I recently had an interesting chat with a friend of mine, she is in the middle of a career-shift and was asking my opinion on how to proceed and what advice can she get from someone who pays a lot of attention on strategic thinking and the value of KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE GOING 🙂

Therefor, this week’s tip, is multi-purposed, it goes both ways, whether you are in looking how to move forward with your career, or simply evaluating where you are today.

Probably to start, I would highlight what Gandhi said about life and how there is more to life than simply increasing its speed,

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

If we look a little bit and try to learn from a very dear creature to me, the horse 🙂 , you would greatly realize that your career moves you just like riding a horse; How? keep reading…

1. Clarity is Key

You really can’t expect to reach where you are going if you don’t know where you are heading, who do you want to be? what do you want to do? how do you expect to write a resume that is designed to talk JUST about you.. Where you are right now, and where you want to be… And most importantly How clear you are about your self. A horse somehow sense that when he is being LEAD, Driven or just a transport mean…

2.Your career is honest

In my personal opinion, Horses are the most Honest creatures you may encounter…A horse never forgets and never forgives, they can be more honest than humans, and just like horses, your career is honest as well, you can take bad decisions or wrong moves, and it will impact you for a long time…

3. Confidence, Bravery and Patience

You can learn a lot from a cowboy, they know that it’s not easy to be able to manage, manipulate, and train an animal of that size and ability, it requires confidence, and a lot of patience, as the horse needs first to understand what you expect from him, and then to be able to get to the point where they can ride and be in total control to get the horse to jump over that fence smoothly… Now that requires Bravery!

 4. Responsibility

When horse accepted man onto his back and chose to carry his burdens, it changed the world. So you have a big responsibility, to come out and care for that horse day in and day out and when you are sick or lazy, you can’t just decide not to come in. They depend on you. Same thing with your career.

 5. Partnership

Unlike a car, a horse is a real partner in your journey, and not just a mean of transportation; The horse will stop both of you from falling of a cliff, even if you were not paying attention, he would trust your leadership, although to be honest, he’s the one doing most of the execution, but he would know that you’re an integral part of the success of the activity.

So for this week, just remember that you can’t expect to just ride on a horse and they would do everything for you, you need to spend a lot of time and some really hard work, before you could enjoy the greatness of what a horse can give you… And same thing with your career… You shouldn’t expect things to come easy, but after a while, things pay back handsomely… with the essence of clarity.

This post is dedicated to K.D. and inspired by E.Ch. 

Enjoy your Week!

SC

Samer Chidiac is a Sr. Strategist, Author & an International Innovation Expert.

The Monday Tip Weekly blog is part of the “Influencing the Life of Others” project