5 Ways You’re Overthinking Your Early Career

I believe in getting straight to the point - I’ve spent over 20 years learning and watching others learn these lessons…sometimes more than once. 

You don’t grow out of overthinking your career.

I’ve coached many a successful leader well into their career through these same principles because the higher you go, and the farter you get, the higher the stakes.

The difference between you and them? You’re at the beginning of your career.

Learning and rigorously practicing these principles from the start will expedite your ability to leverage these skills to confidently navigating whatever lies ahead and quickly capitalize on opportunities you know are aligned with the life and career YOU want for yourself.

1. THE “RIGHT ROLE” – Two Scenarios

• Applying - short of applying for a job that is completely outside your industry of interest or requiring significantly more experience than you actually have (“more” meaning 2+ years), you can’t apply for a “wrong” role.

• Current Role – every role has something to offer you, it’s a matter of how you approach your day-to-day, engage with your manager and your peers, and how strategic you are in navigating the best ways to learn and leverage your current role for the future.

  THE “RIGHT TIMING” – it doesn’t exist and will never be what you expect. 

2. THE “RIGHT TIMING”

It doesn’t exist and will never be what you expect. 

All of the best and worst things occur at their own cadence and in their own time – something you rarely have control over.  The best things you can do, that you do have control over:

• Be future minded – you don’t have to have a strict checklist, but spend at least some reflective time on, “three years from now, where do I want to be?” Putting purpose behind where you want to end up and when will help you evaluate short and long term decisions, opportunities, and mitigation plans.

• Be curious and pay attention – timing and sense of risk usually go hand-in-hand. When opportunities and challenges present themselves, if you’ve been prioritizing learning beyond your own role and understanding the ecosystem and interworking of the business, you’ll be much more equipped to assess how the timing of it all fits into YOUR bigger picture, assess the risk and the reward, and be empowered to move forward accordingly.

3. THE “RIGHT MONEY”

If you are in the first 3-5 years of your career, don’t chase the pay check. 

This doesn’t mean deprioritize pay, it means prioritize pay within the context of your long-term career goals and understand that a value add of any given job to you and your career doesn’t have to come in the form of money.

Understand that experience by doing will help you to fill in skills gaps. Sometimes what a job offers you is not money, but development opportunities that can expediate career growth and leveraged into…you guessed it – more earning potential.

The money always catches up – but a strong foundation of skills are the building blocks to long-term advancement.

4. THE “RISKS”

Take them now, you have so much less to lose if it doesn’t pan out. 

The longer you wait, the more your life will depend on the “stability” of your career making it that much harder and truly riskier to take risks.

Get used to taking risks early in your career when the downside is minimal, the upsides are propelling, and the dividends of learning from failure are at their highest.  You’ll be able to build a framework for balancing risk/reward, ultimately allowing you to take more of the right risks in the future.

5. THE “FEAR OF CHANGE”

Call it what it is, aversion and resistance to change is rooted in fear and insecurity.

Yes, change has implied risks, some small, some much larger, all on the spectrum of uncomfortable to down right scary.

BUT change ALWAYS offers you an opportunity to better yourself and standout among your peers. Your perspective be the determining factor in your ability to thrive through change or be paralyzed and held back.

Develop a process to track, learn, and replicate positive change modalities that can be utilized across all areas of your life. The best defense against unexpected change is a strategic offense – future focused and action oriented in modeling an open mind and good-faith implementation.

This is an invaluable skill that will benefit you deep into your career.  Having a reputation as a positive and successful change-agent will open doors.

It’s not good enough to have read and understood these principles. It’s a quick easy read, but it means nothing if you don’t put it into practice…which make no mistake, takes time and prioritization, which is also a learned skill that will continue to evolve as your achieve success in both your personal and professional life.