Self-knowledge is a process that continues as long as you are alive. There is no beginning and no end. Wondering about your needs, personality type, strengths and weaknesses, and your values is just the beginning. You should try to develop a daily awareness of your behavior and attitude toward the myriad aspects of your consulting life and work. Ultimately, it is perception and sensitivity that determine whether you, as a consultant, will be able to motivate, delegate, negotiate, communicate and perform all the required consulting tasks.
Since life is a continually flowing river and not a static pool, you must be aware that your body, your thoughts, your attitudes are changing every moment. Therefore, it is important to keep up with yourself; to keep breaking the habit of thinking you fit a particular mold.
You should keep a personal balance sheet, listing your strengths and weaknesses, values and desires, and then review it on a certain date, every year or two, to see how you have progressed. You may find, for example, that on the debit side you listed “I take things too seriously and am too stressful” and then wondered, when reviewing it after a year, why you ever thought it was a problem.
Be prepared to change. After getting to know your strengths and weaknesses better, focus on your strengths – winning is about unleashing your strengths. That doesn’t mean you should ignore an obvious weakness. It will have to be fixed. Through effort, training, and experience, most consultants can become proficient in all consulting skills.
Lastly, keep in mind that the rate of social change is increasing and that, as a freelance consultant, you will be working at or from home, and there will be more time for leisure. Change and impermanence are part of the world of tomorrow. Be ready to accept the challenge. You must be aware of the fundamental changes in life that will affect you and your consulting work and be prepared to adapt accordingly.
After leaving school or university, you are faced with the challenge of trying to establish yourself in the outside world. You are likely to be relatively fit and eager to continue earning money to pay for rent and leisure activities. You will probably have a lot of confidence and energy born of a lack of experience in failure, and this will give you the impetus to get back into your work life.
Later, perhaps in your 25s to your 30s, you will begin to focus outside of work on your personal and emotional life. Your job may not be as exciting as it was at first, but you have started to establish a financial foundation and are now looking for a partner to share your life with and a home to buy. Now is also the time when you can start looking for an alternative job.
From your late 20s to your late 30s, you will probably be fairly established in your job, even if you have changed careers, and you may be living with your partner in purchased accommodation. Safety will be high on your list of needs and will remain ambitious, having been promoted but with more rungs to climb. You may have started a family. If so, you may find that your job, at least temporarily, becomes of secondary importance.
You may also find that babies mean sleepless nights and, along with a decrease in your leisure activities, it is more difficult to cope with and more stressful at work. If this happens to you, check if your workload can be lightened, for example by delegating more. Also, make sure you are using your talents and have not strayed from using your natural core strengths.
At age 40, men and women experience a transition phase. The infamous midlife crisis can result in a turbulent change for you and your partner. You may have feelings of achievement anxiety, related to a concern for your career development.
Marriages can experience stress during these intervening years. Couples may have already become estranged by now: a spending jet setter, for example, is likely to be estranged from a spouse with a less glamorous lifestyle; a middle manager, dissatisfied with a monotonous job, can make up for it by seeking enthusiasm at the expense of family commitments. If you have children, their adaptation to adolescence may coincide with your middle-aged problems, exacerbating domestic conflicts.
If you have weathered the storm that follows the midlife crisis, you should be able to cope with the next phase of readjustment. Now he should have settled for his position in life and made the most of it. Retirement will increasingly be on your mind: “How will I manage? Should I save more? Will I try to continue working or negotiate a deal? Will I have the leisure interests to occupy my day or will I be lost?” a balance of his career and what he has achieved and what he has not achieved.
The right time to consult
Age is an important factor in deciding whether it is the right time to become a consultant. There is definitely a right time and a wrong time. The fact is that everyone possesses different skill levels at different stages of their career. It is also true that a consultant in their 20s and 30s will have different values, and therefore a different service to offer, than a consultant in their 50s and 60s.
This will also be true from the customer’s perspective. A former manufacturing company, where the average age of board members is 60, is unlikely to employ a consultant younger than they are. Similarly, a young tech company, where the average age of board members is 25, is unlikely to employ a consultant older than them.
It is also important to understand that clients will employ different consultants for very different reasons. All you need to make sure is that your consulting service ultimately reflects who you are at the moment.
The old adage “If you’re good enough, then you’re old enough” really applies here. It is very rare for a client to hire a consultant simply because of their perceived expertise. Clients still need to understand the service of a consultant and how it will be implemented. Relevant experience may or may not be an asset, depending on the nature of the service.
The point is that you will know precisely when is the right time for you to consult because your body will tell you, regardless of the phase of life you are going through. If consulting is a great wish for you right now, regardless of your age or financial security, you probably have strong personal reasons for feeling this way. Only those who are entering the consulting industry, in the absence of something more suitable, need to worry about their current career path.
