Job security.

I am sure that all of you reading this blog is far too sensible to follow the lunacy career advice that you hear all the time from self-appointed well-being experts. You know the type just as well as I do; the individuals only interested in expanding their global audience of gullible followers, slurping on their caramel-infused mocha coffee, their fingers dancing across their keyboards urgently writing down whatever drivel has entered into their heads.

And before any of you ask, I drink a black americano with one sugar. And I am not writing these blogs just to create a following.

Dreams

We all have them. That skiing chalet, an island in the Caribbean, an annual holiday to Mauritius. Dreams are important.

But they are also dangerous.

Unchecked, they can lead to rash decisions, lead us to places where our rational selves would not dare to tread, bringing a danger to those two words I which I started this blog with.

Regular readers will no doubt have noticed a running theme in my blogs by now. As Kipling wrote, don't make dreams your master. I really do not want to hurt any egos, but if you're reading any blog about careers, then I bet your dream of being a Premier League footballer, an acter or a singer in a girl band probably didn't come true.

I know of a chap in his thirties who gave up his career in the police to become an actor. After a couple of years of drama school and aesthetics (honestly), he returned to the police force having failed to secure an agent.

I am sorry, I really do not want to sound like I am gloating. Fair play to him for trying, and who knows, with a lucky break he may have made it. But a sense of realism is important. Just think, what were the chances that he was going to make it to Hollywood?

Exactly.

There is a better word to use for all of us who have reached a certain age, and that word is "aspirations."

I would like every single one of you to do something.

I would like you to stop reading for 30 seconds. You see, how many mocha coffee experts will tell you to do that?

During these 30 seconds, I would like you all to close your eyes and think about your aspirations.

Where do you want to be in 5, 10 or 15 years from now? Is it a professional goal? A personal achievement? Is it family?

This goes beyond "I want to provide for my family." We take that for a given, but what we are trying to ascertain here is those things that only you want, those things that are personal to only you and your immediate family.

Then, ask a second question; "am I on course or do I need a change or an incentive to achieve this?"

To provide you with confidence in my advice, let me tell you my aspirations.

I would like to buy a plot of land and build a Huf Haus within the next three years and start spending 6 months of the year living in Europe by the time I reach my late 40s. A villa in the mountains of Italy, a farmhouse in Provence or a skiing chalet in Austria, my wife and I are not yet sure.

It is with regret that I have had to acknowledge that my career in the SAS, whilst captaining the England rugby team to world cup glory and being the lead singer in an international rock band are well and truly over.

The difference between these two sets of ideas?

One is attainable, the other is a fantasy.

I know that with some hard work, application and some good fortune, my aspirations are achievable. In fact, certainly the two out of the three are more than attainable and are achieved by thousands of professionals every year.

What I have done, and what I would urge all of you to do, is that I have kept my aspirations sensible.

The army, rugby and music will now never happen, except in my mind.

So, we have established what each of your aspirations are. The question now is, how do you achieve this?

Unfortunately, this is the difficult question, and I am going to be honest with my opinion.

I don't believe that there is actually just one answer.

What there are, are a series of questions which you can ask yourself and which only you will know the answer to. They change from individual to individual, but below are a selection of the questions you should be asking:

Is my professional life on course to provide my personal aspirations?

Is there anything in my career holding me back?

Am I still as motivated now than I was five years, even one year ago?

Does anything to change in what I am doing to achieve my aspirations?

Could I do something differently?

Not only; are there opportunities out there that I do not know about? But also; do I need some help in identifying these opportunities?

The problem I have advising you all is that it is virtually impossible to provide general advice because of the individualistic nature of the answers. They will change from reader to reader.

Please feel free to contact me, I would be delighted to have a chat with you about this. In fact, I think that this is the first time in 5 blogs that I have asked you to do this, which I hope demonstrates the sincerity in my offer.

We're all intelligent professionals, we know what the questions are that need to be asked and you do not need me patronising you.

But I have come to realise that in some point in our professional lives, we need all someone (a bit like a guardian angel) to objectively look at where we are doing and where we are going, and to provide that assistance to you on your journey.

It is even better if this person is hitherto unknown to you, who is therefore going to be prejudiced by any historical influence on your career to date.

We have established your aspirations, now is the time to discuss job security.

Job security goes beyond ensuring that you have a job to return to after the weekend, important thought this is.

A friend was once a senior executive in one of the world's largest coffee chains. Despite the benefits which came with working for a US corporate giant, there was 1 massive downside; her job security. Due to economic pressures, all the senior staff were put on immediate redundancy warnings. She would leave the office on a Friday evening, not knowing if she and her team would be returning on Monday morning.

As I have been using words like "was," "once," "were" and "redundancy warning." I am sure you can all work out what happened one Friday afternoon.

That is one level of job security, but I want to discuss going beyond the knowledge that you have a safe income stream.

I want to go beyond the nine to five.

For me, job security is about the impact your job is having on your life, your aspirations and your ambition.

Are you secure in the knowledge that your job is providing with the security of knowledge you need to know that you are on course to achieving your aspirations?

Job security is about culture, what journey it is taking you and how you are getting there.

You may have certainty of employment but do you remain motivated? Does your job provide you with the challenges required to stay fresh and to achieve your full potential?

Most importantly, does your current job have that clear promotion trajectory that you know (in your heart of hearts) that you are on course for that partnership, that board membership, that managerial role that will fulfil your ambition?

For me, that is job security; the security that your job can lead you to achieve, not just provide employment.

Remember the Formula 1 drivers who seek challenges elsewhere, who leave a previously secure position in order to remotivate themselves by seeking new challenges? Let's pick that up in a couple of years to see how Lewis Hamilton's move to Ferrari has transpired...

A key part to job security is having the confidence to say to someone, "I think I'm stuck in a rut, and I know after 10 years I now lack that impetus to go out to achieve at my potential. What can I do?"

The answer is to take stock, ask those types of questions we have been asking throughout this blog, reflect and then action it.

Action is vital, we can all think that we know the answers, and whilst no one knows us better than ourselves, sometimes we need that other person to help steer us in the right direction.

What should this person do?

Listening, unsurprisingly, is vital but so too is an understanding of jobs, the corporate world and your profession.

Where should this journey take you? To a job that keeps you motivated, challenged, competitive, hungry for success.

Seek out the lateral move, hunt for that promotion at your current firm. Network, find that client, that new bit of business for your firm that illustrates to your senior partners that you are driven to succeed.

Revitalize, reenergize and, to misquote Austin Powers, "find your mojo."

That is why the questions we discussed earlier are of such importance. They provide the key to unlock the reasons why you may be sluggish, what is important now is to use the answers you provide as a catalyst to bring about positive change.

Positive change to drive you to the next level of success.

To an understanding of what is required from you to push yourself that bit further to secure your aspirations.

Einstein wrote about the power of dreams and it would be the height of arrogance for me to disagree with him. We all have them, but we should not let them define us, to take us over to such an extent that we end up making a regretful error, like the policeman I spoke about at the start of this blog.

Rather than dreams, we should be striving for attainable aspirations and use them to work out how we can we help strengthen our jobs for our future benefit.

Strengthen your job security by finding that new challenge, that lateral move which can remotivate and regalvanise a career.

For 2024, use the power of your aspirations to secure a job to lead you where you want to be.

I'm afraid that I have to go now, chaps

My phone is ringing.

Could it be Steve Borthwick, Hereford or the manager of The Rolling Stones?