Career change: if you’re stuck, perhaps you're skipping a vital step.
Posted on October 07, 2020 by Bruna De Palo PCC, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
You're unfulfilled at work and have no idea how to change your career? Perhaps you don't even know what else you could do? You're in the right place¬
So, you’re unhappy at work, and you’d like to change career… Where would you start?
If you’re anything like my clients… you’d sit down, list all your skills, recall all your volunteering experiences and try to match all this with the current the job market offers, right? Wrong.
That would be the perfect recipe for another golden cage, a place where you feel safe but still unfulfilled.
You may find it counterintuitive, but changing career has little to do with your skills and experience, and the last thing you want to do is to use them as a compass to reach what you miss.
Start by answering this: what do I want to achieve that my current career isn’t providing me with?
Chances are, what you’re looking for is “fulfilment”, a sense of aliveness that comes from your activities, and since aliveness is an emotion, you need to start exactly from that: your feelings. After all, “fulfilment is not about what you do, it’s about how you feel about what you do”, therefore the next questions are:
What makes me feel alive? what type of activities light me up? In what environment does my body produce good vibes? And plenty of others.
If you think you know the answers, think again. You’re not the same person you were 15 years ago, and with your mind, your body changes too, and today, perhaps, it gets lightened up by different things. On the other hand, if you’ve been busy running the 9 to 5 rat race like I did when I was stuck in my tech career, you may not have noticed how you’ve changed.
Do you regularly ask yourself in-depths questions? If not, now is the best time to start.
Perhaps the reason for you being stuck is that your career doesn’t match your real nature. Unless you recognise where the misalignment is, you shouldn’t look at the job market yet. Again, the solution is in asking yourself the right questions:
What makes my heart sing? What drives my energy level? What makes me feel alive? What’s not negotiable for me? What is that makes me, me?
Being clear on who you are and what alters your energy level is vital for a sustainable change and it is exactly where you should start. The more you explore, the more elements you have to point you on a fulfilling path:
Do I enjoy taking risks? Am I a routine type? What is my learning style? In what way I like to be rewarded? What have I learned in the toughest experiences in my life?
That’s, of course, just the tip of the iceberg and I invite you to uncover the rest too (and if you don’t know how to do it on your own, a career coach as myself can help).
The way I see it, fulfilment comes from bringing who you are into what you do, that is expressing your being through your doing. So the first step to a fruitful career change is to start re-discovering your Being. After all, you’re a Human Being, even though we’ve somehow been transformed into Human Doings.
So where would you start? Perhaps by deciding how you’re going about this journey?
There are plenty of great self-help books, and to make them effective, self-discipline and commitment to taking actions are vital. There’s no way you can change your career just through inspiration.
If, instead, you’d rather speed up the process and rely on a proven, step-by-step career change framework, then hire me, and we’ll go about each stage together (check out www.brunadepalo.com/career-change).
Whatever step you’ll take, focus on discovering yourself first, knowing that what you’ll be looking for is a career that brings fulfilment by leveraging as many as possible of the gifts you bring to this world (including your ideas, your vision of the world, your natural talents, your perceptions, your insights, the lessons you’ve learnt through your tough experiences and so on). Fulfilment comes from honouring and making use of your whole package.
And if you’re doubtful, look at the most fulfilled people you know: aren’t they expressing their nature through their work?
So, what action are you going to take, today? Where do you start?
