Video transcript.

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Dr Janin:

I’m Doctor Janin. I’m the author of the book called “A Lifetime of Personal Power”.

Since I returned from Europe to South Africa and I found this house and made it my home, my fireplace has been a place where many, many coaching conversations took place, so invisible people are sitting here.

And, as I am a career coach, most of them – obviously – come when they experience a problem in their career. The problems can be anything. It can be a person saying, “I hate my job.” It can be a person saying, “I can’t find work.” It can be conflict at work. It can be a feeling of being totally overwhelmed by what is going on. There is a lot of stress going with that.

Sometimes people come with a more upbeat problem. They have to make a choice between two very interesting career options and they just cannot make up their mind. That in its own right is very stressful because they sit there with a what if.

And then … ja … it also happens quite a lot that somebody will sit here and say, “Do you know, I want to make a difference in life, but I don’t know how.” Now that is also a question that I love to work with because it is actually the vocational urge speaking in a person. What is the purpose of my life?

But, in any case, there is a lot of agony around career issues and I often see it has to do because people have this underlying belief that their career should provide security. I was also brought up by parents who hoped that my career would provide me security, but I’ll show you a visual chart of how it actually panned out.

You can see there is quite a few ups and downs in my career. Some of them have got nothing to do with my own capabilities or performance. It is outward change, the economy changes, it is retrenchments. It has been general discrimination, it’s been promises that the boss didn’t keep … so, all I can say is career guarantees do not exist.

We have to be prepared for coping with a lot of change. And this is what I’m dealing with on a daily basis. People have to learn to be prepared for the changes. Changes, I think, in this day and age, have mostly to do with having to retool. Retool means you have to learn a different kind of work for which you have never been prepared. You haven’t studied it. This may happen frequently. 

You must be prepared for moving. Career mobility is of essence. Never think you will stay and have your career in a place where you were born. Even if you like that place, you will have to travel. 

And, of course, a lot of change comes about when we have to become entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurialism is what drives many careers. That’s the outward changes, but what this book also zooms in on is because we are not so much prepared for the inner changes that take place in us. 

But believe me, when we are young, when we are older, when we are middle aged, when we’re really getting older, we are actually a different version of ourselves, and I see that in everyone. This kind of inner change may not always be prepared for. We expect different things from life at different stages. And we have different things to offer in our career as well.

What this book now does, is …  if you take the bigger definition of “career” … it’s an old word … it means your path through life … we have to take charge of our path through life. A red carpet isn’t rolled out for us. We have to take our career in our own hands and realise we are so much more than our CV. We are actually the person behind the CV. And, at the different stages in our life, we must be prepared for the opportunities that await us. This is what the book zooms in to: a positive message of how can we be prepared to manage the inevitable changes better.

What can I say about myself? I love life. I love books. And I try to put as much love for life in this book as I could. And I hope you will enjoy the journey.