I collect picturesque word groupings that are meaningful in imagery as well as in practice. The title is one. “Makes my brain itch” is another, that I wrote about a few weeks ago. When I heard the scaffolding phrase, it made me itch to write this.

Be your own scaffolding, on many levels:

  • Able to support yourself during your “renovation,” as in your change of position, company, industry, lifestyle, financially, emotionally, and professionally.
  • Capable of rising, dusting yourself off, caught from an unexpected fall of some sort that would normally cripple anyone else, but restoring your wits, professional wisdom, and even learning from the misstep(s) that led to the incident, to never lose your footing like that again.
  • Anticipating the scary excitement of entering a new role, job, career story chapter, remaking yourself, while relying on a limited few trusted coaches, advisors, peers, mentors, trench-fellows, to address your constant self-doubt (because it’s only natural!) who spur you on as your support mechanism, the cogs that make the wheels spin, pulley you up, boost you to climb out, and promote your vision that you can persevere with.
  • Constructing a generative “why you do what you do,” with safety guardrails to keep you from distractedly wandering, combining efforts among you, your entourage, your peers, and projecting your collaborative future.
  • Finally, revel in the exhilaration of the “big reveal” being your new “you,” when you remove the scaffolding, confidently brave enough to show that you redesigned, refired, refined, reestablished yourself as a new player for the world to embrace, prepared to lance forward in it.

Build, renovate, display your “why” on LinkedIn, and everything you do, say, and describe to make the observer less casual, more attuned, to the real you, as only you can express it, and draw them close enough to want to know more about you (as I call it “fall in like” with you), enough to contact you. Then it’s all up to you to reel them in, to hire / sign / subscribe / retain you (”fall in love with you”). Work your professional magic as a cupid. Make them want to refer you to others they respect and support: the circle of professional life among us lion kings.

Be your own scaffold, either physical or imaginary, to protect and shield when needed,  deconstructed as your reconstruct yourself and emerge.

And you already know this: you will build and tear it down over and over again in your career.

Onward!