Most career assessments try to paint a static picture of what you can do well with the least effort, but they often fail to provide a practical roadmap for your next career move. This episode provides a simplified, multidimensional version of a classic management tool to help you prioritise your growth:

• Understand the Nine-block Matrix: Visualise a grid where the x-axis represents your current performance (how well you are doing now) and the y-axis represents your potential (your capacity to grow to the next level).
• The Energy Dimension: Go beyond a 2D map by evaluating the energy cost of each skill on a scale of 1–5; this helps you identify where you are on "autopilot" versus where a skill is draining you.
• The Risk Factor: Assign a risk or criticality score to your skills to determine which are "fundamental" to your role (like software delivery) and which can be safely dropped to make room for more valuable growth.
• Spot Opportunity Flags: Identify areas where you have high potential but low performance and low energy output; these represent your best opportunities for rapid improvement with the least input.
• Make the Counterintuitive Trade-off: Learn why you might need to drop a skill you are already good at if it has low growth potential, redirecting that energy toward a new skill that offers higher long-term value for your career.
• Categorise Your "Bread and Butter" Skills: Recognise those mid-level skills that ensure your reliability and help you get the job done but shouldn't be the primary focus of your intense energy and development.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community today! I am in there as well, and you can message me directly.

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content, head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keeps us focused on what matters to you.

This episode marks the 11th anniversary of the show, and I want to celebrate by continuing our Career Growth Accelerator series. Today, we’re moving beyond the "autopilot" mode that many engineers find themselves in and learning how to define goals that are uniquely yours so you can find the specific challenges that will actually move the needle.

Many of us operate on instinct, chasing goals like "get a promotion" or "make more money" without understanding the "why" behind them. This episode is designed to help you interrogate those automatic responses and find a path that is optimized for what you uniquely value.

• Break the Autopilot Loop: Understand why common goals like "getting a promotion" are often just survival mechanisms intended to keep us safe within social norms rather than reflections of our true values.
• The "Never Again" Pressure Test: Use the mental exercise of imagining you will never get another promotion; if this causes visceral anxiety, it’s a sign that your goal is rooted in a sense of safety rather than self-actualisation.
• Move from Post-Rationalisation to Purpose: Instead of backwards-justifying the status quo, learn to be honest about what you truly desire—whether it's the affirmation of intelligence, the freedom of discretionary time, or a specific mission.
• Create Instructive Goals: Discover why a goal must be personal and specific to be useful; a generic goal provides no roadmap, whereas a unique goal acts as an instruction for what to do next.
• Find Your True Challenge: Once your goal is defined, identify the specific obstacle standing in your way that requires ingenuity and isn't already decided for you.
• The "Asterisk" of Solvability: Learn the most critical rule for picking a challenge: it must be something you can reasonably solve given your current means to avoid falling back into paralysis and autopilot.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com/contact

Join our supportive community of engineers working to improve their lives and careers at https://developertea.com/discord.

If you're enjoying the show, head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show.

This episode kicks off the Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the specific hurdles faced by mid-to-senior level engineers, managers, and leaders who are looking to move to the next level. Before diving into specific strategies, I’m addressing the fundamental prerequisite for real growth: getting out of your own way. We often block our own progress because our ego conflates our self-worth with our career position, making it impossible to see the real problems or lessons we need to learn. In this episode, I share a vital mental exercise to help you disconnect your identity from your job title and begin diagnosing your career challenges honestly.

• Understand why protecting your ego is one of the most dangerous ways to control your career, leading you to discount valid reasons for stagnation or failure by focusing only on external factors.
• Discover the fundamental shift needed: disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations. Your position is merely a fact and has little bearing on your innate value or capacity to succeed more generally.
• Learn how to use a distancing thought experiment—viewing your situation as if it were an acquaintance’s story—to remove your ego from the diagnostic process and gain necessary clarity and perspective.
• Explore why effective growth advice, whether for promotion or post-mortem analysis, requires focusing almost exclusively on the diagnostic aspect ("What happened and why?") rather than building justifications based on your worthiness or past performance.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.