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June 2005 Managing Your Most Valuable Asset Michael P. Haubrich, CFP |
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What would you consider to be your most valuable asset?
Typical things that come to mind may include your home, savings and pension.
Given the number of working years left before traditional retirement, I would
say that your career should be listed among your most valuable assets. Look at it this way, if you're in your mid-thirties you've
still got many years of working life remaining before traditional retirement.
Even if you are in your early fifties, your career could represent more value
than the total of all your financial assets. Your career is the engine that
drives your financial machine. It produces the income and provides you with
the resources to invest, save, and build toward your retirement. If you consider your "career asset" as the sum
total of your time plus talent plus potential, it should be managed to
maximize its long-term return just as you would manage other asset returns.
Your career asset return is made up of not only the current salary you are
paid, but the satisfaction you receive by doing what really energizes you.
That is much harder to quantify but no less of an important consideration in
managing your career asset. By not balancing your work and life objectives
you run the risk of suffering job burnout -- reduced productivity, stress
related health issues and a lessening number of work years prior to
retirement. By taking steps to ensure an appropriate work-life
balance, you're helping to manage this asset in a way that will maximize your
investment in your time, your talent, and your
potential. Managing the balance will
also help ensure that you remain in the work force longer than if this
delicate balance is not maintained. So how do you manage your work-life balance to protect
your career asset? In her book, Work+Life, author Cali Williams
Yost, outlines a three-step process that constantly moves you toward optimum
balance. The process she advocates involves a combination of introspection,
planning, and action. Backed by case histories and anecdotal stories designed
to encourage and motivate you to achieving balance, Yost also includes
exercises designed to stretch your thinking about your career as an asset. Step one serves to challenge the way we think about work
and life and dispel some of the common misconceptions we hold as fact such as
believing that only our managers or human resources has the ability to
resolve work-life conflicts. In fact, individuals willing to work through the
process are the best positioned to create a work-life fit that will help
ensure long-term satisfaction and sustainability. In step two, Yost focuses on identifying real or perceived
roadblocks that can derail a person from achieving productive balance. Fear,
resistance to change, and in-the-box thinking are all factors that have the
potential to prevent an individual from effectively managing their career
asset. In Work+Life, Yost shares stories of others
who have dealt with these challenges and offers suggestions for how to
overcome them. After doing a lot of the self-work in the earlier steps,
step three centers on creating the actual roadmap and business case to help
you manage your career in a way that this asset provides the work-life
balance you need to be the most productive.
The outcome of achieving work-life balance doesn't mean
that you have to leave your current job and sacrifice everything you've
worked for to-date. It's important to recognizing your career as an asset in
your life portfolio. Effectively managing it may ultimately mean changing
jobs, but there are many options and alternatives to such a drastic step that
could help you achieve the balance you need and allow you to work-and
earn-with higher levels of satisfaction for a longer period of time than you
would otherwise. Michael P. Haubrich, CFP
is President of Financial Service Group, Inc., a Registered Investment
Advisory Firm in |