Let’s talk about emotional adulthood. This concept was introduced to me by Brooke Castillo, and it has so many applications across all aspects of our lives.
Emotional adulthood, in general terms, means that we take complete responsibility for all of our feelings.
We have control over how we feel.
How empowering is that!?
Those feelings that we’re having, they were created by our thoughts. They were created by what we’ve decided something means. They were created by the story that we’ve told ourselves.
We can decide not to let something hurt our feelings.
This doesn’t mean that we’re passive when someone violates our boundaries or does something that we don’t like. What it does mean is that we get to choose how we react.
So how does this apply to our careers? Some of the connections are super obvious. Something a coworker says or does has no power to make us feel bad. That piece of feedback from our boss? It can just be business and we don’t have to make it mean something about us as a person.
It goes even further than that too. It means that we don’t expect anything to be handed to us in our careers. We are responsible for figuring out what our next step should be in our careers. No one else can do this for us.
Emotional adulthood in our careers also means that we take care of our careers by actively developing and nurturing relationships, working on our core competencies, documenting our career accomplishments, and staying organized with our tasks and goals!
In the next few weeks we’ll do deeper dives into strategies for how to get each one of these areas in your career in shape so that you’re ready to kick of 2019 with a solid base!