How can I manage my career?
Key Learnings
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Setting a clear and precise objective helps you to concentrate your efforts and gets you heading in the right direction.
Divide your goals by time slots: (a) lifetime goals; (b) career goals; (c) season goals.
By making better use of your time, you can achieve your goals much more easily.
Prioritise tasks based on importance and urgency and remove non-essential activities.
Making good choices is crucial for success as much of your earning potential is related to your reputation on and off-the-court.
Only use the advice of others to inform your decision-making process – don’t rely on it as the sole basis for your final decision. You are ultimately responsible for the decisions you make.
Networking is the art of building alliances and can help you get a job, find a sponsor, make new friends, get new ideas, etc.
Preparing for your professional life after basketball is just as important as your current career on-the-court.
During your basketball career, you can invest in your development through part-time education.

8-step strategy for making big career or life decisions

Making big decisions in life can feel overwhelming. To make the process more manageable, consider using the following eight-step strategy.

  • Step 1 – Identify your objective. What are you trying to achieve or clarify by making your decision?
     
  • Step 2 – Do a preliminary review of your options. Quickly identify whether you have many or only a couple of options to assess.
     
  • Step 3 – Identify what is at stake. For big decisions regarding health, family, career and finances, you will want to ask yourself what is at stake and how you prioritise those values. While the decision is ultimately yours to make, at this step it can help to have the opinions of others because having more information can make you more confident in your final decision.
     
  • Step 4 – Assess the importance of the decision. This will determine how much time and energy (and money) you invest in the decision making process.
     
  • Step 5 – Budget your time and energy. From this point, you will want to organise your decision making process and set deadlines for making a final decision.
     
  • Step 6 – Choose a decision making strategy. Will you measure the pros and cons of the situation? Will you weigh the opinions of professionals more heavily than others? Will you trust your intuition?
    Having a plan on how to actually make the final decision will help you determine what is most important for you to consider.
     
  • Step 7 – Identify and evaluate your options. As you get deeper into the decision making process, you may discover new information that causes you to view your options in a different way.
     
  • Step 8 – Make your choice…on time. With all the information in hand, now it is time to make your final decision. And do your best to honour the timeline you created in Step 5 to ensure that you take action and don’t ‘overthink’ the issue.