If you want to shake off one piece of brainwashing to start the new year, here is a good one to jettison. Pull yourself out of the delusion that going to work and doing your job every day constitutes managing your career. You know the truth in your heart. One has very little to do with the other.

I want you to rock it at work every day, of course. I want you to feel strong and whole and mighty at work. That’s the best way to feel. I want you to feel on top of your game and supported by the people around you.

I want you to hit your goals and surpass them not because someone gave you a random number to hit and you’re a good little puppy, but because you decide what to work on and when you choose something to work on, you crush it.

That’s the motivation I’m looking for in you.

I want all that for you, but much more than that I want you to be looking way ahead at the farthest point you can see on your path before the horizon dips out of view. This is your life.

There’s no win in getting promoted if you don’t like the work or the industry or the people. It’s not a triumph to get a great performance review and a gold star if you’re not on your path.

If you don’t know where you’re headed not just career-wise but in this finite lifespan you’ve been handed, how can you take the first step?

Get off the IV drip that most if not all of us have been hooked up to for many years, the one that tells us to do well at work and focus on being a top performer. If we do tht, we’re told, and save money we will have a have a happy life.

Maybe that was a good piece of advice in 1962, but it isn’t good advice now. There is nothing stable or secure about the job you’re in or the next job you’ll have after this one.

That’s neither a good or bad thing because if we classify the disappearance of the corporate ladder and job security as a tragedy, we’ll feel like victims. We aren’t victims. For millennia humans survived this way. They were scrappy. Seventy-five years ago most working people didn’t rest on the kind of long-term job security that emerged in the post-WWII era.

Now we are going back to that state. We are all entrepreneurs now. We have to manage our own careers.

The old, critical career question was “Are you working?” If you were working, you were good. No problem! Now that question is almost irrelevant. A paycheck today is cool, but what will you do tomorrow?

Now the critical question is “Are you doing work you love? Is your career supporting your life?”

We all have to grow our muscles, our voices and our flames to survive and thrive in this new-millennium workplace. That means that a day that goes by at work where you don’t learn anything new is a day stolen from you.

The right job gives you much more than a paycheck. It gives you contacts, resume fodder, amazing Dragon-Slaying Stories, confidence, the wisdom of other smart people and the sense of accomplishment we all need.

Sometimes the right job is a salaried job, and sometimes it’s a consulting or contract gig. You can’t stay locked in the box that says “I will only consider full-time employment with benefits.”

That’s the equivalent of saying “I will only consider working in companies whose names start with M.” It’s a hugely limiting factor. Your goal is not to seek a cozy corner in some company and build a nest there. Nothing is solid. Nobody can offer you security. You have to grow it in yourself.

To take charge of your career, get a journal and start writing in it. Write about what you want in your lifetime. Where do you want to live, and why does that place call to you? Who do you want around you? How do you want to spend your time, what do you want to eat and what do you want the view out your window to be?

If you think this kind of exercise is silly, I have a question for you.

Do you intend to stay alive after today? If so, you will have a future. Do you want to have a say in how that future unfolds? If so, design it. Design your future. Decide what you want your life to be. You don’t have to tell anyone you’re doing it. You can design your life in private and only talk about it with certain trusted friends and only when you feel like it.

If you feel that your professional life is cordoned off from your personal life and one shouldn’t influence the other, be aware that your perspective comes from fear. It might be the fear of looking or feeling like a loser or the fear of falling behind your peers. What is there to compete over, really?

You get to live the life you choose, or choose to spend your precious energy competing with other people for fake trophies that have no connection to who you are.

You can pretend that your business affairs and goals are separate and unrelated to the rest of your life. That’s folly. It isn’t true and that belief and the decisions you will make from it will hurt you greatly.

I know that because I work with people who have prayed to the wrong god for a very long time and are adjusting their priorities now, in midlife.

Write in your journal every day if you can. Write about the work that speaks to you, not about the work somebody told you you’re qualified for.

Give yourself permission not to be limited by anything that anybody has ever told you about your weaknesses, faults or deficiencies. A lot of people like to squash other people’s flames. They will have been successful in their attempts to thwart your brilliance if you let their words echo in your head and influence your actions.

Go ahead and make a dream for your life. What part does your career path play in your vision for yourself? How do your travels on your path so far in life point you toward the new career direction you’re thinking about? You have to see that connection first — then other people will see it.

You don’t have to change jobs to take control of your career.

You only have to decide why you’re in your current job — what valuable things you went there to collect! You can think of your stint at your current job as a level in a video game. Every level has something valuable you can collect from it — gold or peanut brittle or something else. What will you collect at this job? How does the job move you closer to your own goals for yourself?

Half of your Real Job Description is to do your work every day and leave time and energy for your personal life. That’s half your assignment.

The other half of your Real Job Description is to manage your career by knowing these things:

• What kind of Business Pain you solve for your clients/employers
• What that Business Pain costs your employers or clients until it’s fixed
• How ‘your’ type of Business Pain shows up, and
• The first 10-15 organizations you would approach if your job should disappear tomorrow

You have to know your market value and keep your network alive. If all that sounds daunting, I understand! Mother Nature is talking to you. She is saying “You don’t have to obsess about your job.

It is only one part of your life. Your career comes before your job does on the pecking order, and your personal life comes before your career does!”

It’s a new day. Can you take charge of your career in 2016 and wake up to your own possibilities? We are rooting for you!

Liz Ryan is the CEO and founder of Human Workplace. Follow her on Twitter and read the rest of her Forbes.com