I'm constantly telling my friends to stop sitting around and waiting for their career, or their life, to happen. To succeed you need to make the conscious decision to own your life and your career to ensure your future success and happiness. It takes some self reflection to really determine where you want to be in life and what you need to do to get there. And to be honest, it’s not always an easy thing to do; I struggle with it, too.

It's not always easy to figure things out, but there are some questions that I have asked myself throughout the years that have really helped. I'll share of few here with y'all since I'm a cool person.

1. What is your personal definition of success?

I just can’t stress how important this is, I really can’t. What success is to me is not what it is to you, and what success is to you, is not success to your neighbor. Let’s stop comparing ourselves to each other and come up with our own personal definitions of success. When you do this, the end goals that you are striving for are of actual significance to you.

2. Do you have your priorities in check?

Have you reconciled your priorities in regards to meeting your goals? Do you need to shuffle priorities around to achieve your goals? Are you okay with moving some things to back burner while pushing others to the foreground? Is it worth any of the strains of priority shifting? Yes. No. Maybe you need to reshape your goal to be more inline and in sync with your priorities.

3. What are your resources and how can you use them?

Resources come in many flavors: educational opportunities, professional organizations, even your coworkers. To achieve your end goal, you need to identify these resources and their benefit to you. What training classes do you need to take? What certifications would be beneficial to you? What professional organizations should you take a part in? Who is in your network? But don’t be a user, though. Don’t be a person that tramples upon others and actually expect (or demand) their respect at the end of the day. It doesn’t work like that. Respect and a polite demeanor go a long way. Trust. 

4. Are you willing to deal with your own flaws?

You need to “get over yourself.” We are our own worst enemy. We all have our flaws and we need to learn coping mechanisms to overcome them. If you are not willing to recognize your flaws, how can you expect to achieve your goals? Many times it is our own action or inaction that is preventing us from reaching our goals. We tend to mask our faults and misplace the blame to external sources. In order to succeed we need to recognize who we are to realize who we want to be.

5. Can you deal with failures?

Crap happens. It really does. You’ve gotten everything all laid out, everything is working to plan, and someone pulls a loose thread and everything becomes unraveled in a blink of an eye.  Been there, done that. We all have. If you really want to get to where you want to be, you can’t live your life wallowing in what could have been. Pick yourself up, figure out what went wrong and why, and remedy it. And if it’s something that is out of your power to fix, figure out how to make the situation work for you. Don’t let the system work for the (wo)man, make it work for you.

To close out, I’d like to remind y’all this awesome quote by John Lennon “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” Goals and priorities shift over time, and by no means does this make you a failure.

- Engineering Diva

Check out my blog at engineeringdiva.wordpress.com