How Wonder Woman Can Help You Conquer Your Career Kryptonite

Well that’s a title unlike any other you’ve seen from me.

Am I confusing my superheroes? Perhaps. But please hear me out…

Let’s get past the image of Superman’s kryptonite and go straight to a much more relevant question: What is your kryptonite?  Specifically, what is your career kryptonite?

Career kryptonite is what sucks the life out of your career. In doing so, it sucks the power and capacity for immense success out of your career…and can even drain the life out of the rest of your life. Sometimes it happens painfully – or even undiscernibly – slowly, and sometimes it happens in one fell swoop.

I think, in many cases, our kryptonite is simply our own truth, truth that can be hard to face in the mirror. 

Think about it – really think about it – is there a truth about yourself or your career that you’ve been burying because you just have not had the will or the energy or the strength to face it?  If so, chances are that it’s sucking the life out of you and, in the process, preventing you from being the enormous success that you have the ability and capacity to be in your career.

Hard truths in our careers take many different forms and can include…

• A realization that you need to create distance with a colleague whom you have a friendship with but whose negative energy is being absorbed in your life and affecting your work
• The recognition that a business partner is not living up to the values of your organization and you are hurt and embarrassed by the behavior
• The fact that we failed someone, or our teams, or even our boss, and that by doing so we’ve failed ourselves
• That we simply don’t care. That we’ve become trapped in an organization that does not represent the best of ourselves and we no longer care
• Perhaps our worst truth – that we’re not giving the best of ourselves to our career, and the people around us, and we know it

How do we deal with these often harsh realizations? By facing the truth.  And this is where Wonder Woman can help.  Wonder Woman has that amazing “Lasso of Truth” – her “Golden Lasso.” Stuck in her lasso you simply can’t lie; speaking the truth is the only way to freedom.  And career freedom is a beautiful thing!  It allows us to…

• Finally stand up for the fact that it’s ok to want more and to expect more.  It’s ok to admit we need a job where we feel like a valued part of a team.  As a matter of fact, it’s actually liberating to say it, own it, and go after it!
• Tell colleagues that we need boundaries so that we don’t absorb their negative energy into our life and our work. 
• Recognize the immense power that the 3 words, “observe don’t absorb,” which I’ve chronicled here, can have on our career and even our state of happiness.
• Be open.  Looking at our truth and owning it – bringing it to the surface to finally deal with it – enables us to be open to all the magnificent opportunities in life to make amends, find new career paths, open freshly painted doors and windows and start anew.

So, when it comes to conquering your career kryptonite I say it’s Wonder Woman to the rescue…a powerful female character whose roots come from Greek mythology.  After all, on a blog “with a twist of goddess power,” you wouldn’t expect Superman to have all the answers, now would you…?! 🙂

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Dear readers – I really hate to ask you this but would you be willing to VOTE for my “Conquer Your Kryptonite” presentation with Judy Martin at the SxSW conference event?  In other words, you’d be voting to recommend to the conference organizers that they include the presentation that Judy and I would like to give in the conference lineup. 

Judy and I attended SOBCon 2010 together in early May and recognized soon afterward that we are “soul sisters” in many ways – on very similar journeys right now in our lives. We decided to take our mutual insights and create a proposal for a presentation that’s named “Conquer Your Kryptonite: Superpowers Fueling Kick-Ass Business Deals!”  One of the Superpowers is “Knowing and Owning Your Truth – What You Bring to the Negotiating Table”…!  I obviously adapted that thought a bit for this post – making it a bit more personal and reflective of what some of those close to me are going through right now.

Judy and I would be honored if you’d go here and cast your vote that tells the SxSW conference team to include us in their lineup.  Presentations that don’t get a lot of votes are not as likely to be selected for the conference.  Thank you for considering it – it means a lot to me! I know I have the best readers on the planet!

I also have a proposal that’s more “social media” related with Connie Reece entitled, “Resources Roulette: Winning Social Strategies for Shrinking Budgets” that you can vote for here – thank you so much for considering it!

Again – so sorry that we have to ask for votes, just having you all as readers is what means so much to me!

Amazing photo is Artwork for the cover of Wonder Woman vol. 2, 186 (Dec, 2002).Prominently featuring the Lasso of Truth. Art by Adam Hughes. Via Wikipedia.