Stuck in a rut?  Feel like you are on a professional plateau and not sure where you are going?  Wonder if you are “traveling” on the right personal or professional path?  Do you have clarity on your goals?

If you have or are asking yourself these questions, good.  That means you are human and you want grow and develop.  I mean, if you didn’t have these questions, you would probably be okay with the rut and plateau.

I am an overachieve and never satisfied with the status quo.  There are pros and cons to this mindset, but for now, I will stick to the pros.  I ask myself these questions all the time and I recently found a model to help me answer them.  I wrote about this model during my recent Career Tip “3 Simple Questions to Spur Personal and Professional Growth“.

Getting clarity on your goals, finding the right path to get there and identifying what must be done to accomplish your goals starts with asking yourself a question, “What does success look like for me?”  This is a general question of course.  You need to specify it to whatever area you want to work on.  For example, for me, “What do role do I want to have at Cameron-Brooks in 5 years?”  Or, “What do I want my relationship with my children to be like when they are grown and out of the of house in 5 years?”  I asked myself those questions, and then I did an exercise called Preferred Futuring where I wrote in my journal my vision for each of those areas.  You can do this exercise for any domain of your personal or professional life.

Now that you have clarity on what you want, you need to take stock on where you are and what you need to do to get there.  I recommend asking yourself, “Where am I now?”  Then, “What do I need to start doing and/or stop going to get to where I want to go?”

There are more questions I recommend during the podcast, but those are the main one to ask if you feel like you’re in a professional plateau.

I also reference a couple of sources in the podcast that I want to give credit to:  Chris Perry at Market Sense, Inc. Sandler Training, Michael Bungay Stanier (aka MBS) author of The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap, and Caroline Webb author of How to Have a Good Day.

Joel