OPTIMIZING YOUR GIFTS FOR CAREER SUCCESS: My Journey Leveraging Resilience, Mentorship, and Leadership Mien

By Ronald Edward Smiley

This book describes my unique journey that culminated in a dynamic and successful career as an engineering professional and senior executive working in the public service sector. It illuminates the importance of self-awareness in discovering one's innate gifts and talents and strengthening and optimizing them to achieve our goals. Further, it offers practical advice and lessons learned for aspiring new professionals, in both private-for-profit and nonprofit organizations, who are seeking career advancement in today's ever-changing and challenging work settings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798891570672

Book preview

OPTIMIZING YOUR GIFTS FOR CAREER SUCCESS

My Journey Leveraging Resilience, Mentorship, and Leadership Mien

Ronald Edward Smiley

Copyright © 2024 Ronald Edward Smiley

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89157-051-1 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89157-093-1 (hc)

ISBN 979-8-89157-067-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

To my dearly departed mother and father, who gave me relentless encouragement to always be curious and a continuous learner. A special thanks to my wife and partner in all things, Drexel, for providing me the quiet time needed as I worked on this writing project.

Additionally, I want to express my appreciation to Dr. Robert J. Warnagieris, a friend and former mentor, for his support.

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1

Journey toward Career Success

Chapter 2

Resilience

Resilience: Continuous Transformation in Adapting to Change

Chapter 3

Mentorship

Mentorship: Seeking and Utilizing Guidance from Those Who Care

Chapter 4

The Alchemy of Leadership Mien

Chapter 5

Reflections on an Arc of Service and Leadership

Chapter 6

Practical Advice for New Professionals

Chapter 7

Coda

Coda: Final Thoughts

Treasures from My Journey

Treasures from My Journey: 49 Nuggets of Experiential Learning and Wisdom

Appendix A

Model for Career Development Plan for Professionals

About the Author

To my dearly departed mother and father, who gave me relentless encouragement to always be curious and a continuous learner. A special thanks to my wife and partner in all things, Drexel, for providing me the quiet time needed as I worked on this writing project.

Additionally, I want to express my appreciation to Dr. Robert J. Warnagieris, a friend and former mentor, for his support.

Preface

Among other things, this book is intended to serve as a reminder that everyone has gifts or innate special talents. The challenge is recognizing what they are so they can be optimized and utilized to achieve great things no matter what those things may be.

In my case, an insatiable childhood curiosity and persistent quest for new knowledge brought me the gift of resilience. Through my experience as a protégé working under my father's sage guidance, the value of mentorship was inculcated as well as a penchant for mentoring and helping people. Moreover, I recognized early in my evolving managerial approach a unique style and ability to enhance followership in the roles I performed simply by leading with the attribute of mien.

Aside from the success I enjoyed career-wise, uncovering and leveraging these idiosyncratic gifts also permitted the fulfillment of my personal mission statement drafted at author Stephen Covey's workshop (i.e., The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) nearly forty years ago:

To celebrate and enjoy life in all its most fundamental dimensions of lifelong learning and personal growth; closeness to God and nature; a happy and meaningful marriage; nurturing and providing a family environment that ensures success for my children in life; a cadre of close personal friends; a comfortable lifestyle that permits me to be a contributor to society and my community; and the ability to awake every day remaining in my life to look in the mirror and respect myself and the values that shape my character.

Writing this book has also been part of the fulfillment of this mission statement and provides great satisfaction.

For readers who are new professionals (or expect to be one soon), establish your own frame of reference and give serious thought to the following questions: Do I know what my unique gifts are? And am I optimizing them to the fullest advantage in achieving my goals? As you begin your reading, the author wishes you bon voyage!

Ronald Edward Smiley, August 2023

Introduction

Your talent is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God.

—Leo Buscaglia, Author

This book describes the unique journey along a path my parents set for me at an early age that culminated in the dynamic and satisfying career that I had as a successful leader and executive in the military-industrial environment. It draws on my childhood and life experiences and nearly fifty years of public service working in various capacities for the Department of the Navy at locations extending from Washington, DC, on the East Coast to Southern California on the West Coast.

Further, it illuminates the importance of self-awareness in discovering one's innate gifts and talents and then leveraging those gifts as we seek to achieve our personal goals. These gifts come in many different forms and vary by individual. Moreover, as author Elizabeth Isaacs has succinctly stated, We are born with gifts and talents, which we discover over time through new experiences. Talents invigorate our lives, incite our passions, allowing our authenticity to shine.

I had a college fraternity friend, for example, who used his gift of humor to tear down walls of division and disagreement in our group to reveal the common aspirations that we all held and solidify our collective commitment to work together in performing community service. Albert Einstein used his genius-level intelligence and scientific talents to make ground-breaking discoveries that benefited humanity. And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used his gift of oratory to demonstrate the power of nonviolent protests to spur changes and reforms in our social justice system.

I became aware of several unique gifts that I had as I progressed forward in my career journey in the public sector. I further developed them as I moved up the career ladder and leveraged them to ultimately attain what I perceived was my penultimate north star for career achievement in public service: becoming an accomplished executive and leader of a large, complex, engineering organization!

Writing this book was motivated in part by a desire to develop a personal memoir for retrospective and self-reflection and, in part, to serve as a career advice manual that would be useful for new professionals. Taken as a whole, it tells my career story, highlights key leadership lessons learned, and offers insights concerning enabling factors that contributed to my success in achieving personal and professional goals.

To start, I grew up in a modest suburban neighborhood in the East End of Louisville, Kentucky (near the community where Muhammed Ali's family resided), along with two younger brothers, an older sister, and a younger sister. My father and mother were both hardworking and very devoted parents who worked in blue-collar industries that permitted them to be able to support our family's needs. Together, they established our moral compass for life as well as instilled in us foundational values that guided our family: love, tolerance, togetherness, being courteous and respectful, and being truthful and honest.

In reflecting on my childhood years as the eldest son, I recall that my parents always made me feel special when I barraged them with a constant flow of questions about the nature of things that garnered my attention. Their patience with me and my incessant curiosity was amazing and always reflected their love and encouragement for me to continue to learn. For example, my mother (before she passed away) often reminded me that as