There’s no separating the cascading benefits from working on both your fitness and your career at the same time.
As I was talking with a member of the current Career Reinvent Boot Camp cohort the other evening, he remarked how during the month or so he’s been working on (not “in”) his career, he’s managed to drop 16 pounds and radically overhaul his diet. I asked him where the inspiration came from, and he smiled and said, “Your article.” (Note to self: perhaps I should be marketing the career reinvention programs as stealth weight loss programs!)
Consider the benefits of an improved diet and a strenuous physical regimen. Aside from the daily feel-good rush of endorphins, you tend to sleep better, think better, and improve your ability to navigate everyday challenges.
Effectively, you strengthen your resilience.
Resilience Beats Resistance Every Time!
Resilience may be the most critical attribute of all for career reinventors.
Resilience supports you as you strive to get started on your career makeover. Note: much like diet and fitness routines, getting started is the hardest part.
Resilience is that essential element required to beat back self-doubt, kick imposter syndrome out of the way, and keep moving when it’s so much easier to quit.
Resilience born of physical and mental health will carry you forward as you fight Pressfield’s “resistance” on the road to writing your book, creating your TED Talk, or announcing to the world you are doing something new and completely different.
Setting and Achieving Micro-Goals Builds a Virtuous Success Loop
Too many of us are stuck in professional and personal doom loops. We’re unsettled in our careers, hate our jobs or bosses, and this spills into our personal lives and relationships.
We need something to shatter the doom loop guiding our thinking. Setting and achieving micro-goals is the perfect hammer to break the glass for this personal emergency.
An effective physical regimen incorporates an endless series of micro-goals, which, as you achieve them, feeds your self-confidence and strengthens your resiliency.
Successful career reinvention takes place by achieving a series of small goals—each accomplishment fueling you for the next stage and a set of exploratory activities or mini-experiments.
The physical transformation feeds the career reinvention and vice-versa.
And hey, you end up looking pretty good in the process!
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Career transformation and physical transformation are both challenging, evolutionary processes. Combining the two not only makes sense it also makes the entire experience of discovery and design exhilarating. A labor of love beats a labor of compliance or drudgery any day of the week. Take a look at yourself (literally) and then start moving
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Related: Check out my growing library of articles on Career Reinvention