Follow your bend – 2

Advice which misplaces one’s abilities should be cautiously received. Advice, in all good faith, is no doubt a wonderful thing. Perhaps we all have time and again benefited from the advice at various points in our lives. We have also on more than a few occasions tried to advise those we care about with the pure motive of saving them from unnecessary loss or pain.

However, when we exaggerate our dependency on advice, we betray a gross weakness in our confidence. We risk becoming decision seekers than decision makers. We forget that what works pretty well for one person may not work sufficiently for another. Better still, there may be many ways of achieving the same result.

Some ways may be harder for us if we are not made up of the same material as those who recommend them for us.

Sometimes you will receive various contradicting pieces of advice from different people. More to your problem, you will place upon your shoulders another dilemma – you won’t know whose advice to follow. Sometimes it will prove more rewarding to settle for your personal judgments you can justify than what you can’t comprehend.

Whenever I am in a dilemma of whether or not to I should take advice, I remember my grandfather’s words;

Never believe easily what you cannot justify for yourself

You don’t necessarily have to do things like everyone else for you to succeed. We could possibly discover our own way of doing things better. However, we always follow the narrow conviction that we must follow others. This is called the art of following followers. The whole picture of life is painted a dull color. The tone of life is lowered and demoralized because we are out of place. It is much cheaper and valuable to get advice from an expert or consultant in a particular field or subject. People who have failed in what you are trying to do or who cannot do what you intend to do are not the best to take advice from; because they are likely demoralize your motivation.

No two people can experience life the same way.

As a general rule, advice will be more practical and effective only when your interests, feelings, abilities, values, ambition, and understanding are considered.

Thank you for reading this far, lol.

Please feel free to leave your comments below.

 

Follow your bend – 1

Your bend is your natural inclination. Every career is to a large extent based on particular natural abilities in an individual above and beyond the level of education. Whenever we pursue careers in which we are not naturally gifted, it shows in our results. People will directly without doubt judge a good teacher from a bad one, a high-quality engineer from a dreadful one, a superior tailor from an appalling one, an excellent doctor from a horrific one, a fine lawyer from a terrible one, etc.

It is regrettable nowadays that most people are engaging in careers they merely “know about”. How many times do we see people change from one line of work to another simply because someone has told them about it? Every one of us can learn about journalism, law, teaching, cookery, counseling, fashion designing, management, psychology, etc but that doesn’t automatically qualify us to be excellent at them.  Goldstein S. Truism rightly observed, “Success means only doing what you do well and letting someone else do the rest.”

At present, a person may graduate in more than five careers and still excel at none of the five. Let your bend act like your north star and guide your efforts.

I more often than not ask people the following questions when chatting about career building;

1. Are you at ease and proud of your current specializations or do you sense there could be other specializations you would excel better in?

2. When and why did you choose your current specialization?

3. Who made the choice of your current specializations? Was it you, your parent, friend, teacher or someone else?

When it comes to deciding what career to pursue for the rest of your life, you need to be the biggest stake holder in that choice. You are the one who will be proud or frustrated by your own results. You are mortgaging your entire life to a particular career and sacrificing all the rest. Like one speaker related; “The question of career choice is as important as choosing a marriage partner. One’s career sticks with them till death does them part.”

This is the more reason you should take a career that you are sure will bring out the smartest qualities in you. Let your career flow from your heart and you will enjoy each day of your work. Whenever we try to do something for which we aren’t fitted, we are not working along the line of our strength, but of our weakness.

Whenever we work very hard at things we are not good at, our determination, ambition, will power, self esteem and enthusiasm become demoralized; we do half work, substandard work, and catch at every excuse to idle away our time. We will lose confidence in ourselves, our self image will suffer ridicule and we will conclude more than ever that we are abnormal because we can’t accomplish what others do. Therein resides the nobler reason why you should strive to follow your bend.

I have posted a second article on “follow your bend -2” on this same blog. If you loved this one, just gone on and read the second.

So what has been your experience like finding work in your bend? Is there an idea from this article that helped or could help one out of a career dilemma? I would love to get feedback from you.  Share your suggestions and comments in the comments section below. I always endeavor to respond to feedback.