Living Your Purpose: Four Things That Will Get You Through a Career Transition
Posted on December 23, 2011 by Dawn Greaney, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
Career Transitions (any transition, for that matter) can be difficult. Here are four things to get you through.
Living your purpose: Four things to do while going to where you want to be.
1. Have trust — you’ve got to trust that you have a unique gift or talent that the world needs. And you’ve got to have confidence that you can do it in a bigger capacity. You simply must believe in your purpose. Know that if you give it attention, it will grow and eventually lead you.
Perseverance is necessary – not in the physical sense (like you need to continue to make cold calls even if it’s hard or even if you don’t like it), but in the trusting that if you keep focusing on this “thing” and if you continue to follow your urges, something will happen. We only manifest thoughts that we believe. So if you believe that you’re not capable, you won’t be capable. If you believe you don’t have enough money to make anything happen, you won’t have enough money to make anything happen.
Trust also that change is sometimes necessary. What you think you are losing is actually making way for something great. Open yourself up to that.
2. Change your mindset — Tune in to what’s going on in your mind at any given time. Chances are, you’ll be disgusted. We have trained ourselves to see the bad in everything. To look for things or people to blame. To use excuses that keep us from moving forward. Once you’re aware of the constant chatter in your brain, you can start to retrain it. This takes ongoing diligence and you mustn’t stop. But once you tune in and start the process, you will realize how these bad thoughts make you feel. Once you feel that, you’ll be motivated to take charge. Forcing yourself to find the good in every situation is great practice and it will eventually become automatic.
When a car cuts me off, I can usually feel anger welling up in me. I can see how easy it would be for me to carry that with me until I can get the driver to look at my disgusted reaction and make them feel regret. But instead I think maybe this person prevented me from getting in an accident up the way. Maybe that split second of slowing down saved my life. Or saved me from getting a ticket. And that thought is enough to disengage the anger that would normally well up in me. The kind of anger I could bring with me and take out on others.
Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist who had a stroke and wrote about it in her book My Stroke of Insight. The hemorrhage was on the left side of her brain, which she identifies as the side that is filled with all the chatter; the very linear thinking side of the brain. She recounts that during her recovery, she was conflicted because she didn’t know that she wanted that back. She was living in her right brain, which was so ethereal, touchy feely, floaty and intuition-based. How could she retrain her left brain to co-exist with the good-feeling side? She talks about how we have the ability to choose how we respond to any situation. She says there’s a 90 second physiological affect that follows an emotion, such as anger. That’s the physical component of anger, where your pupils get big and adrenaline flows through your veins. But that reaction is gone in 90 seconds. If you’re still angry after that, it’s because you’ve chosen let that circuit continue to run. You’ve chosen to keep that in your head and circulate it every few seconds so that you can react to it. You can indeed choose to let the reaction go away, just as the physiological reaction did.
So changing your mindset is not only possible, it’s necessary. You must let go of thoughts that are preventing you from moving forward. Striving for a healthier mind will expand your belief in the possibilities. You’ll be inspired more often and you’ll attract what you need.
3. Align with your passion–Find a way to incorporate more of it in your own life. Find a way to do what it is that makes you light up. Don’t dwell on the details, just do it. Get as close to it as you can. Talk about it with like-minded people. Keep meeting people who are on the same wavelength. Surround yourself with inspiring people. Encourage inspiring conversations. Find resources and start looking for the opportunities that surround you. Shift your focus from what you hate about your life to what you love. Be authentic and true to yourself.
4. Let go of resistance — Stop clinging to old habits and ideas that keep you paralyzed. I read a great analogy about monkey bars…remember when you first learned how to cross them? You can’t get to the next rung without letting go of the last one. If you don’t let go, you’ll drop. It looked daunting in the beginning. Like you were never going to trust that the next rung would be obtainable. But eventually we learned to trust and we crossed to the other side and back, letting go when we needed to move forward.
Stop making excuses. For every excuse that you come up with, there will always be at least one person who has overcome that very thing having much less than you have now. There will always be stories of people succeeding against all odds.
Recognize and take advantage of the opportunities that surround you. They really are everywhere! And you’ll see them when you’re happy and inspired, more so than when you’re depressed and complaining. Keep moving forward. Take action especially when you’re inspired.
www.dawngreaney.com
