Academic Writing Amplified 74: Controlling Your Career vs. Setting Intentions
Do you set intentions for your career and have the skills to follow through with them? I’m sharing a little bit about my own story to shed some light on the difference between control and intention.
I have a pretty long history with trying to control things. I did my undergrad, with 2 minors, in 3 years. I white-knuckled my way to graduation and I did it through carefully strategizing my next steps, leveraging one course into the next, meticulously placing summer sessions in the mix.
What my undergrad experience taught me was that I could do that. I could strategize and control my way to making an outcome occur. And I would do that over and over again throughout my career. This was an invaluable lesson. The choices I make and strategies I employ for my career trajectory don’t involve white-knuckled control anymore, but they do involve intention.
When I created Navigate, I had been strategically steering my career for almost 20 years.
Creating NavigateIn Spring of 2017 I launched the first cohort of Navigate. I developed the program as an organized way to create the kind of writing-for-career transformation that I had been helping clients with in one-on-one coaching.
I built the original marketing messages of Navigate with those client’s phrases in my mind. They talked about being pulled in a thousands directions by their responsibilities, feeling overwhelmed by all the things they have to do and guilty that they were not writing more, that they had let writing “fall to the bottom of the list” but couldn’t easily see an alternative. The original promise of the Navigate program was to “help academic womxn write and publish more”.
But as I kept trying to articulate what the promise of Navigate was, and as I developed the course over the years, the theme I kept returning to was control. When I think about what I want to teach academic womxn to do, what continues to come up for me is “I want to teach womxn to control their careers.”
So, Navigate is about helping your write and publish more, but at its core, Navigate is about controlling your career. Not the white-knuckle kind of control that led me originally down this strategic path back in that dorm at IU in 1993, but a deliberate, intentional kind of control.
Making choices from a place of confidence instead of fear. Setting intentions to guide you on the career path you are building for yourself, and following through. That’s why we start with an academic mission statement and build everything from there.
“Navigate matches intention-setting with the actual skills and strategies it takes to realize those intentions.” -Cathy Mazak
Coming SoonThe waitlist for my next Navigate class is coming soon! Be sure to get on the waitlist, and when you sign up you’ll get some great bonuses (I don’t want to give it all away, but there’s keep your ears open for the word “retreat”!).
Stay tuned for more information.
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Follow me on Clubhouse: @cathymazak
This episode was first published at cathymazak.com/episode74.