Module 8 - The Final Word
Value in this Module:
You are almost at the finish line.
Review where you go from here as you begin the next stage of Designing YOU.
Congratulations! You have designed a Whole YOU that you can be proud of. You’ve set course for a 5-year mission that’ll let you achieve your very personal definition of success. In this final step, we offer some of our closing thoughts on needing to view the journey of Designing YOU as a state of mind.
If you go to your phone’s App Store or Google Play store and look at the apps that are installed on your smartphone, you’ll notice each of them are at version 6.56, 7.15, or 10.32. These products never stopped improving. This concept of continuously adapting to a changing environment is what makes products successful over the long-term.
Don’t be content with the first version of the Whole YOU that you launch. Your 5-year mission must constantly evolve with you. You’ll inevitably change as you add new competencies, new interests, new relationships, and new goals. Things around you will also change new opportunities, new threats, and new responsibilities. The work you have done to get to this point is important not only because it got you from there to here, but it also paved the path for how to get from here to wherever you might want to go in the future.
Adapting, learning, and growing is your only option. At certain times in your life your Professional YOU may be important, and at other times it may be your relationships, your health & wellness, or your spirituality. How and where they fit in depends on how you define success at any moment in time. However, don’t lose sight of what you wrote for your 100th birthday. Use this as your ultimate litmus test. Reflecting on the whole you gives you a solid foundation to make those big (and small) decisions in life.
Life is inevitably full of ups and downs. Your ups include achieving your personal and professional goals, like completing your first triathlon, or meeting that special person or finding your dream job.
The unavoidable downtimes are why resiliency and perseverance are core attributes for product designers. If a new product flops, they take everything they learned from that failure and feed it into designing their next product.
There are few people who don’t, at some time in their professional lives, find themselves bored at a job, underemployed or altogether unemployed. Sometimes, losing a job may have nothing to do with you but you became a casualty of something you had little control over.
When great product designers have a product that flops, they park their ego at the door and reflect on why it failed. This same reflection needs to happen when you find yourself out of a job. The shock of being unemployed can do a number on your self-esteem (not to mention your bank account). After you get through the shock and perhaps anger, you need to ask yourself “Why?” What can you do to put yourself in a better position going forward? What part of the Whole YOU needs improvement?
For you, maybe losing your job had nothing to do with you and more to do with the struggling company or shrinking industry you’re in (although you chose to work at the company or in that industry, so you’re not completely blameless). On the other hand, maybe losing your job had everything to do with you. Did you fall behind on your competencies? Did you get complacent? Did you tip the scales toward other success factors, ignoring the Professional YOU?
The best time to plan for the downs is during the ups. This includes revisiting your 5-year mission annually and questioning whether the current version of the Whole YOU helps you achieve that purpose. It also means ensuring you have a buffer in your real bank account as well as your relationship bank accounts. If you start to sense that an unscheduled and unwelcome career change is in the cards, it’s critical that you revisit the Whole YOU. Prepare to re-launch yourself into the world with all the energy, planning and reflection that you did when you launched the Whole YOU v1.0.
Taking a professional break is not incompatible with your Professional YOU, in fact, we believe it’s essential. What exactly a “professional break” is will be up to you. Just like most of what we talk about in Designing YOU, taking a break should be incorporated into your 5-year mission. If you want to go backpacking for six months, go to Florence to study art history or volunteer in Africa, then go ahead and add it to your plan. This will force you to figure out the financial implications long before it’s time to take the break. Reflect on this but know that we encourage you to plan for professional breaks. You’ll find that well-timed breaks do wonders to help you evolve the Whole YOU.
Regardless of wherever your path takes you it should be the path that feels right and matters the most. There’s no right or wrong because what matters is that you are always working on developing the Whole YOU.
