CHOOSING A DESTINATION IN THE JOURNEY OF YOUR CAREER (AND LIFE)

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  • Posted by: Koen Pouw

It was only 5 months ago when I made a very important decision to resign from my (in my own eyes) successful career at a Fortune 500 company. After 9 years of climbing the career ladder, being in a leadership role, I decided it was time for something else, a change.

Actively seeking big changes in life is not something that you do every day. I think we can all agree that change is a little scary, and not always wanted. Sometimes it is groundbreaking though, and we do need to take the road unknown. For me it was the distinct feeling there could be something else that I could or should be doing, an undefined purpose somewhere buried deep inside, and for it to come to the surface, I needed to make a change.

“Life is a journey, not a destination”. I always loved the phrase but do believe that on that journey we can and should make decisions on what destination, or at least what stops we should visit on the way. Sometimes the day to day of our hectic life, either career or personal (and very often the combination) has us on a high speed train to travel our journey. How often are we on board of the train knowing where it’s heading, let alone we have control over what stations the train should stop on the way. With my resignation, I made the choice to step out of the train and spend some time to figure out how I’m going to travel the next part of my own journey.

The most amazing thing happened, because after getting of the train, out of the confined space of a train cart, I was out in the world with so much space for new ideas, people and initiatives. My creativity and brain turned into overdrive and I started contemplating on what my journey could look like. Pretty soon it was obvious for me that my journey should be full of change, full of challenges and filled with personal growth. Also, I wanted to make sure that along the way I would want to see to enable growth in other people as well. My destination becomes the journey itself, and sometimes I’ll take a train, but sometimes I’ll go hiking or take the bike (after all, I’m Dutch).

Per January 1st 2019, I’m starting my own business, “Incrementum Consultancy & Coaching”. I’m hoping that my vision of enabling growth will touch people and organizations, so we are all developing ourselves continuously, a life full of learning. For sure it’s helping me grow already, but not just on the tangible skills required to set up a company. The true growth is in the intangible things related to my motivation, the passion to move forward, setting the bar at a level that pushes me forward to learn.

In the coming time, I will publish more blogs on how I believe we can define and enjoy our journeys while having control on our destination and stops on the way, how we can benefit from connecting to other people on our journey and make it even more interesting and powerful. I’ll touch on the more “intangible” parts of our personal career growth, our behaviors and competencies that we cannot google to find the immediate satisfaction of an answer.

I hope you will join me on my journey, let me know your thoughts in the comments or if you are interested in what I can do for you or your organization, please contact me through the website or LinkedIn.

Author: Koen Pouw

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