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“Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup” is the first book to help professionals and entrepreneurs navigate the uncertain, post-pandemic world of work, while aligning personal purpose and professional advancement.

In this short-form series, Connie Steele shares tips from her #1 Amazon new release book, Building the Business of You. Today, Connie discusses the “career mashup,” a premier concept in the book and the key to the future of work. What is it and how can you use it to create your dream career?

Transcript

Connie Steele: What is a career mashup?  It's my term for the career of the future. And even the present in which workers are able to merge their breadth of skills, interests, passions, and experiences into a career that fits a person's whole self. And that hybrid, may be something that happens in a particular role or position in your current job.

Or maybe your future job, or it could be parallel pathing, multiple jobs at once. So what are some examples? Well, there are ones that are out there right now. J-Lo for example. She is a designer. She's a movie star. She's a singer, she's a dancer. She's a producer, she's an entrepreneur. But, while she started off as a dancer, she had moved into a lot of different areas and she's parallel pathing multiple things. 

And that defines everything that she is, but let's even find another example of somebody who is in her early twenties, her name's Catherine Bowman, and she is the world's youngest lymphedema researcher. 

And funny enough, even though she has this amazing role that’s advanced in being a researcher, she's also parallel pathing, being a medical student, she wants to be a doctor as well. So we have two different examples, but even people who are, for example, folks that I know even on my team. So I have two great folks in my team where not only are they marketers, but they're also writers.

They also are musicians. They also are guitarists. So no longer does one role really define you, but it's these multiple skills and interests that you're doing all at once that define the whole person. 

[00:03:17] So how did this idea come about? The main ideas came about from my own research analysis, interviews and observations of how work and subsequently job dynamics were changing over time.

But I was really also tying this to some bigger trends that I was seeing in products and services. And even the experiences that were happening. So first from a work perspective, you know there's been these major shifts that have been occurring in terms of what people want out of work and the approach that they are taking in order to find alignment between their interests and passions and even purpose.

And having chosen to leave the corporate world myself, I could also look at it for more, for more of an objective non-biased point of view to see what was really happening. And so you're seeing shifts from being more narrowed and specialized to hybrid work and broad tools from sequential processes to being more agile.

But all of that was leading up to even seeing things where on a product service and experience level, I was seeing different combinations of things that were happening. So in exercise, you see people combining yoga and hardcore cardio together. In food that everybody knows you've got fusion that's happening.

[00:04:39} So at the end of  the day the world of work has fundamentally changed. And I believe that many are struggling to find their place in it. We’re at an interesting time where we have multiple generations in the workplace, yet, with the largest generation, the millennial generation, they're really on the cusp of becoming that dominant group of business leaders, particularly in the next 10 years, because the oldest one right now is 39.

So inevitably, you're going to see major shifts in how people want to approach work from mindset and process perspective. And so that's going to impact everyone no matter where you're at and what age you're at. And so for me, why it's important is that once you understand what's happening in terms of what people want, then it becomes easier to adjust and adapt, across the board, to at the end of the day, align with what's gonna be best for all that are involved so that the company and the individual can reach their full potential. 

[00:05:45] So how will this book help you build your own career mashup?

At the end of the day, it helps you understand how to strategically align your interests, passionate goals in a way that helps you truly make for progress in achieving what you want, but it also will help you fundamentally build important business skills that you're going to inevitably use in your career no matter what you choose to do. 

You always have to have some plan to make your dreams happen. And the book is intended to help you build that foundation to do so. You know, my own career mashup is one of, a marketer, a strategist, a podcaster now, an author, a consultant entrepreneur, but I'm also a mom and I live all these roles dynamically and I've chosen to, because it fits all of me. 

So for those of you who have that breadth of interests and you want to be able to pull it all together into something that reflects all of you. So it's not about being left brain and it's not about being right brain. It's now about being whole brain. You can do that because the career of the future is something that you create. It's not something that you get. 

I know most people don't want to feel like they're put in a box anymore. I know I didn't. And the reality is that you can have that opportunity to leverage what may seem to be completely disparate interests and skills, into a hybrid that is incredibly valuable, unique and differentiated.

Not only that sets you apart, but it can be incredibly valuable for a company because let's face it, the world is changing rapidly and not everybody knows what's going to be needed in the future. But if you have this diversity of skills and thinking, you're going to be able to pivot and adjust faster and be able to bring all those, that knowledge to bear in a way that other people can't.

So that mashup is a way that helps you leverage all of you that creates more fulfillment, which then creates more traction, which then will create more impact.

Resources

• Connect with Connie on LinkedIn 

• Get Building the Business of You: A System to Align Passion and Potential Through Your Own Career Mashup

• Order the book on Amazon

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