Ever since I bought my new little Canon camera, I shoot many more photos than perhaps any other time in my life. Random ones, like the one on the left and deliberate ones like the one in yesterday’s post.

Recently, I have started to look at my business, Design Resumes, very differently. You could almost say that for the last 25+ years I have been running my business randomly. Not that I never did anything deliberately but life just kind of happened all around me and I was not executing a deliberate plan.

The business began as a sideline business in 1983 while I was a property manager.  It took a 9 month break when we transferred to Naperville, Illinois to open a new property for our development firm. And it resumed when that transfer didn’t work out. To bolster the career business, I took on non-profit management and support starting with Kiwanis in 1991. I was green, didn’t have a clear plan to help non-profits, I just evolved… sort of randomly.

In 1997, my journey with Wausau Whitewater began, a journey that was great and mostly random and just ended with my resignation on December 12. That, however, was deliberate. I finally realized my limitations. Chris Brogan captured this quite  well in his recent post, Never give up, no-give up which references Seth Godin’s book, The Dip. Though I now read Seth’s blog regularly, almost daily and even put his posts on my Facebook page for Design Resumes, The Dip is the only book I have ever owned by Seth despite an enormous library. All of his books are, however, on my Amazon wish list. I read The Dip shortly after I resigned from Kiwanis. It made sense. It was time to end.

With Wausau Whitewater, despite my passion for the people, the cause, the sport, the community, I saw the dip coming a few years before my final resignation. I saw that how the same passion would continue to drive my focus away from any deliberate development of my own business and me in general. I would always be pulled, stretched, much like a rubber band and I would always be trying to juggle two sides when I needed to figure out how to be more deliberate. The last board meeting was traumatic for me. As I looked around the room, I knew that I just could not do one more year. Everyone on the board was probably convinced I was mad. And they were right, I was mad. But not at them or the organization. I was mad at me. Mad that I wasn’t able to do more, balance more, juggle more. Then the light went on. Quoting Chris Brogan, “There is a right time to give up. There’s a right time to quit. The trick, and it is a HUGE trick, is knowing which is which.” This was the time for me. The right time.

Since then I have made more decisions, always using members of my team of trusted advisors (a blog post for the future) but they know who they are. Different advisors for different decisions.

1. One decision will impact my business and my marketing tremendously and take it in a whole new direction. That too is a blog post for the future. But it was a deliberate decision and one made with much investigation, thought, and prayer.
2. Another decision is to begin to build more awareness and connections with the career community. Even though I have many friends that are career professionals and have gotten to know them much better through social media, I have only met one personally. To remedy that, yesterday I registered for the Career Thought Leaders Conference and Symposium in Baltimore, MD on March 22 to 24. I am excited because I have not been to any of the career conferences before. Truthfully, most of them met at times when I would be needed either planning Wausau Whitewater’s season or executing it. If I had not resigned, I would have been writing Wausau Whitewater 2010 and rushing to meet the printer’s deadline around that time. Again this was a deliberate choice to register for this conference, to expand my career education, and to network with my colleagues.
3. I have for some time been exploring partnerships. It is common knowledge that I am one of Jason Alba’s Career Experts. It started with JibberJobber and has expanded to include many of his new ventures from the LinkedIn for Jobseekers DVD to his newest venture, Affordable Outplacement. Jason is one of my trusted advisors so I frequently talk with him about my decisions and get to hear about his new projects. During one of those interactions, he asked me if I would guest blog for Affordable Outplacement on a regular basis. This was a deliberate decision but a very quick one… Yes! The link to my first post is here. A little scary because I wasn’t sure what Jason was looking for and we have different blogging styles. But he’s given me the go ahead so you can look for me over there too.

You will see me being much more deliberate in 2010 and I am excited about the opportunities, many of which I am sure I am not even aware of yet. This is a new year, a new decade, a time for new beginnings. As you look at 2010, are you going to live it randomly or deliberately? Will you make choices to grow, to move on, perhaps to quit things that aren’t working to make room to make deliberate choices with your trusted advisors? Or are you going to just let life and your career happen?

For me, I choose deliberate. I lived random far too long.

Thoughts? Talk to me. I talk back!