Sabotaging Success

What's the single easiest way to kill an idea?

Say it can't be done.

Imagine that you are brainstorming a new product idea with the rest of the team. You have a great idea, a brilliant idea even. You voice it. And before it's even had time to breathe, someone knocks it dead with a lucid reason as to why it can't be done - a reason that perhaps you don't have the courage, experience or facts to counter. Great idea. Goes nowhere.

So it is with careers. Except this time the idea-killer is you. Despite the fact that one of the most commonly cited reasons for getting in a career rut is not knowing what to do, the truth of it is that on some deep level we DO know. We have ideas or hankerings, or ‘wouldn't it be nice if' thoughts all the time. But we don't think it's possible or, even more commonly, we don't think it's possible for us. And so we continue doing what we're doing, feeling frustrated and unhappy and wondering how we're ever going to get to do something we really enjoy. All the while, often unbeknownst to us, many great potential options get dumped by the wayside, by that great saboteur of a good thing - ourselves.

Some examples of the self-saboteur at work:

"I know I've got the right transferable skills and I could do the job, but I'll have to start at the bottom and I can't afford to do that;

"I'd love to work as a fashion buyer, but that's for people who've got a certain image, not me, so I've decided not to go for it."

"It's a really competitive industry and it's impossible to get into"

"I want to run my own business, but I don't have the financial resources'

"I can't afford full time training, there's no way I can do this"

Really? Is there really no way you can do this? Is that true? Or is it based on assumption? Or fear? Or lack of information?

What if?

What if it means that you don't have to start again at the bottom, that there is no such thing as a fashion buyer image, that it's a hard field to get into, but not an impossible one, that you could raise the capital, that you can train part- time?

Somebody said once that, ‘ Truly great achievements always begin by being impossible'. For anyone contemplating a career change that is a comment that can either inspire or irritate. It is certainly one that you can appreciate more once you've reached the other side of the road. When you are at the start mark, impossible is a pretty tough place to be. Career shifts hit our panic buttons on both cash and confidence, We have to confront difficult things, both about ourselves and about survival. It IS scary. Your ideas get squashed by your internal psyche and dismissed as out of reach, before you've even had the chance to consider them.

The fact is it's often NOT easy. You need to want it, totally. You need to be prepared to go all out, no matter what. You need to believe you'll get there. The other fact is that most major career transitions happen in stages, sometimes over a few years. You get yourself on the right track, that's leading in the direction you want to go in, and then you work towards it. You get the experience, you do the course, you make the contacts, you do whatever it is you need to do, and then one day you realise.... you're there.

Mountaineering quotes are a bit of a cliché when it comes to scaling career challenges, but they are (over) used because they ARE so apt with their rhetoric of climbs and summits. On the ground though it's not all grandiosity and vaunted ideals, here's what it can feel like along the way: "I am currently stuck on the 6th pitch of a 10 pitch climb ten miles from anything. I have dropped all of my gear, my rope, my harness and my partner. What is the best way to fabricate a rope from sagebrush and laptop computer?"( Jason Lucero). In other words, total chaos. But you stay on the mountain. You find a way, you sweat and you curse and you panic and you plug away and you get there. And as most climbers will testify it feels pretty damn good when you arrive.

For all that to happen, you need to allow your ideas the opportunity to be considered. Seriously. Question your assumptions. Work through the options. Brainstorm the possibilities. Ignore for now the seeming chasm between where you are today and where you want to be - don't look down into the gorge, but over to other side; then work out how you could bridge it. If you find yourself losing your nerve ask yourself this:

What if the greater risk is doing what you are doing now for the rest of your life?

© September 2007 Sonia Lakshman