Awesome on Your Own Terms: Intentional Practices to Help You Stop Shoulding and Start Succeeding

By Nicole Lance

Ditch the doubt and drive your own success.  

 

If you're tired of letting everyone else call the shots for you, if you're worn out from trying to achieve someone else's version of success, and if you're straight up done letting all those "shoulds" shape your decisions, then it's time to become awesome on your own terms.

 

Because let's face it: you overgive and you feel undersatisfied. 

 

Awesome on Your Own Terms delivers tactical approaches to build a career you adore and cultivate a life full of joy.  

 

Chart your own path to professional and personal success so you can:

• Learn to initiate Courageous Conversations.
• Build an Army of Advocates to help you.
• Discover micro-strategies to make self-care easier.
• Build an adventure list to become more intentional. 
• Master ways to ditch the doubts that are holding you back.

It's your moment to finally press pause on trying to live up to someone else's definition of success and hit play on blazing your own trail to a life and career you love!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicole Lance
• Release date: Nov 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215553329

Book preview

Introduction

I threw them out. Every single pair of high heels I owned.

They all went into two trash bags I unceremoniously dumped in the garage. Okay, technically I was going to donate them, but for all intents and purposes, I was tossing those suckers out. Little did I know this seemingly minor decision about footwear would change my life!

Now, I’m not bagging on high heels, and I certainly hold no negative judgment against anyone who likes to wear them. A little bit of envy perhaps, and a healthy dose of awe, but no negative judgment. But for me, they’d become a symbol of something that just didn’t fit anymore. I’d always liked how they looked, and of course, at just under 5'4'', I’d appreciated the extra inches they gave me, even though I was still never at risk of towering over anybody.

The truth was, I didn’t want to wear them. I was much more comfortable in flats or even my Converse or Vans that I’d occasionally slip into during long afternoons and even longer evenings in the office. The day I tossed my high heels was—unbeknownst to me—one of my first acts of rebellion against the culture, mentors, media, and internalized beliefs that told me I had to do things a certain way if I was going to succeed.

I wanted to be awesome on my own terms.

In the decade-plus since heel-pocalypse, I’ve carved my own path to success in my work and in how I’ve lived my life. I’ve left a long-term career, switched industries multiple times, branded and rebranded my business, said farewell to mentors and found new coaches, tried things that didn’t work, found completely unexpected things that did, and I’ve done it all to align more fully with my authentic self and in a way that respected my own integrity.

This book captures some of the strategies I’ve used along the way. I’ve also included reflection questions throughout that are designed to help you get a bit deeper into your own understanding of the strategies and how you might want to apply them. If you’re looking to build a career and life that’s awesome on your own terms, this book’s for you.

Strategy 1

Be Intentional

The first strategy is the most fundamental and serves as a cornerstone for the other strategies. It seems deceptively simple, but it can lead to life-changing results: be intentional .

Seems easy, right? Maybe not so much. The concept manifested in my life a number of years ago when I was looking at what I wanted professionally. That led very quickly to an examination of what I wanted personally. I challenged myself to take a serious internal look and ask, Am I doing the work that needs to happen to get there?

I found what I was lacking was intentionality. I had great ideas and great desires, but I wasn’t doing the work. I wasn’t setting the appropriate framework. So, as I outlined these eleven strategies and looked at this one in the context of the other tactics, it was clear that without being intentional, none of the other strategies would be as effective. Establishing a strong foundation of intentionality and using that as the jumping-off point for doing the work to achieve the personal or professional growth you want is critical for your success.

Included in each chapter are strategy questions for you to work through and reflect on as you go through the book. These questions are designed to help you outline and develop your strategies for your own personal and professional success. Make sure you have a journal, notebook, or electronic document handy so you can capture your answers. Since this book is constructed to provide you context for working on what you’re currently pursuing, writing down your answers along the way serves the dual purpose of additional depth and reflection, as well as creating a memento of your journey. It’s also a great first step toward putting the strategy of being intentional into action!

The first two questions I’d like you to answer as you begin to think about what you want to achieve from this book are:

What area(s) of your professional life would you like to improve?

What area(s) of your personal life would you like to improve?

You don’t need long answers for these with lots of justification and explanation. A simple bullet-point list will do. The goal of these first two questions is to give you a little more direction for what you might want to work on so you can begin to build intentional strategies in those areas. You might find yourself crafting a list that has a lot of items on it or some items that might be simpler to address than others. I know I have a tendency to be the Queen of All the Things All at Once. I often start these lists and quickly get overwhelmed by how much I keep adding to them, and eventually I don’t start anything at all because there’s just too dang much on there.

You don’t need to work on everything that goes on the list. You can pick one item from each list, a couple from each list, or just a single item to get you started. All I ask is that you’re reasonable with yourself about your own capacity and commitment in terms of your ability to do some work in each area. It might even be a good strategy for you to identify one single area of improvement and use that as the basis for your initial work through this book. Think of this like setting a micro-goal. Instead of I’m going to the gym to work out for ninety minutes, maybe the goal is I’m going to go to the gym and open the front door, understanding that once that’s done, you’ll go inside and work out. Once you’ve made your way through the questions with a narrower focus, you can then go back and work through the questions again with a new area of emphasis.

Okay, back to the first question: What area(s) of your professional life would you like to improve? Depending on what’s going on in your work life when you picked up this book, this might be a specific situation you want to improve or a relationship you want to address. It might be a larger career goal, like getting a promotion. It might be gaining supervisory experience. It might be joining a board or a commission or a nonprofit outside of your current workplace. If you’re having trouble pinning it down, consider asking yourself these questions: What would I like to be different about my professional life right now? What professional accomplishment would I like to be celebrating a year from now?

You can also look at job descriptions of positions you’re interested in and identify skill sets you need to develop for future careers of your dreams. If you’re stress-prone, maybe pick something off your 2:00 a.m. list (that’s what I call the list of things that I wake up thinking about at 2:00 a.m.) and work through that. Whatever you select, please don’t overthink it or spend a lot of time trying to come up with something more important than whatever you first identify. The strategies outlined in this book are intended to become an operating framework for you as you become familiar with them, and you can easily apply them to other areas you want to improve down the road.

Now onto the second question: What area(s) of your personal life do you want to improve? Again, this doesn’t need to be some massive overhaul or an earth-shattering, revelatory exploration into turning your life upside down. It’s just about identifying something you would like to make better—whatever that means to you. It could be new friendships you want to build, fears you want to overcome, skills you want to develop. I’ve played with everything from learning new methods of being creative, like watercolor painting or drawing, to practicing new recipes in the kitchen so I could cook at home more. I’ve engaged these strategies to help me clean out my garage and declutter my house, and I’ve also explored more intangible things like working on my inherent tendency to say no to things at first.

The first year I started working with this strategy in the context of my personal life, I decided I wanted to defy the internal framework I had adopted somewhere in the first three decades of my life that said, I’m not a runner, so I challenged myself to run a half-marathon. Granted, I ran it very slowly, and even using the word run is pretty generous, but in the end, I accomplished it. I’d never run more than a couple of miles before, but I took the challenge seriously and used intentionality to stick to a training schedule that ultimately helped me accomplish my goal.

Own Your Days, Don’t Let Your Days Own You

As you think about what it means to be intentional in the area(s) you’ve identified, I want you to think about when you’ve owned your days and also times when your days have owned you. Allow me to explain.

Sometimes we get to the end of the day, week, month, or maybe even an entire year, and we look back and say, Whoa. Did I intentionally achieve anything I even intended to? What even happened to my time? How did I get here? It doesn’t mean that sometimes great things don’t just happen, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing when good things do just happen. I have always said there have been plenty of times I was successful in spite of myself, and that’s not a terrible thing! But as I once learned from a contractor I worked with early in my career, Hope is not a method. It’s not going to accelerate your level of professional or personal success.

So, what does that look like in terms of reaching your goals? I’d like to invite you into a moment of self-awareness. Grab your notebook and jot down a couple of responses for this next question:

What are some examples of when your days have owned you instead of the other way around?

At one point in my local government career, I found myself working in the budget office, and during budget season, it certainly didn’t feel like I had a whole lot of ownership over my days. I was just kind of being swept along with the tide of to-do items, council and commission meetings, community outreach meetings, and endless data entry. I survived it, of course, and things were fine, but at the end of it, I reflected back and saw that I had been just making it through. The work was not as high-value or as productive as it could have been, and there had been very high costs to me personally in terms of the stress from a busy season that ultimately took its toll on my health with some added pounds and insomnia. Some of my examples from that season of how my days were owning me included cutting out all exercise, sacrificing healthy meal planning, giving myself the green light for fast food more often than I know is good for me, and not setting any boundaries around time as it related to going in early, staying late, or even working on my days off. Yes, it was busy, but those behaviors weren’t mandatory by any means!

Question three—What are some examples of when your days have owned you instead of the other way around?—is designed to help invite you into some self-awareness, because that is the platform for being able to be intentional.

Choose to Engage

As you build on your self-awareness and focus your energy on increasing intentionality, one of the core concepts to explore is choosing to engage. When we look at owning our days instead of allowing our days to own us, we might find we have a tendency to fall victim to the flurry or the whirlwind of the days and weeks and months that seem to fly by in a blur. It’s not just that the days have owned us, but it’s that we haven’t engaged in the activity of all this time that’s passing us by. I’ll give you a minor example of how this shows up in the workplace.

I always laugh at this example because I was definitely the one doing this for many, many years. It’s a great demonstration of how we can experience something without ever even engaging in it. I’m talking about Donut Day.

Now, when I’m in a workplace and get a whiff of that fried dough and sugary aroma, I’m like,