For 12 years, I served in the Army Reserve as a trombone player. Even though I was a military musician, I was still a Soldier and had to complete a series of leadership development courses over the years to learn how to lead and manage people.
The first course was the Warrior Leader Course, which was two weeks long and covered the basics of leadership and management.
During the first week, you spend eight hours a day locked in a classroom, learning how to complete paperwork. It’s as exciting as it sounds. After that, you spend a week in the field, going on missions, practicing military tactics, and completing a series of soldiering tasks.
Overall, I found the field exercises to be a lot of fun, especially the land navigation exercise. To complete the exercise, each student had to find a series of grid coordinates, using only a map, a compass, and a protractor. Then, we had to navigate our way through a forest, find every checkpoint, and write the checkpoint number on a piece of paper.
A few days before the exam, each class reviewed the basic principles of land navigation with their instructors, including how grid coordinates worked, how to use a compass, etc. Each student had to ensure that they knew how to navigate before exam day because we were not allowed to help each other during the exam. If you got lost, you got lost.
On the day of the exam, we got our maps and grid coordinates and sat on the ground to begin plotting our points. One by one, my classmates got to their feet and walked off into the forest. With each passing minute, the group of seated Soldiers got smaller and smaller.
Finally, I was by myself, the last one, and still had to plot a few more grid coordinates. I looked around and saw only the instructors chatting off to the side. At first, I worried that I was going to fall behind but remembered that preparation is everything in land navigation.
Once I felt confident that my grid coordinates were plotted properly, I got to my feet, picked up my gear, and headed into the forest. A couple hours later, I finished the course and found a quiet spot to sit down and rest, finishing first and beating the second place finisher by more than 20 minutes. It took another hour or so for everyone else to finish.
How did I finish first when I started last? I remembered that preparation is everything, especially in land navigation.
Some students plotted and found their checkpoints in order, one at a time. Some students plotted a few checkpoints, got impatient, and took off into the forest, thinking that they would plot and find the rest later. I took a different approach, plotting all of my checkpoints before I did anything else.
Because the order of the checkpoints was randomized by the instructors to prevent one student from following another (read: cheating), it was inefficient to find each checkpoint in order. It was only by plotting all checkpoints in advance that I saw the most efficient way to find them all, starting with the checkpoints closest to me already. As a result, I finished before anyone else.
To know which direction you need to go, you need to know where you are and where you are going.
In geometry, we learn that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But, before you can draw that line, you have to plot your grid coordinates. The same principle applies to you career.
Before you can plan your next career move, you need to identify both where you are and where you want to go. It is only after you see the dots that you can draw the line to connect them.
When planning your career, you have to be honest with yourself about where you are and where you want to go. Career planning is not the time for wishful thinking. It does you no good to plan your next career move if you don’t know whether you are approaching it from the north, south, east, or west.
If you know only where you are or where you want to go, you are doomed before you start. You need to first determine each where each dot is and make a plan to connect them. Otherwise, you will simply spin your wheels and accomplish nothing, wondering why you can’t seem to get where you want to go.
Where most people go wrong with career management is that they dive straight into tactics when want to make a career move: updating their resume, attending networking events, etc. People rarely, if ever, take a minute to ask themselves where they are and where they want to go in their career. Instead, they just dive in and start doing stuff.
In the end, they become frustrated when, after months of applying for jobs, they fail to get a single call about any of their 200+ job applications. Don’t let that be you. Take the time to plot your coordinates before you start your journey.
Now, I have three questions for you.
- Where are you in your career right now?
- Where do you want to be?
- How can you get from here to there?
Take a few minutes and leave a comment, answering those three questions.
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