You might be ready to take forward steps to advance your career but not quite sure where to start. Worse yet, you might have a bad case of “analysis paralysis” and be focusing all your energy on where you should be going or how you will get there while your career remains decidedly stuck in the same spot.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to stop planning or agonizing over where to begin and just start moving. Invest a few minutes reading this article, and then go forth and do something that takes your career a measurable step forward. It will be easier than you think. I promise.

A Career Direction Is Not Necessary
You might be surprised to learn that you don’t need to have a career plan or even a career direction to get started in building a career. Early in my career, I was opportunistic. I took advantage and made the most of job opportunities as they came up. For example, in my first job as an assistant editor, one of the senior editors went on a three-week vacation in the middle of a technology project we were working on together. I stepped up to take on some of his testing responsibilities, and a few months later, that effort landed me a job in QA.

In retrospect, I followed this pattern throughout my early career, and each experience helped get me where I am today. This approach eventually landed me in a middle management position, even though I never foresaw myself taking on this role and actually resisted the promotion at first.

Taking Small Steps Is Better than Analyzing Big Ones
Even if you have a clear career goal, you might be overwhelmed by its largeness. If you do want to become a manager, lead a project, or move up one level in your role, how do you get from where you are to where you want to be?

Remember that you do not need to achieve your goal in one giant step. In fact, it’s often preferable to take multiple steps. Just like agile practices are teaching us how to learn and succeed through small, incremental software releases, our careers can benefit from myriad small, achievable steps.

But what should the first step be? Take a look at your competencies and find one to improve. Analyze how your job provides value to the organization and seek out ways to increase that value. Find an opportunity to improve one practice or invest in one stakeholder relationship. Or, just do something new that feels right at the time.

We often worry about what the “right” step is and that fear convinces us to do nothing until we figure it out. If you are stuck and your career is stagnant, any step that gets you moving is the right step.

I’ve been through this, too. About three years ago, I left my full-time job (the middle management role) to decide what to do with my career. I spent three months in self-induced unemployment exploring possible career directions. Now this was valuable time, but at the end of the three months, I only had a partial answer to my question. I didn’t yet have a plan, but I knew I needed to go back and dig deep into business analysis.

I decided to get moving. I looked for contract work in business analysis and started the blog Bridging the Gap to share my ideas about being a business analyst. These two actions created all sorts of opportunities for me to grow in my career and this time, since I knew where I was generally headed, those opportunities aligned with my bigger career goals. That’s the amazing thing about small steps: They have a tendency to grow into big ones. When you start moving in a direction, you create new opportunities for yourself.

Be Sure to Deal with Fear First
As you consider a next step, you might become a bit nervous or anxious. Doing something we’ve never done before can make us uncomfortable. It feels risky. What if we fail? What if we look stupid? What if our boss reprimands us or, even worse, laughs at us?

If you experience thoughts like this, I challenge you to consider the alternative: What will happen if I do nothing?

Doing nothing, although it feels comfortable, can be riskier than doing something. In the past two years, I’ve met with several job seekers who are unexpectedly out of work after a long career in one job. With their heads in the sand, they dutifully worked away at that one job, assuming that the comfort they had would last. Unemployment is the worst kind of discomfort. If you do nothing to advance your career, you are likely to face this situation sometime in the future

Even if that something proves to be the wrong thing, it can still be valuable. For me, working on my first BA contract helped me learn that my big picture career plan would not focus on contracting and consulting as a BA. I may never have discovered this through analysis. With the experience, however, I saw it rather quickly.

Get Past the Fear
One technique to overcome this fear is suggested by Dale Carnegie in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. He suggests you envision the worst that can happen. By embracing the worst as the reality of your situation, you open up your creative juices and position yourself to improve upon the worst possible outcome.

Say you set a small goal to build a better relationship with a key project contributor with whom you’ve never really hit it off. You might decide to invite the person to coffee for an informal conversation; but the idea paralyzes you with fear. I’ve been there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve neglected to do the obvious thing to improve my situation because it seemed unnatural or scary. But if you take the perspective of imagining the worst, this feeling seems quite silly.

Honestly, what’s the worst that can happen if you invite someone to coffee? He could laugh at you, though that’s unlikely. He could tell you he doesn’t have the time. But even in these negative scenarios, you’ve acquired some new information. You know a bit more about your stakeholder’s priorities and where you stand, and you may have opened the door of the relationship just a small bit. Even the worst case scenario isn’t all that bad.

How can you go about improving upon the worst possible situation? Well, you could do a bit of research and discover what kind of breaks this person takes and then change your suggestion to fit his schedule. You could be sure to stop by and ask at the best possible time, when he is most likely to be receptive to your idea. You can smile and start the conversation by asking a question that you know will get a “yes” response, such as “Wow, this project sure has taken some unexpected turns, don’t you think?” Once you accept that you might be told no, you have nothing to lose and you open your mind to uncover ways to secure a positive response.

Stop Reading and Do Something!
So my charge to you today is to find one small step, overcome the fear, and take that first step. Don’t just talk about doing something or plan to do something—do something. By taking that step, you’ll begin to minimize the stress of career advancement and start moving your career forward.

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Move Your Career Forward