The New CEO of Your Destiny

You’re the CEO of Your Destiny.

I spent a lot of time waiting. I waited for my career to get me more prestige. I waited for more money. I waited for job security to keep me happy. I waited for Human Resources to give me even more training to equip me with more.

One day, I fired whoever had been in charge of my life up until that point, and I hired a new CEO. Me.

This wasn’t easy. You see, the old CEO had also hired an Inner Critic. (I learned about such things from a book called Self Esteem, by Dr. Matthew McKay). That Inner Critic thought he was being benign, and thought he was on my side, whenever he told me I was just going to fail again, whenever he told me what others were probably thinking about me, whenever he let me quit before I even tried.

On the day I fired my Inner Critic, I hired an Inner Coach. Now, the voice of the Inner Critic is real. It’s something we do without meaning to, and relates to a low self-esteem. The Inner Coach was something completely different. I had to fabricate this voice. I had to go out and find material for this coach to tell me. And I had to remind him every day that his job was to help me succeed. It wasn’t a voice in my head; it was talking to myself. But that’s okay. It got the job done.

As CEO of your own destiny, you’re responsible for a few things: determine your strengths and magnify them. Determine where you’re wasting time and minimize it. Don’t fret over such things. Just shift that time into the maximizing spaces.

You, Ms. or Mister CEO, are hereby dutifully required to figure out your own career path, inside or outside your current organization. You are to draw up your own plans for your destiny, be that staying at home, traveling all over, or becoming a plane-hopping hug-giver. It’s your duty to plot this out.

The Cavalry is not coming. The HR department has quit. You’re it. You’re the boss. This is terrifying to some, but if you accept that your Inner Coach and you both have the smarts to know what you know, to ask others about what you don’t know, to share your abilities, and to offer your beneficial services to those you choose to count as your customers (however you want to frame that word), then I suspect you are on the road to something great.