Today’s idea is more about what doesn’t work than what does. James Sexton has handled over 1000 divorce cases. He shares everything he’s learned in his book, How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Staying Together. A key highlight from the book applies to much more than just marriage.
I have learned, over and over, that marriages and other committed relationships fail for two fundamental reasons.
1. You don’t know what you want.
2. You can’t express what you want.
End of story.
Not knowing what you want or how to express what you want is destructive to marriages. This is also true for other relationships like Company-Employee, Manager-Employee, Parent-Child, School-Parent-Student, Friend-Friend, and even your relationship with yourself.
One of my favorite questions to ask people is, “What do you really want?” Being able to answer that question for yourself and then express that answer to others will make you more happy and successful.
Career Development is a hard conversation. Often, we either don’t know what we want or don’t feel comfortable expressing what we want to our manager. And that assumes the conversation even happens at all. Trying to make a single conversation better can be tough. And scaling good career conversations at a company is particularly challenging.
So how can you actually get better at this?
Taking time to reflect on what matters to you and having a safe way to talk about it can make this happen more frequently and with better results.