Career Mapping: Understanding your methods and getting detailed with your outcomes

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The concept of creating a visual image map in your mind’s eye toward achieving your goals is nothing necessarily new—ever heard of the quote “what the mind can conceive, it can achieve”. This speaks to the fact that if you can visualize achieving your goal and the steps to get there, you can bring it into reality. You need to work towards clearly understanding your career plan and the possible outcomes of the work you’re putting in, otherwise you may find yourself in situations where you attain your goals but do not understand the “why” behind the goal.

When structuring your career path, visualizing the future that you want is critical. Creating a vision of your future role, environment, and lifestyle will set you on the right path to making the right decisions.

What is visualization?

• Visualization is the process of creating a mental image of a goal you would like to achieve in the future. You use your thoughts to imagine a certain outcome, and what you will do to get it.
• Where do you see yourself within a decade? What type of job do you do? In which environment? What level of influence do you have? Do you have an impact positively on other people?
• Most importantly, ask yourself “why”. You need to know the reasons behind it.

Be detailed about your career path

Visualizing your career requires you to create a very detailed and specific image of your future. Additionally, to envision your future career, you need to outline the contents of your future lifestyle.

You create a life goal plan by answering these two questions for your life:

1. What do you want to start doing?
2. What do you want to stop doing?

How to visualize the end goal of your career

1. Create a mental image

Visualize how you see yourself in extreme detail. Be so detailed that you can even include the environment of your office, the kind atmosphere, the mission and vision of the company, is it in the public or private sector? Is it a multinational corporation or a local NGO?

2. Set pragmatic goals and take actions

• You need to ask yourself what needs to happen for your goals to become a reality and thereafter, visualize the small steps you need to take to get there. In other words, break down your bigger picture into bite-size chunks. Experts on visualizing your dreams have even said that every day, you need to do something that brings you closer to your dream. Therefore, daily focus and execute on the methods to help you reach your outcomes.
• Regardless of how large or successful the actions that you take care of in the long run, by taking action, you’re proving to your subconscious mind that you’re moving in the direction of your goals, which makes achieving them seem less far-fetched.

3. Celebrate small wins

Further than that, whenever you make a milestone, motivate yourself by celebrating those wins. Have you finally completed an application? Celebrate. Got a promotion at work? Celebrate.

4. Be open to redirection

The key to reaching career goals is always being open to life’s pleasant surprises. Life has a way of surprising us and our careers are no exception, so I encourage you to have confidence in yourself and your ability to reach your career goals while maintaining an open mind about what the journey may be like in your pursuit.

The more we routinely get specific about our goals and become detailed about our ambitions, the more we’re able to trick our brains and allow ourselves to believe that our goals are attainable. As a result, we become more tenacious in our efforts to achieve our dreams.