Planned Happenstance Inventory and Making Your Own Career Luck from The Career Peer

Choices you make regarding the structure of your podcast may result in tradeoffs that leave you with unfinished business regarding content. For example, in a short-form podcast, you can’t cover all material that you would like to cover.

When it came to The Career Peer episode on planned happenstance, there were two questions that I absolutely love that we didn’t cover. As a quick overview, planned happenstance is this idea of creating and transforming unplanned events into learning opportunities. Specifically, individuals need to learn to take action that helps generate and find opportunities for career development.

However, the two questions that stayed with me after the episode — even though we didn’t cover the questions in the published content — apply beyond career development. Relevant to the idea of generating desirable chance events, the questions are:

  • How would your life change if you acted?

  • How would your life change if you did nothing?

I get excited when I come across simple, but extremely powerful and impactful questions. These questions shouldn’t become mantras, but as I think about times where I’m sound boarding with a CEO or executive about how to create meaningful organizational change, these questions are relatable. As a matter of fact, I envision these two questions as completely-related to three-step change models, demonstrating the implications of creating change vs. the implications of not creating change.

I also see the potential for a variation on these items, by adding the word “now” at the end of each question. Organizational change implies a time element, but not every change can be taken on at once. When working with a leader to build out a timeline, it’s important to analyze the impact of today (short-term) and tomorrow (long-term or longer-term.)

Here is a link to the episode and additional resources on The Career Peer website.

Below is the embedded audio, if you wish to listen without a click!

Enjoy!

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