Exit Strategy

Do I have any exit strategy?

This the thought that has been floating through my head this week.  It has not been the best week a work (and yet it is only Wednesday today), but every time I consider the thought I remind myself that at this moment there is no back up plan in place. If things were to go horribly wrong as they did in 2009 there simply would be no plan but to start looking in the industry that I am in  - an industry which colloquially is contracting in the type of work I do.

Upon reflection this does not sound like a terribly astute strategy to me.

After considering the last week what I have come to realize is that one always needs an exit strategy - and what is more important, one needs an exit strategy as soon as one starts something new.

That sounds a little be ominous, even a bit like Chicken Little:  the concept that as soon as you begin a new job or career you are thinking about the time you will be leaving it may seem to some like always preparing for the sky to fall as soon as you walk out of the door.  But what painful experience has come to teach me over the years is that without such a strategy in place one  loses one's ability to act.

With no plan to leave and/or for what is next, one is less diligent about getting the experience and education one needs.  One becomes first comfortable with, then dependent upon, the way things currently are.  Comfortable ultimately leads to an unwillingness to change because the change becomes too difficult and too extreme to imagine - until one day one realizes that one is trapped where they are or with what they are doing.  In other words, we carefully remove the ability and responsibility of ourselves for our careers until we have put all of that into the hands of someone else, someone who can be less concerned about us and our lives and more concerned about how our lives should be supporting their plans and goals - even if it is not always in our best interests.

How does one change this?  This is the challenge.  The first obvious step is simply the realization of where one is and that one needs an exit strategy.  It can be very painful to realize where we are and how much authority over our lives we have ceded to others.

It will probably be alarming as well.  That is as it should be - if your house was on fire you should be alarmed! - but the one thing that cannot be done is to overreact by suddenly creating grandiose plans or deciding to make a change right now.  Like any successful action such things need to be planned and reviewed before they are acted on.

What to do in that plan?  That is the choice of the individual - of me, of you. Only we ourselves know the decisions we must make, the situation of our life, the things we want to do.

But in the flurry of individuality and specific plans let us not mistake the need for planning how we do it for the need to have a plan.  Things change - sometimes quicker than we can imagine and often in ways which we cannot control.  If we lack a exit strategy, something that guides us on where we are going through an experience to what the thing beyond it is, we will find ourselves in a combination of living in fear of change and being frustrated by wanting to be able to take action but having no idea what that action will be.