When we’re looking for ideas or guidance on how to move forward with our career, we can very easily slow our own growth or talk ourselves out of pursuing a career path because we feel like we don’t have what it takes to do it the “right way.”  But when it comes to your career and your work, there really is no right way to do it, there’s just your way.

In this episode we’ll talk about how to prevent letting that kind of limiting mindset get in your way.

Transcript:

As we grow and look to blaze our path, one of the natural things we do is look to people around us and successful people for examples of how to do it the “right way.” 

So as we grow personally and professionally and as we look for ways to blaze our path forward in life, one of the natural things we do is look to successful people or people who we trust for advice and for validation that we’re on the right path. 

 It’s very natural for us to want guideposts to help us know where we stand and what we need to do to get to where we want to go. 

It’s a very natural thing to do and it can be a healthy thing to do. If someone else has spent their career or a lifetime studying something or honing their craft, and what they know relates to our individual path forward, then we should want to know what they have to say. It’s a vital part of our growth. 

So using successful people as role models is great. We should study them and we should learn from them. 

But we can fall into a trap when we start to compare ourselves directly to what others are doing. 

But one trap I think we can fall into when we look at the stories and advice of successful people is blindly comparing their path with our own path. 

When you rely too much on comparison, you risk developing a mindset that edges out your instincts, and your talents, and your original ideas.

It’s that thing in our gut that tells you how and when to take action.

And when what we believe doesn’t align with advice we’ve heard or how other successful people have done it, we second guess ourselves.

We run the risk of thinking if we’re not doing it a certain way, then we’re doing it the wrong way.

So let me give you an example from my own professional path. 

I practiced law at a major US law firm for six years and then I branched out and started my own law firm, and then eventually started my own startup called DueCourse. And I had never run a startup before, and had no point of reference for how to do it other than what I had heard and read about other founders and the way they built their startups.  

So when I founded DueCourse, I used to mimic what I had heard other successful founders say they had done – things like staying up all night, working 14 hour days, eating ramen noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to save money, and just generally not taking good care of themselves. 

So early on in my startup I did that. I pushed hard, I worked too much, and I almost completely burned myself out. And I quickly realized that what I had heard and what might have worked for other people didn’t work for me. 

So I backed off of that strategy and spent a lot of time thinking about what it is that helps me show up at my best. 

And I realized a few things: I’m ultra productive and focused in the mornings after a good night of sleep, I need exercise, I need to eat good clean foods, I like to meditate, I like to ride my motorcycle and hang out with my friends. Those things help me show up at my best. 

And so what I had to do was take the advice I had heard and I had to run it through my own personal filter to determine whether it would actually work for me. And I’ll tell you more about that in a second. 

Consider whether there is such a thing as the “right”= way to do something. 

So we can easily fall into traps like this because we hear or we observe things that are deemed by someone we respect to be the right thing to do or the right way.

Also when we get nervous about the path forward, we default to comparison and conformity. When we’re confronted with uncertainty about things like our future or our career path, we want to latch on to a proven method, something that’s safe.

But here’s what I believe now: there’s no such thing as the right way. There’s just the way you choose to do it. The way that works for you.

It’s ok if what you know to be true about the way you work or the way you want to approach your career path isn’t aligned with the way other successful people have done it. 

And you should have the confidence to know that you’re smart enough and that you know yourself well enough to figure out the way that works for you. 

Just because someone next to you is doing something a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the right way. I think it’s very healthy to question whether the way people around you are doing things is the way you should do it. 

Let me just pause for a moment and say that I do think it’s a great practice to look to successful people to grow and use what you can learn from them and see how that information aligns with what you want to build or accomplish in your workday or your career. 

Believe me, I have studied lots of successful people and have drawn a lot of inspiration from them and also followed their advice. Again, that’s a very natural thing to do. 

But be aware of whether the exercise of comparing yourself to what other people are doing is actually helping you. You’ve probably heard the phrase that comparison is the thief of joy, and I think the sentiment behind that is applicable here. 

Taking what we can learn from others and running it through our own filter to determine whether it suits us or not is healthy, but doing a one to one comparison of where we are vs. where others are is not because there’s too many variables. 

Think about how this mindset affects the way you structure your workday and your career. 

I want to give you two concrete areas where you can think about how this mindset might impact you.

The first area is how you structure your workday. There’s a lot of advice out there on productivity, and time management, and how to network, and how to build relationships with people professionally. And many of those resources can offer helpful information for us. 

But at the end of the day, we have to know and study what it is that works for us, and we can’t be drawn into feeling like our way of doing it is the wrong way. 

We can test and we can iterate and we can grow, but at the end of the day we shouldn’t be looking to comparison as THE indicator of how we should approach our workdays. 

The second area is how we think about our career and professional trajectory. 

It’s very tempting to look around us and see what other people are doing, and to use that as an indicator of whether we have what it takes or whether we’re approaching our career the right way. 

Again, drawing from my own personal experience, I knew in my gut at one point that I wasn’t meant to be a lawyer anymore and there was something inside me telling me that I wanted to start my own business that was focused on helping other people make their workdays better. But I looked around me and no one in my circle had done anything close to that. Almost every successful person I knew at the time had become successful by being an attorney. 

So it was hard for me for a while to reconcile the career path I wanted with what I had observed about the people in my network at the time. 

And when I did stop practicing law to pursue a new career path, I had a lot of lawyers giving me advice and their input on whether they thought that was a good idea and on how I should do it. And even though they meant well I couldn’t look to them for advice because they hadn’t done what I wanted to do which was build a startup. 

So these are two immediate areas that come to mind where having the “right way” mindset can impact us. 

If you want to use the advice of others, you have to create a filter. 

So how do we make decisions about the advice of others while at the same time being true to who we are? 

I think if you really want to become the best version of yourself, you have to start by creating what I would call your own personal filter. A personal filter is the mindset and set of beliefs that are the foundation for who you are, and when you have your own filter it helps you to process information through the lens of your own experience.

So the things you observe, the comparisons you make, the advice you receive – it all gets run through your filter. 

And you can decide with confidence whether to use that advice, modify it, or discard it.

I built my filter by asking myself these four questions:

• # 1 What do I value?
• #2 What’s my purpose?
• #3 What am I trying to accomplish?
• #4 What helps me show up at my best?

You can ask yourself any questions that you think will help you refine your focus, but if you’re looking for a starting point this is where’d I’d suggest you start. 

And truthfully when I started, I didn’t know how to answer any of these questions. It was hard because I didn’t know myself well at that point. 

And you might not know the answers to them either. But that’s ok.

The important part is that you keep asking the questions. The more you ask, the sooner the answers present themselves. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t know the answers right away. Just keep asking the questions. 

And the more you focus on the filter, the easier it will be for you to access your own intuition and listen to your gut, and the easier it will be to make decisions about how to use all of the advice and input you receive from people around 

So that’s how I recommend you get started. Build your own personal filter and use it to process information. 

And remember that there’s no right way. There’s just your way.

Go have a great workday.