Career Strategies for High Performers Who Want a Life
Leadership / CEO / Career Strategies
Date Published: January 25, 2021
Publisher: Elite Online Publishing
You’re a high performer who wants a career on your own terms. Maybe you’re exploring the next, best step. Maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you want more. No matter where you are right now, you need options. When you have options, you’re in control. You make decisions from a position of strength. You run to something, not from something.
Options are Power provides strategies for surrounding yourself with options. You’ll learn to lead with a Me-Suite mindset, cultivating the role you want work to play in your life.
You'll create a life in which:
● your personal core values drive decisions
● your priorities are clear
● you’re staying fresh and relevant for the future you want to have
With options, you’ll always have the right, not the obligation, to make a change.
My life mission is to help career-driven, life-minded individuals surround themselves with options.
Options are power. Let’s get in there.
Excerpt
CULTIVATE THE ROLE
YOU WANT WORK TO PLAY IN YOUR LIFE OPTIONS ARE POWER
Lying atop a marginally comfortable bed in a Seattle hotel,
wearing my Cornell sweatpants and allowing my laptop to live up to its name, I
took a sip of the second nightly gin and tonic on the side table and ignored
the TV as it blabbered some background local news. I had about three more hours
of work to do for a client, and I was determined to finish before midnight. At
seven p.m. on that fateful July night in 2010, my phone rang. It was Mom.
“Hi, shug. I have some troubling news,” she said. “Your dad
is having a heart attack.” My mom was the leader of a high-pressure hospital
laboratory. She had never been one to beat around the bush, but this level of
bluntness was unusual, even for her.
“What? Is he okay?” I asked, not sure what else to say. As
soon as I spoke the words, I realized how ridiculous they were. Of course he
wasn’t okay.
“He’s in the hospital,” she said.
My mind raced with options to address the issue at hand. I’m
a natural problem solver, so I immediately went into fixer mode. “Do I need to
come home?”
“Well, I know you’re so busy,” Mom replied empathetically,
not actually answering my question. But the concern in her voice spoke for her.
She needed me to be there.
“Let me check flights. I’m coming home.”
The red-eye from Seattle to Birmingham via Atlanta allowed
plenty of thinking time, maybe too much time. Not knowing whether my father
would be alive on the other side, I checked my watch at least a dozen times
during what seemed to be the longest flight I’d ever experienced from one coast
to the other. I’ve since flown to South Africa and to Asia multiple times, both
considerably more flight time than this one. Yet, that flight from the West
Coast to the East Coast, with my dad’s life in limbo, remains the longest
flight I’ve ever taken.
Seated in an exit-row window, I listened as the pilots
whispered updates. The flight attendants walked slowly through the aisle, in
the dark, without the cart, scanning to make eye contact with anyone who might
be awake. Back then, there wasn’t Wi-Fi on planes, so red-eye flights were
really dark and quiet. With sleep an impossibility for me, given the
circumstances surrounding my trip, I kept my head down, trying to avoid eye
contact with anyone, suspecting I’d start crying. Despite my efforts, I unintentionally
caught a flight attendant’s eyes as she passed my row.
“Can I get you anything, hon?”
Ugh! Too late to pretend my eyes are closed. “How
about the snack box?” I mouthed this more than spoke it, making a square in the
air with my fingers. She handed me the box I knew well from months flying this
route. Oreos, cheese spread and crackers, and a mint. I stared out the window
to the light at the end of the wing. It was following me like a personal moon.
Helplessly, I wondered what was happening on the ground at UAB Medical Center.
Was my father asking for me? Was he scared? I tried to recall the last thing I
said to him. I knew it had been something pleasant. Our relationship was great,
and I was grateful for that fact. But what had we last talked about? I couldn’t
remember. I wanted so badly to be there for him and Mom. If this was his last
day, he’d be proud of his principled life and the family he had prioritized.
In contrast, I thought: If this plane goes down and it’s
my last day, I’ll be disappointed at best. If someone speaks at my funeral
about my amazing abilities to build a merger integration playbook, I’m gonna be
pissed. I’ll be dead, of course, but I’ll also be pissed. In that moment,
the reality of the life I had created reared its less-than-attractive head. I
was doing everything in my power to get promoted as fast as I could. Work was
working well. I was getting prime projects, accelerated promotions,
high-profile task-force appointments. But on other dimensions, I wasn’t doing
so well. I’d gained about thirty pounds living on the road. My friendships were
staler than rice cakes and just as bland. My husband saw me only two full days
a week, and we spent much of that time together with our two friends, gin and
tonic. My finances were fine, day to day, but not purposeful. I had quiet time
in the air that night to think about my life.
The companies I most admired—Nike, Tesla, Johnson &
Johnson, Accenture, Starbucks, Patagonia—all had core values that steered
behavior, that took a stand, that created the future they wanted. I respected
that. At the same time, like all high performers, these companies fell short of
those core values from time to time. Whether due to an employee mix-up, the
ill-spoken words of the CEO or board chair, faulty machinery, outdated
processes, or some other faux pas, they screwed up. Only for them, the mess-ups
landed front and center atop the headlines for the daily news rundown. Although
not perfect, they had a clear North Star for quick course correction. Why
don’t I have this steerage for my own life? What are my core values? How do my
core values guide decisions for the future I want to live in?
That red-eye flight was my moment that mattered. The moment
I decided there is no work-life seesaw to balance. There is only my life, and
all decisions I make, including those about work, must be in service of the life
I want to live, not in balance with it.
Dad survived a widow-maker procedure while I was hurling at
35,000 feet with five hours of stress. Literally hurling. As a
twomillion-miler, my barf bag was typically used for stale chewing gum and
trash, but this remains the only flight when I actually used the barf bag for
barf.
When I entered his recovery room, Dad said, with a tired
smile, “You didn’t need to make this trip, doll. I know you’re so busy.”
Strange, I thought. That’s the same thing Mom
said. Is that what my parents know most about me, that I’m busy? In that
moment, I decided no one I love would ever again feel I was too busy to show
up. I decided I would make my career serve the life I wanted to live. Work
would work for me. I also decided I didn’t care too much for Oreos anymore
About the Author
Donna Peters is an executive coach, speaker, and author. As Founder of The Me-Suite, Peters helps career-driven professionals shape the life they want to live.
Formerly a senior partner in management consulting, Peters hosts The Me-Suite podcast, 2021 finalist for Best Business Podcast. She is faculty for the Executive MBA program at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and certified through the International Coaching Federation.
Peters holds an MBA with distinction from Cornell’s Johnson School, an MFA in Acting from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and a BA from Davidson College.
Options along Peters’ journey have also included acting professionally, co-owning a restaurant, and teaching English in South Korea. She’s visited 45+ countries, lifts weights, and gardens with heirloom seeds.
Peters’ core values are curiosity, freedom, and respect.
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