EM 187 | Growing Your Career with a Growing Family

Welcome to Executive Minds! This week, Kevin Jennings sits down with David Farmer to discuss Growing Your Career with a Growing Family. As leaders, it’s important that we schedule a time to reflect and go inward so that we might have a renewed perspective and outlook. David dives into his growth process as a leader and shares all the things he wished he had known. It’s not just a matter of wondering how you grow your career, but rather how do you grow it in a way that you won’t regret? How do you grow your career in a way that is appropriate for what matters long-term? Hopefully, this discussion will help you analyze and right-size best practices and principles for your life in whatever particular season you may be in at the moment.

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Three Takeaways:

The Difference in Doing & Being

Making the mistake of focusing on doing and not being. The way that plays out is being proficient in hard skills, but not there with soft skills. In this way, you will get things done, but at the cost of relationships. Oftentimes, this failure of cultivating emotional intelligence and relational skills means that you’re not creating a healthy work culture. When you move from doing to being, then you’ll find yourself thinking about others more than yourself. It calls you to be intentional about developing people.

The Fallacy of “That’s What I’ll Do Later”

It’s never too early to give back. Oftentimes, we plan our “Rockefeller moments”, those times when we’ll be a philanthropist or change the world, for much later in life. The fact of the matter is that you’re never too young to help others. It’s never too early in your career to begin investing in other people. Do an audit of yourself and dial back some of that time you spend focusing on yourself. While it’s true that you shouldn’t neglect your needs so that you can be of good service to others, you should also seek out ways to assist others. We’re actually healthier as human beings when we get outside of ourselves and focus altruistically on developing others.

Imagine Your Future...

There’s enormous value in imagining what you want to be true in the future and then chipping away at it until it comes to fruition. Little by little, you are crafting your dream reality. It’s not about the sweeping changes that can be done at once, but rather the cumulative effect of developing the disciplines that will set you up for success. Do you want to volunteer? Do you want to be a lifelong learner? Do you want to learn finance and investments? Begin today by taking small steps in these areas. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be consistent. Make deposits in the things that matter today. Don’t make the mistake that you’ll do it “one day”, because that day will never come.