A Personal Relevance Reality Check
Take a moment for a personal relevance reality check because at any age these painful things can start happening to you, and if they do, you’ll want to change your course of behavior:
-You increasingly feel that your smarts aren’t getting you anywhere, that your skills aren’t being used.
-You aren’t sought out or taken seriously by colleagues and managers.
-You sense disregard for your authority by those above, below, or around you.
-You can’t seem to gain new responsibilities, and your current ones are being chipped away.
-Your honest self-assessment tells you that your expertise doesn’t always fit present-day needs; you aren’t “with it.”
-Your ideas to improve work aren’t welcome.
-You experience notable indignities, such as being ignored in meetings, being left out of the loop on key decisions, or being omitted from the circulation lists from important e-mails, meetings, and social gatherings.
-You get heavy and steady criticism of your work.You are frequently passed over for the most interesting, important, or prestigious assignments.
All of these things can happen if you allow them to happen. But you, my dear reader, will not let this happen. You’ve got the fight in you, or you are ready to get it back if you’ve let it slip.
Right now, take your age in years and multiply it by 365. That’s how many days you are old. Whether you are 10,220 days old or 21,275 days old, it’s only one single day that makes a change in your life, not a year. Each one of your days has a start, a morning, noon, night, and an end. You have to vow to yourself to make something of the 1,440 minutes you have each day. Take just a few of those minutes, and use them to put effort into doing things a little out of the ordinary, a little beyond anyone else’s efforts.
Debra Benton’s new book, The Leadership Mind Switch: Rethinking How We Lead in the New World of Work (McGraw-Hill, June, 2017) is available at any book store.
