Life is a Journey; so Is success

Lulu Mae Williams, affectionately called “Granny” was one of my grandmothers older sisters and one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. Since birth I knew her to smoke cigarettes, keep her living spaces immaculate and show genuine love to ALL people. When we arrived to family functions, we could always count on her to show true excitement and tell us how beautiful we were. She actually said everybody was beautiful, even if they weren’t, Haha! She truly lived her life seeing others the way God sees them, uniquely beautiful in every way. As I grew older, I had the opportunity to spend more 1:1 time with her, listening to stories and tucking nuggets of wisdom away for when she no longer walked this earth. One piece of wisdom she seemingly shared over and over again was “Life is a journey baby”. I really had no clue what she meant until “life happened” to me and I had time to reflect on it from a personal and professional standpoint. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll share what I learned from it professionally.

First and foremost, understanding that your career is a journey directly correlates with the fact that it doesn’t happen overnight. Sayings like “it’s a marathon, not race” are frequently used to say the same thing. It’s about being patient. It’s about focusing on the steps being taken to reach your goals, not solely being focused on the goals. It’s about understanding that each experience leads to another, which leads to another, and another; collectively qualifying you for the goal you’ve worked to attain all along. There’s a term I recently learned that speaks to this called Career Capital. It’s defined as carefully and persistently gathering valuable skills that will translate into valuable opportunities. Take a moment to reflect on this definition in relation to your career. Which job did you have that taught you the skills you needed to be considered for your next job? Once you got the next job, what projects did you work on that qualified you for a promotion or for a higher level job at another company? Yep, that’s the journey! Develop all the skill blocks you can and consistently leverage them when opportunities present themselves to build the career you want. When you do this, you get to a point when you’ll be too good for anyone to look past you!

Another key factor in seeing your career as a journey is to “trust the process”. Though “trust the process” has become somewhat of a cliche, it’s about letting go and letting God. It’s about throwing your hands up and saying “I am not in control and therefore can’t force things to happen”. In doing so, being proactive is still important but not to the point where you stress over making things happen. The fact of the matter is, what will happen will happen; regardless of your efforts because our lives are predestined. What we have to do is open our eyes in the moment; feeling where we are, seeing who we have during the current season of our lives, understanding the skills we have in the palm of our hands to leverage for the current season.

One of my favorite scriptures is “A man’s gift maketh room for him” Proverbs 18:16. Once I reflected on what Granny always said and then heard the term “Career Capital”, a light bulb went off. It’s essentially saying the same thing! It’s the idea that God has blessed us all with certain gifts. Gifts that will open doors for us and get us opportunities if we just use them and have faith that our success is inevitable. I didn’t learn this until I was 10 years into my career. To make a long story short; I graduated from grad school with an MBA in 2018 and couldn’t get a full-time offer to save my life! I was told for 2 years that I was overqualified. Employers were downright afraid to hire me (even told me to my face)! In 2020 (pre-Covid), I was helping a friend promote her business on LinkedIn and came across a group I had never seen before (Women of Color in Career Services). A black woman had posted a contractor position at Georgia State University working in the Career Services Center of the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. Despite NEEDING full-time employment and being well aware I was overqualified for the role, I reached out to her. She offered me the role and I began doing project work for her and her team. During that time, the Associate Dean noticed my professionalism, poise and overall experience and tapped me to do employer relations work. As a result, I began managing virtual career fairs and working with employers to identify jobs for graduates in addition to the project work I was hired to do. I did this work remotely part-time for 8 months before I received an email from the Director of Career Services for the Graduate School (someone I didn’t work with directly), telling me her daughter was seeking a full-time Career Coach for her team at a company called Generation (a non-profit I had never heard of). Come to find out, she had already talked to her daughter, told her about what she had observed in my work and told her she needed to meet me. My mind was blown away! I had no idea this woman was watching me nor could I had ever imagined she would recommend me for a job. I ended up connecting with her daughter immediately, navigated the interview process and was offered the job! I cried when I was offered because I was so thankful for the opportunity but also in awe of how it happened. For the 1st time in my life, I had trusted the process fully. Still, the job was not completely aligned with my skillset nor my salary requirements, but I felt God leading me to take the job and trust that my gifts would make room for me. I joined Generation as a Career Coach in November of 2020 and within a year I had been promoted 2 levels to Director, created an entire team and ended up inheriting another team. By the time the company took a turn for the worse in 2022, I had 10 direct reports! All of this happened because I built my skill blocks and then leveraged them to strategically position myself for opportunities.

The value of building Career Capital and committing to the journey has continued to ring true in my career; all the way to my current full time role as a Global Leadership Development Program Manager. I could go on and on about how it happened (I’m sure it’ll be addressed in another blog at some point) but the moral of the story is this; regardless of the road you’re traveling whether you’re an Entrepreneur, Student, Educator, Artist, Athlete, Author, Poet, Corporate Professional or anything else you can think of…respect the journey. Walk don’t run. Have goals that you work to attain but focus on what you can do right here, right now at this very moment. Every strategic move you make, every relationship you establish and every opportunity you sieze will allow you to build skill blocks that you’ll eventually stand on to reach for the stars!