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In this episode, Connie covers step one of the five-part fluid career system, called Spotting the Trends. It’s all about identifying the challenges, threats, opportunities and potential to help you research and analyze where you are and where you want to go. She explains how it fits into the overall system and why it’s so critical to career success.

Transcript

Connie Steele: So spotting the trends. What does it mean to spot the trends?

What that means is being able to do a honestly somewhat thorough analysis on what's happening on a macro level, meaning what's happening in the market. What's happening in your industry. What's happening with competition, and subsequently;

What are the implications to you on a micro level and even understanding trends on a micro level, which means you. Y’know, what's working for you. What's not working for you. What are your strengths? What are your areas of development? And when you pull all this data and information together, it provides a foundation for you to then base strategic decisions off of, because you might have had a lot of thoughts really.

Based on your own reading observations, conversations with friends. But what this is doing is helping you do more rigorous analysis of potential opportunities, potential threats, potential strengths that you might see all of that then highlights areas in which you could define in the near term in which you can go in, but it also can help you chart out those opportunities that you could take in the longer term. 

Some of you may be familiar with that book who moved my cheese. So spotting the trends is all about understanding where your cheese is going to be moved.

So, it's important because it's the very first component in the system. The very reason that it should be grounded in data and information to understand what's really going on externally in the world, but also internally in you, because you need to map those two together to really find what fits and where you have those opportunities to then thrive.

And, you know, specific advice is that once you see the big picture, a lot of this is helping you gain that insight and understanding of what's happening. It's not, Oh, here's a piece of data. It is. This information is telling me one thing, but what does that now mean once you understand what it means then it's so what, what are the unintended or intended consequences?

For example, right? Technology has fundamentally changed the way that we work and live. How has technology impacted your specific role as a marketer? For example, you know, it's completely changed the way we reach out connect and influence others to look to buy products services way back when. It was TV.

It was radio. It was print. Those are the only mediums. Now you have a broad set of tools, broad set of mediums to reach anyone anywhere at any time. And so if all you ever did was understand how to do direct mail marketing. It's pretty much irrelevant. And if you didn't catch that and understand where those trends and spot that trends, the technology would upend the way you connect with people to get them to buy well.

Then you might be out of a job. So what we want you to do is do the same thing is see what's happening in the world. See what that ultimately means to you, because then you'll be better too. You'll be in a better position to anticipate what could happen. This will help you level up your thinking to really start to think strategically and proactively versus tactically and reactively.

And so once you do that, you can then map out the,  so what right. So what you then map these implications to specific actions you can take. And these actions don't have to be big. They can be small steps, then it's about rinsing and repeating, and it's a never ending.

Process, because what we're trying to do in this particular component, it's helping you build that habit of thinking strategically and connecting the dots to create momentum. And it is a, a information and insights exercise. You're going to be acquiring knowledge from all different places. And then what we want to do is help you realize that there is some interconnectivity between all of it.

So once you're able to build that skill of truly connecting the dots, then you're going to be able to see the white space opportunities for you or your company, or a general role of which then you can move in and fill that gap.

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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