery.

For those who use a system of personality (type, temperament, enneagram, etc.) to understand themselves and others, the fifth element is where the real power of personality type comes in. The power of personality style lies not in using it to decide which career to follow (your passion, one key to your essence, is the true guidepost for which career to follow). Instead, the power of type lies in the clues it gives you about which of the four career elements you might naturally be inclined to do, and which you might neglect or ignore. Are you inclined to set goals but not take action? Or, are you inclined to take concrete action, but not connect with others? And so on.

As you engage the power of the fifth element to wake up, you move from being had by your personality to having a personality. It doesn’t run you. You begin to live more from your essence, or true self, and you recognize that your personality can help or hinder you in realizing the career dream of your true self. Working from the power of the fifth element, you step out of the habits of your personality style to remember what is truly important to you, what you really want to do, and to recognize and remember your career passion.

Engaging the fifth element to Wake Up requires both Intent and Awareness. Awakening in this way requires you to use awareness to see yourself as you truly are and to engage your true intention – not just wishes or hopes. When you engage your intent, you are not living at the mercy of your environment, nor do you pass responsibility for your career development to others. Intent and Awareness are two of the core Elements of Power.

What are the Elements of Power™?

We’ve noted that the Elements of Career Mastery link back to the Elements of Power - principles and practices for personal mastery. So what are the Elements of Power?

Modern psychology, organizational research, wisdom traditions, and martial arts have all repeatedly “discovered” five fundamental elements that represent human qualities and behavioral options. These elements of power transcend personality type, represent options for effective action across domains (e.g., leadership, team building, and career development), and link to personal development through consciousness practices.

Core to this model (i.e., Element Five – Waking Up) is an appreciation of how we use our attention and energy, which leads to the core practices of developing Intent and Openness. The four other elements are Ground, Heart, Action, and Perspective. There are practices associated with each of these elements that you can engage in an ongoing way, throughout the day – practices that lead to living consciously and living well.

As an example, to engage the power of Ground, stop what you are doing for a moment, take a deep breath, and relax into the here and now-ness of your physical body. Breathe in a slow and relaxed way and feel your center of gravity sink into your lower abdomen. Stay present. A simple activity – but ongoing practice leads to a stable centered and relaxed state from which any activity can be more effectively engaged.

The fifth element of the Elements of Power embodies and underlies the other four elements – it represents your tools, resources and potential for awakening from the dream of your everyday habits. Applied to your career, it represents your potential for creating what you want in your career. Learning to manage your attention, energy and habits is what gives you access to the power of the fifth element.

Awakening and recovery of our authentic power and our freedom are accomplished through release from unconscious habits and identifications that unnecessarily restrict our perceptual and behavioral options – through the recovery of our attention and energy. Awakening to our habitual modes of response also helps us realize the potential options for effective behavior inherent in every situation, thus leading to greater freedom and effectiveness whatever your domain of endeavor. In applying this Elements of Power to career mastery we see that uncovering what has heart for us in our careers offers us the interesting challenge of recovering our trapped energy and attention back from the habitual preoccupations of our personality style (e.g., worry about having enough information, or concern about reaching out to others), and to pour them into realizing our dreams.

It’s simple really. We’ve read and heard about all the things we need to do to build our careers. In some ways there seems to be a lot of complexity to the recommendations, but all the recommended attitudes and behaviors come down to four very simple groups – the first four elements – Get Active, Get Connected, Get Informed, Get Focused. So why don’t we do them? Habit. We have habits of personality, some defensive, some of which have served valuable purposes. But now those habits keep us in a rut. So we spend our time exploring options but not setting goals, or setting goals but not acting on them, or taking action but not being focused, and so on. The fifth element - the element that asks us to live more consciously – challenges us to get outside of the habits that trap our attention and energy.

So, are you able to step out of your habitual ways of responding to life? Can you do so long enough to see that you may need to do something different to enhance your career development and effectiveness?

Go Ahead - Supercharge Your Career!!!!

Mr. "B"