Dear Dorothy,I've been working at an entry level position for about two years. For the last 6 months, I feel as if I have outgrown my job and don't see any room for growth. I enjoy my job and the people I work with, but I feel like I need to make the next move in my career. How should I move forward?
Life Lesson: Eliminate barriers for your life dream
An important life skill you need to maintain or develop is how to eliminate barriers to your life dreams. As I see it, there are two primary reasons to do this: 1- You are as empowered as you allow yourself to be. Empowerment allows a person to remain victim-free and confident that no matter what, you can move forward. 2- It keeps you introspective and in a problem solving mode. Introspective simply means you think about your own actions (or non-actions) and their impact on your life and others. I combine introspection with problem solving here because it is a skill that you need your entire life. Chances are with being introspective; you will need to create solutions so you can move forward with your life.
What are the barriers you might face with regard to pursuing your dreams? We produce most of our barriers. As you have heard, we can be our own worst enemy and this is certainly one way we do it. We don’t always realize it since it can be so much of who we are. If our dream is to help feed people in an impoverished country, we may have a voice inside telling us we can’t do it. That voice can rationalize multiple fairly logical sounding reasons. That voice more often than not, is the barrier I’m talking about. The voice is your more primal, survivor instinct telling you not to jump over a cliff. It stands to reason then, that if the voice is right about the cliff, it must be right about the dream. Not so.
I do acknowledge that there are other possible barriers that get created along the path to your dream. The same skills and outlook are needed no matter where the barrier comes from. I’ve seen people have issues crop up not of their own creation and allow that issue to totally derail them. I’m always sad to see this happen for the person, especially when I know it doesn’t have to stop them. It’s times like this where having a finely honed problem solving skill ready to pull out is great so you can look for alternative solutions. There are very few things presented to us in life that only have one path forward. In fact, if you were to give 10 people the same goal, chances are very high that you would get 10 different paths to that goal.
Are you stuck going forward on your dream? Not sure how to get from here to there? Time to open up your personal tool kit, gather your resources and get going. You can eliminate barriers by going around them, over them, through them or another way. Let me know how it goes.
Posted: December 5th, 2009 under Personal Change.