In a time where you should be grateful for all that you have in your life, you can find yourself getting caught in the hail storm of worry, doubt and fear. Â When you know you should focus on the good things in your life, you can’t help but get dragged into the concerns, challenges and dread that has become your seemingly endless quest for the perfect job, or for some, just any job. When you look at your career, do you consider yourself blessed or just a mess?
It’s okay if you answered the latter. Â Feeling uncertain about which direction you are heading has become somehow natural and familiar. Â Not that you probably ever intended for that to be the case. Your career was something you may have either fell into after school, inherited from your family, received advanced degrees or spent years of training and experience. Â Yet, here you are, staring down the same road as everyone else, regardless of how you got here. Â This does not imply you are lame, misguided or even a little crazy. Â What it does mean is that you are traveling down the path that was intended for you and only you. Â That does not make this a right or wrong choice either, it just makes it your choice.
You are where you are whether you love it or hate it because it’s part of the process of your journey towards success. Your career choices are a reflection of that journey. You can change course anytime you like. You are in complete control of your career no matter how messy or treacherous that journey may seem. Â Blaming yourself for not taking that promotion when it was offered to you or going back to school to get an advanced degree, or taking that extra job because it would help you pay the bills, is not going to help you feel blessed in your career choices.
Wondering what could have, would have or should have been part of your career journey is a wasted exercise meant for people sitting on a beach in a lounge chair with a banana daiquri in one hand and scratching their sun burnt head under their tattered straw hat with the other. Wasting time and remembering how you might have played out that promotion or corner office better is not going to help you move forward on the career that is waiting for you to show up and grab it.
We tend to forget all of the good things that happened along the career journey in favor of recalling past memories that could have been played out differently if we just did that one thing differently. Wasting precious time and energy focusing on the negative and burdensome thoughts we hold particularly when we are in a bad place because of the lack of interviews, job offers or job leads is not going to help you. Â Remembering what made you get up in the morning to get to work early, the excitement of the new deal you closed, the boss you loved to work with, the co-workers you loved to interact with, all play a part in defining the moments of your career you should choose to focus on. So the next time you feel like your career is a mess, recall the times you felt truly blessed and maybe you’ll recreate the feeling over again.
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Copyright © 2024 Lisa Kaye - HR & Business Consulting - The Career Rebel
Such a nice article! felt gr8 after reading this,,,,,,,quite motivational 🙂
Warm Regards,
Rumana Khan
I like your perspective.
I am kind of torn in my career…but what matters more to me is the ‘evolution’ of our careers.
You mentioned the ‘corner office’ and the ‘promotion’, I agree. Those decisions and goals and objectives are yours for the taking.
We must have vision, drive and the ability to see it and achieve it. There aren’t too many out there that stumble upon greatness. Maybe a few, but the norm is to work the process.
With that said, I have witnessed the evolution, dénouement and what appears to be the disenfranchisement of the contemporary, careerist.
The economy tanked and so did the funding for the services, goods and trade that were and are so desperately needed to keep the organic evolutionary process going.
We have literally sealed our own fate and I don’t know how many of use truly had a ‘choice’ or input in these directions, or, paths that we are now on, negotiating and experiencing the personal side of our career mortality.
But to break away from the standards and trappings of a ‘career’ is a true act of survival.
Opportunities to experience life are what are out there now…All of them; good and bad.
The wins, the falls we will feel them all and feel them as we are intended to.
I would recommend that we all experience life and its true potential. Not some made up, Madison Ave depiction of what kind of life you can have.
In the stead, embrace the radical changes. Master them. Learn how to negotiate out present situation and evolve.
I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday and lets look up to the prospects of 2010…
I find that concentrating on all the negative aspects of my career provides an “unstoppable engine” to improve my situation; Im not prepared to sit back and let my growing frustration dissipate amongst fond memories.
If I hate a job, I knuckle down for precisely the amount of time it takes to get me into a better role.
Thanks, really needed to hear that right now. It’s very true. A whole year can’t go by without several good things happening. Just gotta keep your eye on them.
Thank you. I have been having one of those days, and your post helped me remember how I should be thinking. I have been in a self-imposed rut the past two days wondering about how I will pay the bills and getting any type of job, and forgetting the fact that sometimes it takes a little time for different people to find something that both keeps your stomach filled and makes you happy.
I’ll find something, just need to have some patience and keep on working at it. Enjoy my friends, my comfy apartment, and my opportunities to work with other creative types and the free time to work on personal projects.
Thanks again, now I’m off to make some toys work.
Very appropriate advice, Lisa. While contemplating obstacles and risks helps us to plan ways to overcome them and reach our goals, obsessing about them leads to frustration, negativity, and saps our will to create and achieve.
I personally faced this dilemna in a company where I faced significant internal obstacles to change, and opted to leave to return to a company I had worked at 3 years ago, simply because the energy level and challenges were much more positive, and I perceive a greater opportunity to make a difference.
Thanx just a needed motivation. …………gr8 article………….but the time to click on the right opportunities and entering new challenges and proving them, just exhausts and make you feel spent. but the results are top of the world feelings.
There’s always Lemonade to made. Or in one laid off worker’s case, you can make a movie about making Lemonade. http://www.lemonademovie.com/
“It’s not a pink slip. It’s a blank page.”