The Power of Self-Responsibility, Part 3

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: Many athletes have never conducted a well-organized job search on their own. Here are some of the new fundamentals that you will need to learn:

• What you want to do
• Where to start
• Whom to contact
• How to dress
• How to best network for job leads
• Which type of resume is best for your situation
• How to write winning resumes and letters
• Which Internet employment sites yield the best results
• How to answer and ask questions
• How a behavioral interview differs from a situational interview
• How to ask for the job
• Which follow-up methods work best
• How to negotiate salary in terms of employment

As a result of not being prepared to answer to these items, many athletes just stumble into the job market without much focus and make numerous mistakes along the way. It would be like going into a big game without ever having learned the rules of the sport.

The most effective job search methods require you to take self-responsibility for employment education and your future career. Very simply, what this means is that YOU—and only you—can put the proper priority on learning what it takes to launch and sustain a great career. 

The Power of Self-Responsibility, Part 2

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: As we age and acquire more information, our maturity level increases. Career maturity is an important aspect of your life and your self-responsibility. Career maturity has been defined as your ability to make appropriate career choices, including awareness of what is required to make a career decision and the degree to which your choices are both realistic and consistent over time.

Career maturity can also be defined as the extent to which you have planned for and acquired the necessary knowledge and skills to make intelligent, realistic career choices. Sadly, highly competitive athletes suffer from a low career maturity level as a result of the ever-increasing time commitments required by the competitive athletics in which they participate.

Athletes who start every game or who play the most minutes are oftentimes the ones who are not as prepared to learn the new skills required for an exceptionally great career. On the other hand, there are also many athletes who are very successful at not only playing their sport, but also taking self-responsibility for their career planning and career development. These people not only view themselves as talented athletes, but also as talented people. They have learned to parlay their sports success and life success into a meaningful new personal identity and are ready to compete off the playing field. They do not have tunnel vision and are ready to take self-responsibility!

The bottom line: Taking self-responsibility for learning effective career planning skills (skills you may not have thought about as important right now) will ultimately help you find careers and jobs that you truly enjoy. Along the way, you may still need to be lucky to land a great job or a rewarding career—but just like in sports, the coach was right when they explained to you that “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”

The Power of Self-Responsibility, Part 1

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: High school and college are primary involvements through which student-athletes learn to be self-responsible. Although your coaches and advisors will be watching your progress, no one will be there to monitor all your activities and decisions. You’ll have to be willing to take increasing amounts of responsibility for the consequences of your decisions and actions.

You also have to begin to take responsibility for motivating yourself. Although others can provide some external motivation (like coaches yelling, fans cheering, or red lights flashing in your rear view mirror), external motivators are usually less powerful than internal ones, and their impact tends to diminish when the motivators are no longer present. In turn, motivating yourself has a more lasting impact on your behavior and will lead to even greater persistence, conviction, and self-discipline—all things you will need as you embark on your career path.

If you’re reading this, you have probably already learned about self-responsibility and self-motivations, because no one is forcing you to read this chapter. You probably already know what works for you and what keeps your motivation strong through difficult or uncertain times. This means remaining interested in a task or having confidence when others doubt you and not letting others (or laziness) keep you from pursuing something that really interests you or is beneficial.

Beginning in college, you’ll have to take increasing amounts of responsibility for the consequences of your decisions and actions. Giving careful consideration to your interests, values, abilities, and personality style is a matter of self-responsibility, because no one else can truly make these assessments for you.

The Choices You Make Stay with You a Lifetime

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: As we discussed earlier, highly competitive athletes may experience a series of emotional, physical, social, and mental changes during a transition to CareerBall… changes that will have different intensity and impact depending on the individual. Coping mechanisms may include denial, isolation, substance abuse, or other negative behaviors. Retirement from sports is not easy, even if the athlete is ready. But a transition that is prepared for and welcomed, however, will usually generate less stress than one that is viewed negatively or approached poorly.

Career development is such an important aspect of life. Over the years, a ton of research has been conducted to explain the significance of career development. From the time we enter this world until the day we die, we will experience changes. Circumstances and unplanned events will force us to make informed (and some crazy) decisions about our career choices.

As you age, and at different stages throughout your life, there will be many factors that may contribute to and impact your career choices. These factors can fall into several categories including environmental, personal, family, financial, and health-related issues. Where you live, where you grew up, what your parents did for a living, who has influenced you, your money motivations, and physical capabilities are all in play when you make career choices.

During childhood, from a very early age, we began to identify skills, interests, likes, and dislikes. Pre-teens and teenagers begin preparing for their future by taking college preparatory courses in school and participating in educational and extracurricular programs like sports, car clubs, or drama. These experiences help you discover what you like to do, but it is difficult to interpret all of these experiences and nail your dream career 100 percent right from the start. It’s somewhat comforting to realize that throughout adulthood, we will change jobs and careers perhaps multiple times, relocate to new cities, and realize our dreams (or not) based on ever-changing personal factors and the career choices we make along the way.

Career development also involves being acutely aware of one’s personal goals, values, and work goals. It Involves continuously learning and applying new knowledge, taking advantage of opportunities, and taking risks in order to increase effectiveness and productivity on a personal level and for your organization.

Athletes are somewhat at a disadvantage to the non-athlete at the critical time of identifying the initial career signals. Why? Countless college athletes have asked me, ”Who has the time to worry about tomorrow when I’m head-down working out and competing and being the best I can be today!” I’ll try to be nice here, but this isn’t just being clueless… it’s pathologically dumb.

Your First Career

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: In many ways, sports are your first career. Some people have been lucky enough to just fall into the perfect job right as they finish their last minute of eligibility or leave their sport “for good.” But finding the right career need not depend solely on luck. Actively searching for the right career (often called a career plan) does require a great deal of preparation, planning, determination, and some luck. Career development is the processes of making good transition decisions in order to facilitate your dreams of a successful and rewarding career.

This is not to say that your participation in sports has been a waste of your time. For while you have been competing in athletics for most of your life, you’ve acquired many important skills and values that will serve you well in the future. It will serve you well to remember, though, that sports can be a dual-edged sword.

• On one side, sport can provide you with numerous opportunities to learn about yourself and others.
• On the other side, an exclusive commitment to sport can dominate your life so much that you won’t be prepared for any other activity.

You need to devote enormous amounts of time and energy to perfecting your athletic skills. If these efforts come at the expense of education or your preparation for other life activities, you may have nothing to turn to when you’re sport career ends.

It's a Scientific Fact

Inside the book and game of CareerBall: You should know a few things about being a highly competitive athlete that were not advertised in advance and are a downside of being an athlete in college.

First, researchers in sport psychology (the people who spend their lives studying these types of things), have conducted studies that support the notion that college athletes often compare unfavorably to non-athletes in terms of issues related to vocational and career development. Non-athletes have been found to score higher than athletes on measures of career maturity, vocational maturity, and the formulation of mature educational and career plans. These studies seem to indicate that college athletes experience less career development and maturity than non-athletes. Ouch!

These sports researchers also go on to introduce plausible reasoning why athletes compare unfavorably to non-athletes in early career development. One of the related factors that might influence an athlete’s level of career development is “athletic community,” which is defined as “the degree to which an individual identifies with the athlete role.” It appears that individuals who have a strong athletic identity place great importance on being involved in sport, which may actually hinder career development among athletes. More specifically, sports psychologists have hypothesized that athletes with a high athletic identity may engage in fewer exploratory behaviors, experience “identity foreclosure,” and perceive their “life role” as solely that of an athlete, which may inadvertently postpone career decisions.

Another plausible sports-related theory is that an "early life focus" on athletics is also a significant factor that inhibits career development. Athletes often develop a strong commitment to sports early in life through reinforcement from parents, coaches, and peers. Although a strong commitment to sports is certainly a desirable characteristic from an athletic point of view, many leading psychologists have theorized that such a strong commitment may be harmful in areas outside of sports, including career development.

What we do know as the truth today is that college athletes generally have more time constraints placed on them than non-athletes; for example, practice, training room time, road trips, film, study hall, nutrition, etc. Further, the life of a college athlete is often highly structured, with many important decisions made by others (e.g., coaches, academic coordinators, and team cultures). Taken together, these factors may cause the college athlete to feel that he or she is lacking in terms of tangible, practical, occupational information. Throw in the fact that most athletes never make professional ranks, and often a college sports commitment simply does not prepare an athlete for a career outside of athletics. As a result, college athletes lag behind their non-athlete peers in formulating career goals and plans.