Navigating 2024: The Roadmap to Continuous Learning and Career Growth (Episode 142)

Ready to level up your career and start planning for a successful 2024? Join me, Dr. Jason Wiggins, as I offer game-changing advice on setting a strong foundation for your future. We're going to explore the significance of inspiration, reflection, and high self-expectation when it comes to achieving career success. I'll share strategies for effective planning and preparation, making the most of available resources, and the importance of continuous learning. Your potential future greatness is waiting right around the corner.

I'm also beyond excited to connect with our faithful listeners from all corners of the globe. From Russia to Australia, England to the Middle East, your support has led us to be recognized as one of Feedspot's top 50 Millennial Discussing podcasts. As we draw closer to Thanksgiving, my heart is full of gratitude for all of you. Let me take you on a journey through my personal experiences, education, and how my family shaped the motivational speaker I am today. I hope to continue sharing my passion for motivation and inspiration with you in our upcoming episodes. Let's keep this exciting conversation going!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Hello friends, welcome to the Motivational Gen Z and Millennial Expert podcast. My name is Dr Jason Wiggins and I am your host, and it is great to be here today. It's the day before Thanksgiving here in the United States and I am excited about what we have to talk about today. But first I would like to share a few sentiments about what I'm thankful for. I am thankful for my family, my friends, the ability to speak to everybody within the geographic areas all around the world, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to be able to share my knowledge, my motivation, inspiring assets that I believe that I can help others with. And I'm excited for health and happiness. I believe one thing that we take for granted in life is the ability to be healthy, to live a lifestyle that is healthy and that also includes our mental state, our physical state and our chest overall well-being. So having the opportunity to be able to exercise, to eat well and to be able to share that with my son my son's my inspiration. He's seven years old and I can't think of anything better to share my life with, and him and my wife, who is terrific, and I'm very blessed. Again, it is just great to be here. I'm really thankful for the opportunity to be able to go to school, get a good education, get a PhD and utilize that PhD to provide a foundation that helps me have a platform to be able to write a book. I had a chance to write the book how to Understand, retain and Motivate Gen Y Leaders Millennial Leadership. If you'd like to check it out, it is available on Amazon, barnes, noble or any of your favorite platforms that you would like to purchase. So, again, it's great to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:33

We have a terrific podcast, as I mentioned, and, most important, I want to make sure I'm thankful for you, the viewers, the listeners, if you're listening on YouTube or via podcast, thank you. I mean, without listenership, I would just be talking to the air, and you know it's great if I can talk to the air, but I want to be able to hopefully share something that will inspire, motivate, educate, and that's what's really important to me. I do this because, at the end of the day, it's not about who I am, it's about what I can share. So let's get started. So, today, what I really want to talk about is the three important aspects to start thinking about as you build a foundation for 2024. And there are a series of three processes that involve steps, and we're going to talk about each of those succinctly and we're going to wrap it up and then, as we do that, I want you to think about. You know some of the things you can start thinking about for 2024, and being the close to the end of the year is number one. It's inspired to achieve greatness, and we're talking about certain aspects that you want to start thinking about, that you want in your career pursuits, maybe your next job, whatever it may be. The second part of that is start preparing for 2024. You know, start making a plan, building the foundation, and we're going to talk about all those individual steps as well. And then let's talk about expecting success. Remember what you breathe, what you plan, what you think you're going to do. You can do if you set the bar high. If you set the bar low and your family and friends have low expectations for you and you have low expectations for yourself, then there's a good chance that the outcome is also low. So those are the three processes we're going to talk about today Inspire to achieve greatness, start planning and preparing for 2024 and expecting greatness, and what that means.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Today is like any other day, if you haven't changed from what you did yesterday to what you did today. Now do you want to change? That's the question that is not always easy to answer. Many cases, yes, we want to change. We want to improve who we are, we want to improve our well-being. But to do that, we have to inspect what we expect, what we expect from ourself, meaning, inspect everything that you want out of your life and then expect that same result. So, inspire to achieve greatness. It's not just a cliche of words, it is about desire. What, what do you want in your next job? Is it money? Is it fame? Is it collaboration with others, work-life balance? Is it diversity, inclusion, equality, being open-minded within your career aspects? Is it about continuing to grow? These are the aspects of being able to inspire to achieve greatness. But to do that, that's the important part you have to reflect on as you go to the next process.

Speaker 1: 7:02

The next process is start preparing and planning for 2024. And what you want to do is first lay the foundation. What are your current tools? What are the resources you have available? What are you going to do to get the additional training? Are you currently working? Are you currently looking for another job, or are you currently out of work and developing new skills or planning a different career? Whatever it may be? First and foremost, we all have a set of tools that already exist from our previous working experiences. Therefore, you have a foundation. It's about maximizing what you have and building upon those tools that you already have and you want to establish your resources, so develop, establish and grow. Growth means continuing to learn, to learn new things. The great thing about learning, especially being Gen Z and Millennials, is you understand being either digital natives or growing up within the platforms of social media and continuous learning Is you have YouTube. Youtube can be a great resource to learn new things. There are software programs that you can learn new tools, get certifications. Those are key areas that you can continue to develop and learn and grow upon the resources you have and develop who you are.

Speaker 1: 8:56

Develop from the mental mindset. You have to think bigger. Sometimes it's easy just to go back into the doldrums of what we know best, what we're familiar with, what we're able to be in our previous life. What are we comfortable with? Well, you probably heard of, you know. Sometimes you have to step outside the box Again crochet but when you're inside the box. That's all you know. And if that's all you know, you're not going to expire to be great. And they say the same thing about baby boomers. Baby boomers don't want to step outside the box. That's not always true. That's not true for any generation, or it could be true to some of the individuals within the generation, but all traits are not indicative of a generation, and that's why it's important to ensure that you step outside the box and you look for what else is available out there, and to do that, you have to aspire greatness For me.

Speaker 1: 10:07

I always try to find ways to improve my skills, and the best way to do that is talk to others, find out what they think about who you are, how you do stuff well or maybe how you need to brush up on some of your current characteristics, tools or anything that you may not do to your peer satisfaction. And that's the same thing you always want I do. You always want to try to take an assessment of your tools. Just like anything, our tools get rusty over time. We need to brush up on it and elaborate on those tools, maybe even get new tools and find ways to improve our overall skill set. So part of the aspect of preparing for 2024, we talked about setting a foundation, establishing your resources. Develop who you are. If you don't know who you are, then Ask somebody that cares deeply about you. If that's your spouse, your sibling, your parents, your friend, whoever it may be, have them do an assessment of you. There's plenty of tools, again online, that will provide you with a benchmark of tools that you can help determine, or your important person in your life can help determine how you can improve.

Speaker 1: 11:44

And then, once you've done all that, you want to aspire greatness. Aspire. Greatness comes from within, as we talked about. Inspect what you expect. And then, once you've done that, once you've inspired to achieve greatness, once you've prepared for 2024 with all the foundations and resources, the tools, the brushing up on your skill sets, then it's time to start expecting success.

Speaker 1: 12:12

Success does not happen overnight. It's developed over time. For example, I'm in the process of continuing to develop my speaking career. It's not going to happen overnight. I have to continue to work at it. I have to brush up on the skills, I have to find ways to continue to motivate others to do better, to strive for more, if that's in the workplace or in the classroom, or just being a mentor or a coach or a consultant, whatever it may be. I want to utilize the foundation that I've developed over time, while brushing up on the tools that I need, to continue to reassess and evaluate and then utilize that to help others grow.

Speaker 1: 13:05

And that's the important part of leadership, in whatever capacity. It's not about what you can make of yourself. It's about what you can take and expand that on to others. So when you have a lead, this fine earth, you have a lasting legacy, and that lasting legacy is about what did you do for others, not what did you create for yourself. Remember, monetary value is not important. What is important is health, family, friends and the ability to have the opportunity to share with others what you've been able to accrue over time. So that's you know, and that's where you expect for success. Success is about sharing what you have and being able to identify the areas that you can promote for other people.

Speaker 1: 14:10

If you ask somebody that's 80 years old, what are they going to do? They're not going to talk about themselves. They're going to talk about what they've passed on to others, how they've been a mentor, how they've been able to help somebody else's life, and that is a great thing about being Gen Z and millennials is they care a lot more about the earth, what goes on the earth, people in general. It's just more indicative of what they've had to grow up in within the last 20 to 40 years, depending on the generation Generation X and baby boomers it was a little different. We were more about trying to satisfy our own existence versus looking at social diversity. Equality, I mean, it was about how can we survive, especially with the baby boomers and Gen X. Gen X was the latchkey kids. It means they grew up in single family homes where the parents were typically separated and Generation X had to defend for themselves. And now we have a new generation that's come on board recently, from 2010 to now is Generation Alpha, and I just read something the other day that 27% of Generation Alpha have been born into single parent homes. So it's definitely a different time of establishing a new generation.

Speaker 1: 15:56

But that leads me to being thankful, thankful again for everything that we've had. From this point on, what we can achieve, and remember what we talked about today the three processes inspiring to achieve greatness. Remember that's developing what you desire to achieve and then start preparing for 24. And that is talking about the steps, of the foundations and the resources and the tools that you have and can develop in order to the third part of the process, in order to expect success. Again, I could not be more happier, more thankful, and I wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving.

Speaker 1: 16:46

Wherever you may be in the world, we have some great listeners all across the world, from Russia to England to Canada I mean a lot of places within the Europe community and so in Australia, new Zealand, the Middle East. Therefore, we are seeing a lot of individuals all across the world that are excited about the motivational Gen Z and Millennial podcast, expert podcast, and I'd also like to make a note that this podcast was voted one of the top 50 Millennial Discussing podcasts across the world by Feedspot. So thank you to Feedspot for recognizing the hard work that we try to get out in content on our weekly episodes. So, again, thank you and I hope everybody has a terrific Thanksgiving and again, it's a pleasure and I look forward to talking to you next week. Enjoy the holiday, take care. Again, my name is Dr Jason Wiggins and I am the host of the motivational Gen Z and Millennial Expert podcast, so look forward to seeing you next time. Take care, bye, bye.