Your coworker stomps out of the room.  You look at the group and ask, “What did I say?”  It is not what you said that bothered someone… it is how you said it.  Hard skills are the measurable skills people engage in to perform their everyday tasks; soft skills are the attitudes and approach people take to communicating and accomplishing things.  Hard skills like counting, measuring, typing are trainable.  Soft skills are more engrained and take real effort to teach. 

Left or right?  Big Mac or Chalupa?  Snooze or not snooze?  Daily life is all choices.  Generally, people navigate without agonizing over decisions they’ve made or even that they did make a decision.  But occasionally, people are faced with red light situations: stop-and-think choices that will impact the direction of one (or many) lives.

While marriage, genetic testing for diseases and some spending decisions rank pretty high on the impact scale, our focus here is career planning, so we’ll keep our conversation around that.  Which brings to mind the first rule in career planning decision making:  this is not a genetic test, marriage or purchase of a Lamborghini.  A career planning mistake is rarely catastrophic.  When deciding where to go next in your career, keep your perspective in check.

Poet, activist, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes said, “I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.”  For a jazz poet and innovator like Hughes, there were surely any number of places he wished to go, and went.  He invites us to go, also.  The key phrase being, “… if you really want to go.”

Wanting to go further – in a career, in a relationship, in any ambition – is common.  Who doesn’t want to improve?  Who doesn’t want to tackle new challenges and grasp the satisfaction of hard work rewarded?  And yet, people remain in want mode and only in hindsight recognize the opportunities they’ve let slide by.

Newly engaged, and with her fiancé stationed halfway across the country in the Army, Sola wanted nothing more than to get out of Minnesota and get her life’s next chapter underway.  She consulted me for some resume help and my strongest message fell on deaf ears:  Don’t quit your job yet, I told her.  She sent out her resume, interviewed twice and promptly gave two weeks’ notice to quit her job.

You’ve shot yourself in the foot, I told her.  She gave notice on her apartment and started packing.  Sometimes people make mistakes.  Sometimes, so do I.  Sola was confident.  She knew there was a demand for her skills and she knew where she wanted to be.  My experience says that finding a job is easier when you have a job, and negotiating a better salary is easier when you have a salary.  Sola didn’t follow my direction, but she didn’t let me down, either.