The Question That Reveals Everything About Your Career Trajectory

Amy Evans: Hey everyone, welcome back to Women in Sales Leadership. I'm your host, Amy Evans. I'm a coach for sales leaders and founders for how to grow more revenue to get further in your career as well. I'm so glad you're here with me today.

Okay, so today's episode, there are three things you are going to rock away with. Number one, the question that you need to be asking yourself right now. Number two, what the answer is going to really mean for you. As you answer this question, I'm gonna give you the question, don't worry.

And number three, the opportunity to have some action coming out of how you're answering this question right now that will impact what you do between now and the end of this year. Can you believe it? We're almost to the midpoint of the year. And before we dive in, I wanna ask you for a favor.

If this message resonates with you today, please, Be generous. I know you're a generous person. You wouldn't be listening to this conversation if you weren't. But share this episode with a friend.

It's how this show grows and it gives you a chance to give a little gift to someone that you know. And if you're at a point in your life and in your career where you want support, you want some help, you're not sure what to do next, reach out to me. I'm at AmyEvansCoaching.com.

I've got a free one hour conversation that I will gift for you just to come and learn a little bit about what you want, what's next for you. You'll walk away in this conversation with clarity. So amyevanscoaching.com forward slash work with me.

You can grab a time slot. And here's what I want you to think about as you go into this conversation today. ⁓ So the women who are moving up. those who are getting promoted, those who are landing these next big roles, right?

They all started with intention and action and the action that they're getting, like these new announcements that you might be seeing on LinkedIn right now today, like I saw three or four just pop up today, right? The activity that started happening that these leaders started to do in order to make these moves happen. It started probably about six months ago. So where are you?

You're in a sweet spot right now to impact what happens for the rest of your year. This is the question that I promised you that I was gonna give you and it's this very simple one, right? Here it is. Where do you want to be by the end of this year?

Where do you want to be by the end of this year? It's a deceivingly simple question. And some of you might be saying, Amy, I know this answer. I know it.

I got it. I know where I want to be. And if that's you, babe, then awesome. Awesome.

If you're sitting there thinking, I don't really know, which is going to be about 95 % of you, then I get it. I see you. And it's totally OK. to have an I'm not really sure or I don't know yet, right?

So this is not a goal setting conversation. This is a temperature check. This is a time for you to say, okay, what's been going on and where do I wanna be in six months? We often overestimate what we can get done in a day or a week or a month.

and we underestimate what we can get done in a year or in six months. So six months, it will go by in a blink of an eye. However, it's also still enough time to take action and get some things done. So let's go back to this question.

Where do I want to be by the end of the year? Where do I want to be? Some of you might be saying like, I don't know where it is, but it's not here. That's an answer in and of itself and a totally acceptable one.

There's no wrong answer to this question. There's no judgment in this question. Where do you want to be by the end of this year? And if there were like no rules, if someone said like no limits, someone being me, if I said to you no limits, let's pretend there's no rules, let's pretend there's no what ifs or yeah buts that are stopping you, what does that, does the answer change for where you wanna be by the end of this year?

And you can look at this from all areas and aspects of your life. Of course, This conversation is generally about career lens. But guess what? Our career is only a part of what we do every day.

It's not who we are. It's what we do for a living. It's not what we do to live. It's not what our life is.

And there's a big distinction there. I've gotten caught up in commingling those two ideas. And if you're in the middle of that, I understand. Let's go back to this question.

What do you want to do by the end of the year? There are these responses. right, I'm not sure, like your mind goes blank. Like, I don't know.

I hope I still have a job. I hope I'm not worrying about where I need to be by the end of this year. Totally okay if that's where you are. And then there could be an answer that's more like, I hope.

I hope to be something. I hope to be What is it? What is it that you're hoping for? And look, you can look at all these headlines.

You can look at all the reasons to not have hope. And my answer to that is, yeah, you can do that. And if it feels good to you to like be in those feelings and take a day or two and just like feel crummy, sometimes you have to let that happen. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that you can't feel bad.

However, You all also know this, that even in the midst of like the worst of hardest of circumstances, The gift that you can give yourself is hope. If you really know that you want something a little different than you currently have, just because you can't see the path to get there yet, or you're not sure about what it's gonna look like or where it's gonna be, doesn't mean that you can't say, you know what, I have hope that something's gonna be different. And that something could be, right, maybe it's a promotion, maybe it is getting a job in a new place, maybe you're wanting to change industries entirely and could do something else, start your own business.

Yeah, I did say that. And you could do that if you wanted to, right? So there's the hope answer. The third answer is like a very specific, like if you know this, you're like, I want X, I wanna be, senior VP in six months.

I want to be a leader of leaders in six months. I want to insert goal here that you know you've got. And if you feel that conviction, you have that clarity, more power to you. If you weren't there yet, consider this, this your invitation to give yourself a chance and permission to actually think about it.

Like this is your time to be out of the, you know, just getting the day done moment. where you get to truly give a gift to yourself and take care of you and think about you and what do you truly want. Everything that's happened in your life has been born out of two things, two things, right? For the most part, it comes down to these two things.

And the first one is an idea, a vision, a dream, a hope. The second one is language. You then, you say, ⁓ I think I want this to happen. And then you begin to tell people about it and share about it and shop the idea around.

Maybe you tell your friend, maybe you tell ⁓ your significant other, if you're lucky enough to have one. My teenage kids, I don't know, I guess I should try to give them a little more credit and start telling them about what my hopes and dreams are. Maybe that's something I need to work on for myself today. ⁓ but sharing it and starting to talk about it.

And then it's in that verbalization of this, think I want this, or I think I may wanna do that, where you can start to get access to more of that clarity around what does it start to look like? And what I found, I was listening to a podcast earlier today where this idea was brought up to me again, and I was like, ugh, this is what works. Sometimes when I'm trying to come up with ideas about what I want, I have a hard time articulating what I want. And what's worked for me oftentimes is to figure out what I don't want.

There's a, when you ask me what I don't want, that list is real. Like I can tell you all the things I don't want. I definitely don't want. And in that, making the list of the stuff that you don't want anymore, it suddenly gives permission for the things you do want to come forward.

It's like the opposite of whatever you don't want is probably what you do want. So think about it, like run an experiment, try it. There's no wrong answer. Okay, thinking about your career, what are the things that you don't want six months from now?

What are the things that you definitely don't want? the characteristic of a leader, the team that you work with, maybe the company that you work for. Compensation, what do you don't want? You want to go into the office?

You don't want to go in the office. Very controversial. People have varying opinions about that. You know what?

I kind of miss the office to some degree, but I'm also glad I don't have to physically be there every day. It's a choice for me to go to my office. Here's what you have though. This is what you do have.

Because you are a high performing winner. Like you are listening to this conversation because you've already done something that very few people do. Which is pursue a career in sales, in sales leadership. And you're a woman, okay?

You're already in rare air. There are so few of us. that are in this space. mean, if we're lucky that half the team is women who are selling, and then if you get into leadership, then the numbers start to really diminish.

Like it's maybe one in three leaders, sales leaders, as a woman. And then you can go up from there in terms of how few women are in this room. So you being in this conversation already has you at a different level. You're thinking about these things.

You're curious about them. You're willing to face them. You're not hiding it away or numbing it away with Netflix and scrolling, which, there's nothing wrong with that either. Some days that's good for me too.

When you choose to be in the conversation, that's when you can take action. And this is the mid of the year. You know what your territories look like. You know what your team looks like.

You know what the boss looks like. You can probably tell what the year is gonna go like for the rest of the year. And this is a chance to make a declaration. What do I want to have happen at the end of this year?

Right. And the back half is when all the decisions start to get made, all the planning starts to happen. So if you're in a moment where you recognize that you want something more, you want something else. And if that more conversation starts to look like, maybe you move up where you are because you like your company, or maybe you're not so super happy with your company and you're like, I gotta get out of this joint, right?

This is the perfect time. This is the perfect time to start laying the groundwork and start getting that work done. Because if anybody that you're talking to, if the company you're talking to or working with is in a calendar year or a slightly off calendar year format for their fiscal year, this is how the year goes. They're gonna get through with Q2, then Q3, They are going to begin planning.

Q4 is when the heavy duty planning starts. It's like in that sweet spot between September, October planning begins and then leaders who are usually ahead of it, especially talent planning wise, they're starting to kind of think about who might be ready to move up or how they might need to expand their teams, the leaders that they might need to add to their teams in that September, August timeframe. How far away is that? Not very far.

it's still enough time to do something if you want to take action. And so these are the moves that you can move forward that if you are ready and you know what you want, it's a chance to take stock. Where are you? Where do you want to be?

And if you don't know, give yourself a chance. That could be the outcome of today's conversation is that you give yourself a chance to actually think about it. Okay. So.

If you know what you really want and you know you have a vision of it, start to like jot it down, write it down somewhere. There's something powerful. There's behavioral science about writing a goal down or writing an objective down. And even if you don't know how you're going to get it, you don't know what's going to happen or how to get it done, put it out there.

Put it out there for yourself. Put it out there for the universe. And then start to think about, okay, all right, this is what I want. And just like you would plan a trip, right?

I'm here, I want to go there. How are you going to get there? What gaps do you have? Is there something that you think you need to work on?

Do need to get better at telling your story? Do you need to get better at maybe networking a little bit? Starting to have exploratory conversations, saying yes to some of those recruiter calls and not cringing at them and judging their whole situation before you even pick up the phone, right? Or answer a LinkedIn message or whatever, right?

Start to think about what might need to happen there. And don't freak out and be like, ⁓ my God, I gotta go redo my resume and blah. No, let's not go there yet. Let's get the destination figured out right now.

Because the resume is a, that's just like a window dressing, honey. What you need to know is where you want to be and start to think about your gap of how to get there, right? And then there are three actions that you can choose to take between now and the end of the year that will help progress you. Like you probably know some of the things you may need to do that need to be done.

in order to get you to this next place. Number one, it could be, hey, I just need to sit down and think about it. I gotta sit down and brainstorm. Where would I go?

What would I do? What would my company do look like in order to make it worth my while to move to a different company or to move up in the company, wherever that might be. Assuming you're in a moment where you're ready to do something like that, pick three of those actions. Get clarity, number one.

Number two, think about who you need to start talking to. Number three, start gathering the data for your stories that you're gonna tell and put these things in your calendar. Make an appointment for yourself. This is a gift to give yourself the chance to take control of your career and to really create a path forward.

You do not have to have it all perfectly figure out and have it perfectly baked right now. You're in planning zone. You're in figuring out mode. But this is the perfect time to take a minute and figure out where do you want to go from here?

So let's bring this home. That's the question. The question is, where do you want to be by the end of this year? And now that you know this answer, it's really going to inform you about what to do next.

If you found yourself in that spot where you're like totally blank, go and think about, what do I not want? What do I want less of? Like a start, stop, continue. Like definitely on the stop.

Stop with this. Stop these things from being in my life. Stop this from being in my job. Make that list of I don't want anymore.

And from the I don't want list, think about what's the opposite of whatever is on the I don't want list. and that will start to reveal what you do want. And from there, you can start to think, okay, how am I gonna get there? Get your actions and only pick three.

Three is enough. Three is a magic number for a reason. So pick three actions that you can take to start to move your career in the direction that you wanna be six months from now. So you are not in the position of sitting there.

in December and wondering what the hell happened to the year, where did the year go, and you haven't set yourself up to make progress in the direction that you want to go. If this episode helps you, take a second right now, forward it to a friend that you know is struggling. And I got to tell you, almost everybody I talked to is struggling. I've talked to over a hundred sales leaders and not a single one of them shows up and says, I have it all figured out.

None of them do. Founders and sales leaders alike, it doesn't matter who you are, what role you've got, nobody has it all figured out. And this kind of introspection, this kind of like, pause and giving yourself a chance to like look at what you want, start to think about how you're going to get there and give yourself a plan, a little bit of a plan and just start taking action. Do one thing on the list.

One thing. I think you're going to be surprised at the results that you'll produce for yourself just by one action alone. And if you want to go deeper, if you want more support, I offer a complimentary call to all listeners of this podcast to come join me on a one-on-one conversation, you and me. We will talk about your career.

We'll figure out what's been going on. We'll figure out where you want to go and start to map out a plan to get there together. One hour with me. Come find me at amyevanscoaching.

com forward slash work with me. Grab a time on the calendar. Giddy up. Let's go.

Thank you so much for being here. And thank you for investing in yourself today. I'll see you on the next episode of Women in Sales Leadership.