Necessary Exit Strategy

 When You Work For A Villain

My son came home from college and wanted to have a family movie night so he selected Jumanji. I have to say that I wasn’t interested at first because I believe that sequels usually don’t turn out as good as the original. But it was family movie night so I sat back and watched it with everyone else.

I have to say that I was mightily impressed with Jumanji. It was as good if not better than the original. I absolutely loved it and was surprised just how entertaining it was. In one scene, the villain, Russel Van Pelt, sent one of his henchmen to retrieve this magic jewel from the four Jumanji game avatars, the heroes of the movie. When the henchman failed for the second or third time, Van Pelt pulls him close like he was comforting him, but then let one of his evil insects leave Van Pelt’s mouth and kill his own henchman.

I said to the dead henchman, Dude, you needed an exit strategy, because villains can only tolerate so many failed attempts before they get rid of you. I then wondered how many of us work for villains today. Why would we even take a job from them? Or continue working for them? Perhaps they weren’t villains when we started working for them, but became villains after they fired us. The henchman’s exit strategy should have been to fire himself first before Van Pelt fired him. That would have been a whole lot easier. However, most of us don’t know how to fire ourselves because we don’t take time to see the necessity in an exit strategy.

The 100% Rule

In the GUDEJob Channel video entitled, The Sad Reality About Your Job, Jeana and Jesse are two successful YouTube Vloggers with over 9 million subscribers who decide that they can’t run their channel anymore and call it quits. This video discusses the sad reality of this statistic: 100% of everyone one of you must leave your jobs at some point in time, guaranteed.

That’s the rule. There’s no way around it.

It doesn’t matter how much you love your job or hate it, 100% of you must leave it at some point. That’s just the way it is. So it’s not a question of whether or not you’re going to leave your job, the question becomes how will you leave your job. Will you leave it on your own terms, or on someone else’s? This is important, because how you leave your job could greatly enhance or severely impact your career development.

If you leave your job on someone else’s terms, then that could negatively affect how you perceive your career. It might wear down your psyche and cause you to believe that you are not wanted, or you are not needed, or you made a mistake, or you are a failure. However, if you leave your job on your terms, you are actually taking control of your career development, and you are in the best mindset to make the next move to where you want to be.

But to leave on your own terms requires a necessary exit strategy.

Necessary Exit Strategy

Let’s say that you just started a job, or that you

You need a necessary exit strategy in these cases

When someone is trying to get rid of you. Here are 10 signs that you are about to get fired.

When you want to keep your job. In the book, First Fired, Last Hired: 40 reasons why you don’t have the job you want and what to do about it (man, long title, but really good book), three reasons I like about needed an exit strategy are:

And when you want to leave on your own terms, here are several way to leave right:

Exit Strategy Mode

When you are in Exit Strategy mode, here is what your job now looks like:

• Stepping Stone. What I am the most grateful today is that I am alive and able to take care of my children. I am certainly grateful today for my health today. And I am definitely grateful for my secure job at Alamo which allows me to support my family. Each time I reflect on the things that I am grateful for it makes me happy and gives me strength to work through the tough times.
• Vocation, not Calling. Although my memory loss was very difficult to go through, I now have to say that it was a positive thing. It gave me the opportunity to give life another chance and make it whatever I wanted it to be. It is kind of exciting because I have learned how to change and alter my way of thinking to create good, happy, positive thoughts and fine tuning myself in many other ways. It took everything I had in my power to get help with my mental health and physical issues. I had to dig deep within my inner self and by doing so it made me STRONGER! Understanding this about my memory loss helps me to put the inconvenient things that I am going through right now in perspective.
• Means to an End. To find my inner self, I had to get rid of outside stimuli and focus on what I needed to do today to be able to wake up and get things done tomorrow. I was determined to talk to myself and encourage myself as often as I had to, and to rid myself of negative influences that attacked me. Once I did that I went into “Game On” mode and taught myself not to accept the word can’t. This is something that I am determined to do everyday and it has helped me to get through a lot of tough stuff. You have to work at it; determination doesn’t happen on its own.

What Happens Next

When you are in Exit Strategy mode several things happen that benefit you.

Staying One Step Ahead

This is why Career Development is so important, because it is a lifelong process. Your life is not over because of a mistake or a bad situation. Your life is never over until it is over. If you feel stuck for any reason, I want to remind you that you are more valuable than you think. Because you have today, right now, you can use today to begin to get unstuck.

At GUDEJob we have used the RESUME concept to help people get unstuck and increase their own value. Sometimes it starts with a simple spark on how to become more valuable, or it is a series of encouragements that come often enough to help someone move from Point A to Point B. In any case, we are here to help.

You can download our free resource, How To Become More Valuable now.

You can also subscribe to our YouTube Channel.

You are definitely more valuable that you think. By taking the very next step today, you will have just increased your value. Have a great day.