Get in the Driver's Seat of Your Career

One of my clients was laid off from a job she loved last summer. She was constantly on the lookout for new roles, but few postings felt like the right fit for her—and the ones that did weren't leading anywhere. 

In one of our coaching sessions, she said: “I think I need to Good Will Hunting this whole thing.”

I laughed. “What does that mean?”

She explained: “Write my own role and cast myself.”

I groaned, because I felt such a visceral YESSSS bubble up from my core.

I see this kind of job search frustration time and again—especially in the past year.

--> You search the sea of job postings, submit your applications, and then cross your fingers and hope that you’ve said what they want to hear. You hope that they'll understand your experience and skills, make a connection, and that they'll choose you. You wait to hear something. And often, it's *crickets*.

But there's another way. The Good Will Hunting (or *ahem* Hello Sunshine) way*:

--> You create your own dang opportunities.

In the first scenario, you are at the mercy of the job market. You're reactive. It's out of your hands and you're waiting for something to happen TO you.

In the second, you're designing your own destiny. You're proactively exploring, discovering, and building. You're making something happen FOR you.

Creating your own opportunities is all about being tuned in to possibilities.

It's about taking the initiative to understand the needs and problems that are out there.

And it's about being able to clearly see and articulate the skills, experience, and value that you bring to the table to create solutions.

In short, it's taking an entrepreneurial approach to your career.

Whether or not you are an ENTREPRENEUR, you can still be ENTREPRENEURIAL.

And contrary to what you may believe, it's not a skill that you've either have or don't have. You can learn and develop your ability to be entrepreneurial.

I believe that it's an essential skill we all NEED to learn and develop in order to navigate the modern job economy.

We all need to take an entrepreneurial approach to building our careers.

Here’s what that can look like:
- Building relationships in and outside of your circle
- Getting in the room where it happens
- Asking questions
- Producing your own work
- Building your portfolio
- Finding and connecting resources, people, and ideas

—

This approach didn't always come easily to me. It's a mindset that I consciously adopted—and it required letting go of how I thought the working world worked.

I've had to practice, to build the muscle. I was shy, plagued by self-doubt, and deferential. I didn't want to take up too much space.

But I practiced. I challenged myself to speak up and step up. With time, I've begun to trust myself to have my own back.

Now, I know I can count on myself to create opportunities.

I was watching Netflix's new(ish) show, Ginny & Georgia recently, and I heard this line and thought, THAT'S ME:

“I'm a fast learner, and resourceful. You give me lemons, you'll have lemonade, lemon pie, and lemon meringue.”

( <-- Actual Lemon Sour Cream Pie made by me)

I’m not saying that you need to put pressure on yourself and find the million dollar lemonade startup idea that guarantees you’ll never work for someone else ever again. I’m saying that we all need to foster a kind of entrepreneurial mindset that expands our talents instead of spending the energy fitting them into someone else’s narrative of what we contribute to the working world. 

So that we can take back control of navigating our professional path—a process that can feel overwhelming, discouraging, and frustrating.

And get in the driver's seat of a career journey that can be creative, expressive, meaningful, and fun.

Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset is about making your job hunt a process that brings you to the truest version of yourself. 

My client who decided to "Good Will Hunting the whole thing" reached out to people within and just outside her network to have conversations about opportunities where she could apply her strengths as a visionary and creative leader to serve local communities' needs.

Someone she spoke with connected her to the board of a fledgling but mighty nonprofit in need of a new Executive Director. And the rest is history.

Her approach meant that she's not only the leader of an organization—she's the leader of her own career path.

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If you're on board with trying on this new mindset but are wondering HOW exactly to put it into practice—join us at this month's Leadership Lab, where we're talking all about how to create your own professional opportunities.


* Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote their own dang script for a movie they would star in: Good Will Hunting. Reese Witherspoon wasn’t getting scripts for films with compelling female stories, so she created her own dang production company to make them herself: Hello Sunshine.