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Finding personal value can be an engine of your success. Steven, I said, I just pulled up a home in Nashville, Tennessee, that would be a monstrous mansion for what you paid for your home in that city. I would then live in Nashville, Tennessee, and not New York City. So thanks but no thanks! For him, the personal happiness he and his husband find in living in that exact place is the priority. Seattle is a fantastic city. It has great food, great culture, music, restaurants, and shops. It offers proximity to beautiful outdoor locations. It has all sorts of things I love. But I didn’t know a soul there. And I guess I never realized the extent to which having those people in my past life generated an energy, optimism, and excitement that powered a lot of my overall success and happiness. There just wasn’t enough of it for me in Seattle. Maybe even negative! Not finding it can have just the opposite effect. 
No More Tears
If a location doesn’t ensure that you can find and enjoy the things that are important to you, then no amount of money and not even the world’s most perfect job will bring you the satisfaction you are looking for. It’s been a chance to rethink and possibly reposition yourself in terms of a place to live. Whether you stay or relocate, make sure it’s those personal priorities that shape where you choose to live. And once you’ve done that, it’s time to talk about a new job and, specifically, how to streamline the hiring process. Once you know what counts to you, your sense of excitement, your optimism, and your energy will naturally fire up what you do each day. Being an overcommitted and overly loyal employee can come back to bite you. One mishap and you could be out the door. You’ll need to identify the financial, professional, and personal value of where you want to live. Crystalizing the Core Pillars of Your Career! By now, it’s normal to feel like you’re kicking your own ass. I have even asked you to rethink every aspect of the place you call home and, more specifically, to consider whether the fact that you call it home even makes any sense! By now, you’ve done a good bit of reversing, retracing, and rewiring. And hopefully you’ve gone in hard on yourself, given the third degree to your priorities, putting them through the most uncompromising kind of grilling to identify the ones that stand up to every challenge. What are your options for a restart that will get you to the future you seek, one built on what you have determined are the pillars of a fulfilling career, by which I mean a career that fulfills your priorities? The only way to see those options is through the lens of how you define career success. Fear Is the Key
No other standard makes sense. If the course of action you take doesn’t begin in what you now know defines career success for you, it won’t be worth the journey. It’s a grind, but if you don’t put the work in now, you will always look back at your career wondering what if? or worse, if only . We’ll do this one pillar at a time. You know which pillar is least important to you. Rank the ones in the middle as well so that you have a full appraisal of just how valuable each pillar is to the fulfillment of your career ideal. That will be the basis of a plan for lining up your options in the right order as well. It is the easiest career determinant to fix and requires the least amount of time. The fix is easy, and it’s one you can take on right now. I love the definitions of the word compensation. I’m told that if you go back to the original Latin, it literally means to weigh two things together, one against the other. So, compensation is something given to make up for something else. Forgive Yourself
It’s the monetary reward you get if you’ve been injured in an accident or, of course, the monetary value paid to us employees in exchange for the work we do. Based on earnings potential, your best option may be to just get yourself a raise. It will take some work. You will need to know how to quantify your worth, and you will need to know how to ask and advocate effectively for what you want. When I was first being considered for the Bachelor role, I was told it was between Blake Horstmann, Colton Underwood, and me. I knew that this was something I really wanted to do. I obviously knew that was what I was offered, but how did I learn the others were offered that as well? I asked them, and they told me and even showed me the contract. For all sorts of reasons that I bet you can understand, it was the position that was important to me. Reverse negotiating my contract and dropping the money part could have been a differentiator in what was a highly competitive process. I didn’t reverse negotiate, and I am almost certain it wouldn’t have worked, but I bring it up here because it’s the exact opposite of compensation as a determinant of career success. I actually thought about making noncompensation a strategy toward closing the job I so badly wanted. But let’s get back to those of you for whom compensation is the key determinant of success, the pillar on which you want to build your career. Start by understanding that compensation is far more than salary. With more people working remotely, compensation might even include the ability to expense office or computer supplies or to subsidize a portion of your rent or mortgage too. Add to this a clear statement of your job title and job grade, the salary band your job occupies, and whatever other creative new jargon classifications your company comes up with adding.