A few weeks ago, one of my LinkedIn connections reached out to me about something I mention on my LinkedIn profile summary “I can narrow my professional sweet spot to the intersection of Technology, Talent and Business”. She is a career coach and wanted to understand if I really felt I had found that sweet spot, what path I took to find it and my thoughts about how different or not would my process be from everyone else.
“You mention finding your sweet spot, which is very related to the work I do. Do you feel you’ve found it? What was your process? It’s different for everyone?”
That got me thinking. How I got here? Can I really say I have found my professional sweet spot?
My sweet spot
Never before I felt so sure and confortable with the path laying in front of me. What I do, what I work with, what I see myself doing in the future, all seams clear. Today I can say I’ve found a professional sweet spot, a subset of subjects I’m confortable with, where I can add value and want to deeply dig into.
Was there any process?
I didn’t felt like I’ve taken any sort of process, in fact I’ve never thought about that before. Sure, there are plenty of guidelines and articles to help us find what to do and excel where we’re good at, but most likely everyone will take different highly empirical steps, not even knowing those steps are taken. I say this because I never took those much deliberate steps to find it. When I started my career I didn’t knew I would leave so soon hands-on technical roles to embrace business and people management.
The long road
Looking back trying to rationalize what happened I identify some ingredients to my “process”:
- The unexpected turn I took early on my career
- Never forgetting my technical background
- Increased responsibility opportunities I was given along the way
- A personal life event that helped put everything in perspective and changed some part of my professional DNA
This is far from being a process, but it was my long road.
These things don’t necessarily have to be deterministic. One thing is making "upward" career decisions or changing careers, another completely different is finding what we love to do. For me, it took me a while, about 15 years, to get here.
Don't know if I will stick with this forever. For now I feel the "flow" when surfing in Technology + Talent + Business.
But hopefully, it will change…
How about you? Have you found you professional sweet spot?
Feel free to share your thoughts.
Image Credit: target-755802_1280 from meineresterampe under CC0 Public Domain