This episode kicks off the Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the specific hurdles faced by mid-to-senior level engineers, managers, and leaders who are looking to move to the next level. Before diving into specific strategies, I’m addressing the fundamental prerequisite for real growth: getting out of your own way. We often block our own progress because our ego conflates our self-worth with our career position, making it impossible to see the real problems or lessons we need to learn. In this episode, I share a vital mental exercise to help you disconnect your identity from your job title and begin diagnosing your career challenges honestly.
- Understand why protecting your ego is one of the most dangerous ways to control your career, leading you to discount valid reasons for stagnation or failure by focusing only on external factors.
- Discover the fundamental shift needed: disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations. Your position is merely a fact and has little bearing on your innate value or capacity to succeed more generally.
- Learn how to use a distancing thought experiment—viewing your situation as if it were an acquaintance’s story—to remove your ego from the diagnostic process and gain necessary clarity and perspective.
- Explore why effective growth advice, whether for promotion or post-mortem analysis, requires focusing almost exclusively on the diagnostic aspect ("What happened and why?") rather than building justifications based on your worthiness or past performance.
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