The Headline for Your Story

Here’s a brain teaser: Write a headline about how your career is going right now.

Are you stumped?

OK, let’s back it up to 7 years ago. The US was in the middle of a huge financial crisis with thousands of lay-offs. You may not have lost your job, but it became clear that your fate was in your own hands. You used to count down the days to the next long weekend, but now your spare time is dedicated to your passion project.

Think again about your homepage, considering your mindset change since 2010. How about this? “Created brilliant, self-made success!” Wow! Now that’s a headline.

A key Soul Boss principle is moving through change with flexibility and authenticity. Those skills are essential for professional happiness in an ever-changing world.

Why? Because staying in a single career for decades along with the predictability (and boredom) of linear choices got left behind in the 20^th century.

This what anthropologist Wade Davis observed about career paths:

“A career is not something that you put on, like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step by step, choice by choice, and experience by experience.

Everything adds up. No work is beneath you. Nothing is a waste of time, unless you make it so.

An elderly cab driver in New York may well have as much to teach you as a wandering saint in India, a madman in the Sahara, certainly a university professor.”

In this month’s series, Bless Your Path, we’ve met a lot of people who decided to write a new headline for their story.

1. In “You’re On To Something,” Geoffrey Keating took a sudden left turn and stopped pursuing a doctorate in theology to make artisan furniture full-time. He followed his internal compass about what would make him happy and then took action. His headline might be, “Looked. Listened. Then leaped!”
2. In “Yeah, That Happened,” we met a woman who found that gratitude was the way to turn around her disappointment about being fired. Owning that hard experience was uncomfortable. Yet she quickly had an insight she’ll carry the rest of her life: her value as a person wasn’t tied to a single job. Her headline could read, “Bad Break Leads to Big Time Wisdom.”
3. In “I Dig This,” we saw the value of growing in place. When you apply the psychology of safety, experiments from starting small to failing fast can pay big dividends. Perhaps your headline will be, “Gambled Big, Living Large.”

What’s the narrative you’d like to design? Is it time to get serious so you’re ready for the opportunity to be on a bigger playing field? Maybe you want to find your tribe so you can spend your days shoulder to shoulder with some of the smartest, most engaged people you’ve ever known. Or perhaps you’ll challenge conventional wisdom like Geoffrey Keating and do a full-scale reboot.

Whether you just graduated or have been working for decades, your story is coming together. Not just for today, but for a year, 5 years or 10 years from now.

What will your headline be?