The price you pay

There is a price to pay for everything we do. Everything has consequences. The price we pay for running Being-->Doing-->Having backwards is that we often sacrifice who we are for what we want to have.
Enjoy and be well,
Dwika-ExecuTrain




What Will Your Engineering Career Look Like?
**Steven Cerri

As I stated above, many young engineers are ready to take on the world. Once in the organization, they often become confused and by the time they are ready to retire, some are happy with their careers, but many are disillusioned and unhappy with how their career turned out. Whether they remained engineers or went into engineering management, or achieved the highest levels of executive status, they thought it would be different.

The major challenge, of course, is that we can't know with much certainty where the choices we make will ultimately take us. The choices we make along the path of our career may seem to take us to point "A" but instead, ultimately take us to point "Q". So short of having a crystal ball, how are we to make sense of the twists and turns of our career? By what processes can we best make our career decisions?

That is the question I want to address: "By what processes can we best make our engineering and engineering management career decisions?"

The answer is not in the stars.
As you can probably guess, the answer to making sense of the choices in your career is not a simple process. It is a complex process and it will consume a couple of my e-Zines in order to make the process clear. But ultimately I will give you some choices, visibility, and processes into your career that you probably won't get in too many other places, if anywhere else.

The answer is not "blowing in the wind" either.
The answer to a happy and fulfilling engineering career or engineering management career rests in two factors of course, you and the environment within which you work. By environment I mean the organizations, the business culture, and the company in which you ply your trade as an engineer or engineering manager/executive.

Plenty of people can tell you how to deal with the "environment", the company. They can tell you how to ask for a raise. They can tell you how to give a presentation. They can even tell you how to conduct a performance review. They can tell you what to DO in certain situations.

Few however, are willing to delve into that world that ultimately determines your satisfaction and happiness with your career, YOU. Your true motivations. Your true desires. Your true expectations. Your true sense of who you are. As you will see, these factors are not the same as your "personality" or your "style". I am going to take you down a very different road.

I know this sounds like something out of the 1960s but if you want a happy and fulfilling engineering or engineering management career, you had better know who you are. First and foremost.

Let me give you some examples
I know of companies in which becoming the CEO is looked upon by the engineers in that company as a step toward an early grave. The CEOs often have early heart attacks and strokes.

I know CEOs and high level executives who don't have decent relationships with their spouses or their children. They work very hard, they make a lot of money, and yet their personal lives are examples of dysfunction.

I know of engineers who just want to do their engineering work but they are asked to manage. They get tangled in the web of expectations brought about by their organization and they become unhappy and disillusioned with their work.

Now, I know... you can point to an example of someone who is happy for everyone I list as unhappy. That doesn't matter. My job is not to tell you that there are happy and unhappy, successful and unsuccessful engineers and engineering managers in the world. My job is to show you how to make career choices so you are one of the successful and happy ones!

And in order to do that, we must understand what happens to us from the time we are in college to the time we retire and how to make choices, along the way, that bring us the careers we want. That path is what I call the "Engineer's Career Life-Cycle".

A very new subject.
I want to introduce you to a very new subject... and here it is. The subject is your way of "being".

In my last e-Zine I introduced you to the topic of:

BEING--> DOING--> HAVING

I explained it this way: "our way of being leads to the process of doing which in turn leads to the process of having. The arrows leading from Being to Doing to Having are very important.

How most people do this.
Most people decide what they want to have as their first step. This message is everywhere in our environment. "Have this, have that". "I want to have a new car." "I want to have a bigger house." "I want to have a career in xyz". "I want, I want, I want."

Starting your strategy at Having reverses the direction of the arrows. This "reversed process" leads us to ask important decision-making questions this way: "In order to have xyz, what do I need to be doing?"

So if you want a bigger house (having), you need to be working at something (doing) where you can earn $ABC (more having).

The final question that we ask is, "Who must I BE in order to earn $ABC?"

Notice the sequence here. Who we are, who we must BE, is driven by an external force, what we want to have.

The twisted logic that comes out of this process is the question "who must we be in order to have what we want?" And who we must be may not, in any way, be related to who we "want to be" or "like to be" or "are at our core".

The source of final evaluation of your career.
Working the Being-->Doing-->Having process "backwards" is what ultimately leads people to be unhappy with their careers. They mistakenly set up what they want to "have" ahead of who they want to "be". Who they are is "driven" by what they want to have. The result is often a forced way of being that is not aligned with who you are at you "core". (More on this later).

Now imagine it the other way.
Now imagine the scenario differently. Imagine that you are driven by "who you are", especially "who you are when you are at your best." Imagine you when you are doing your engineering work or some aspect of it that you love. That aspect of your engineering work that truly lights you on fire. Does it correspond to you "at your best"?

When we make decisions that are "aligned" with who we are "at our best" we are making decisions not based on "having " something but on "being" someone and then doing what supports that "someone", that way of "being".

The price you pay.
There is a price to pay for everything we do. Everything has consequences. The price we pay for running Being-->Doing-->Having backwards is that we often sacrifice who we are for what we want to have.

The price to be paid for running Being-->Doing-->Having straight ahead is a life that may not "have" all the trappings that the surroundings tell you that you "should or must" have. But rather a life that is more suited to you. It will be based on who you are at your best. This is not "pie-in-the-sky" decision-making. And while it may not be applied 100% of the time, picking this way of moving through the world makes all the difference in your ultimate career. You probably know some people who have are doing just what I'm describing.

They may be your colleagues.
"Who are these people you ask?" If you listen to people who are truly happy with their careers, you will hear in their stories that they made certain decisions that were "right" for them. In fact, you will often hear them say things like, "Everyone was telling me not to do this, but I just felt it was right for me."

Or you will hear them say, "I was going down this path but I just didn't feel it was right and so I changed. I ended up swimming against the current, but I was OK with it."

Or you will hear them say, "I came to this crossroad in my career, and everyone was telling me to 'go right' and I just felt I wanted to 'go left'. And so I did and I haven't regretted it a bit. But it's been different from what everyone else said I should do."

These phrases are almost always a signal that the person is or was being driven by their preferred state of "being "as opposed to their desire to "have". "Who" they wanted to "be" had a higher priority to "what" they wanted to "have".

The keys to the kingdom.
For those of you who truly grasp, understand, hear, and see what I have presented to you here, you know that I have just given you the "keys to the kingdom". Whether you are an engineer, an engineering manager, or an executive, when you master this decision-making process, when you get to the end, the real end, you will be able to look back on your career and say, "It was just as I wanted it to be. It could have been no other way."

Some examples.
In next week's e-Zine I'll give you some concrete examples of what it is like to have an engineering career where career-decisions are driven from:

Being-->Doing-->Having

as compared to a career-decisions that are driven from:

Being<--Doing<--Having.

Until then,
Be well,
Steven