Ever feel like your career path was not ‘the norm’ and its holding you back?  I used to feel that way too until one simple change opened the doors to the biggest and most rewarding roles of my career.  What I used to think of as a weakness actually turned out to be a HUGE advantage!  Here’s how I changed my perspective, fixed my resume, and started advancing rapidly!

Non-Traditional Career Path

In my early career, I bounced around between jobs and industries trying to figure out what I was meant to do.  There was a financial planning phase for a few years, then some retail followed by some corporate sales, contract negotiation, a brief layover in IT project management, and then another total career shift into analytics, finance, and healthcare.  I had done a lot in the first decade of my working life, but never really found a clear career path… and my resume showed it. 

I spent years believing I wasn’t qualified for advancement. Hundreds of job postings for great roles requiring 5, 10, and even 15 years of experience in a single area reinforced my concern. Had I blown it? I briefly considered going back to school and starting over before deciding to seek advice from a professional. There had to be a way to grow instead of continually starting over in different industries.

One Simple Change

I started working with a career coach and confessed to feeling unqualified for any role above entry-level.  Then the most amazing conversation ensued. We reframed how I was viewing my experience when my coach asked, “How could all that diverse experience actually be an advantage? What value did you take with you?”  Ha!  What an interesting question. 

• Sales and contracting taught me how to interact with people, listen to their needs, overcome their objections, and be persuasive. 
• Analytics taught me the value of information and how to dig through a mountain of it to find the gem that becomes your strategy. 
• Finance taught me how money works and that I need to make sure people are at ease about it when I make a proposal at work.
• Project management kept me extremely organized and using tricks to ensure work was completed ahead of schedule

Once I stopped telling myself how horrible my experience was, I realized I was successfully using skills from all of my prior roles pretty regularly. It changed my thinking and boosted my confidence.

A career-changing moment occurred soon after. I was a low-level analyst at the time when a particularly angry VP (we’ll call him Ken) was about to commit career-suicide with a really bad idea. The analysis I did for him could help get things back on track, but he didn’t want to hear it. My fear of making a career-ending move vanished and I allowed my past experience to take over. “Ken, my job is not to sugarcoat the facts and tell you everything is ok when it’s not.  I’ll move mountains to support you and ensure you’re successful, but I’ll also push you out of the way if you are about to step in front of a bus.” It was a gamble that paid off! We fixed the proposal, Ken looked like a rockstar, and I was in a VP’s trusted inner circle from then on.

Most importantly, that moment was a huge boost to my confidence and my career.  I could be direct with executives and not only survive it… THEY ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT!  I was an analyst at the time, but it was my sales experience from 5 jobs back that taught me how to challenge the boss in a way that gained his trust.  I rewrote my resume to highlight the advantages of my broad skillsets and diverse experience (instead of hiding them) and started applying for new roles and promotions. My career took off and it finally sank in that my mindset was the only thing that was ever holding me back.

Related Article: 10 ways Mentally Strong People Build Powerful Mindsets

The Power of Mindset

Your mindset is your collection of beliefs and assumptions that influence your actions, thoughts, and views. The right mindset is a critical component to success in business.  How are you viewing yourself right now in your career?

• It is possible your current situation is hopeless -BUT- it’s also very possible are you just in need of guidance, a change, or an opportunity.
• It is possible you are an unqualified imposter -BUT- it’s also very possible you are vastly more qualified than you give yourself credit for.
• It is possible you are powerless in your current situation -BUT- it’s also very possible you are extremely powerful and just haven’t realized it yet.

If your results aren’t matching your talents and inner amazingness, it’s time to start asking why.  Does your resume say that you are basically a secret agent/superhero/titan of your industry? Or does it show that you haven’t quite figured out how to convey the value of your experience to potential employers?  Shift your mindset and rewrite your resume and life experiences from a new perspective that serves you better. 

Think about those aspects of yourself that don’t conform to the typical business world. How might they make you unique in a good way? Look back at the jobs that don’t seem to fit the career path you want. What skills and experiences did you gain that should be on your resume? Think about the biggest failure of your career. How did it mold you into the vastly more awesome version of yourself that you are today?  Maybe it wasn’t such a failure after all.

Mindset is everything.  Reframing your past and changing your thought process is not the most obvious method of fixing your resume or advancing your career, but it is powerful.  I’m enormously grateful to my coach that helped me make this mental upgrade which opened the door to an amazing career.  You can make the same change. Once you’ve made the mental shift, you will fly past your peers as your career takes off!