Life establishes a rhythm and a pattern. It is often referred to as the status quo. As the world continues to evolve, you may either feel as if your life is adapting along with it, or your career is never changing, growing, or moving forward. Days go by and nothing changes. Your thoughts of the future are focused on getting ahead and perhaps how you’ll create better traction for advancing the knowledge, skills, and talents you possess. Perhaps you feel under-appreciated, you’ve been over-looked for positions, and/or you believe you are under-paid for your role. Whatever the case may be, your daily routine may have been consumed with timely thoughts about achieving a better future.
Significant Lifetime Event
Then when a significant lifetime event occurs, such as a worldwide crisis, it creates an opportunity to re-evaluate the thoughts and plans you’ve had for your career. When that occurs you have a choice, you can use it as a time to reflect and redirect your focus, or you can give into fear and become paralyzed with inaction. While it may seem counter-intuitive, take this time to re-prioritize your goals and re-review your career plan. The reason it may feel like an inappropriate approach to take, while you await resolution of a situation which seems so out of control, is that being productive can actually help to calm your mind and put you in a logical frame-of-reference.
While you are in the process of evaluating your career, and developing new plans to revive it again, you will find yourself better able to control your emotional reactions to the events you are hearing and reading. This is due to a shift in how your mind is processing information, or taking cognitive control once again of the flood of information being received through working memory. You can initiate this type of process by implementing a guided career overview plan and asking yourself a series of self-analysis questions.
Guided Career Overview
You first begin an overhaul process by clearing the mental clutter in your own mind. There will be information and misinformation you have been collecting about current events, which has been creating doubt, fear, and likely a sense of unease over time about your future. Start by evaluating the needs for yourself and those who either depend upon you or live with you. Then search for valid sources of information, not sources of second-hand information. Go directly to those sources which will provide you with facts, data, and statistics. This is the only way you can make any plans with certainty, and stop the flow of speculation from entering your mind. You will find you are also engaging the use of logic and critical analysis skills as you use this mental process.
Mentally Prepared Yourself
After you have mentally prepared yourself for the basic needs required, and you have engaged your rational thinking skills, now you can begin to use those same reasoning skills for a review of your career plan. At this point in time it is likely your entire perspective of your career has changed, priorities have shifted, and the manner in which you work has changed. You may either work from home as a remote worker, or you may have found yourself without work now. Whatever the case may be, and as difficult as you may find it to be, this is the time to conduct a guided career overview. Now more than ever, you are viewing your career from a completely different perspective.
Itemized Your Career Goals
To get started, itemized your career goals. If you did not have clearly defined goals, create a list for your future in increments of two-year periods. This is a different approach than you will read within many self-help articles and it is one I’ve used as a career coach to help improve the success rate of achieving each milestone. When goals are set too far out, those goals seem too long term and can be easily forgotten. Shorter goals serve as checkpoints to keep in mind and also can become motivational signposts to celebrate along the way, as each are completed. Should you have career goals already, you can re-develop them into a two-year approach as I’ve described.
Thinking about Career Goals
As you are thinking about career goals, it is possible you may not know exactly where you are headed or what direction you would like to take next in your career. This is when the idea of visualization can be helpful, as a tool for career development. Imagine yourself two years from now, with the current crisis resolved, and describe what you see, feel, and think about for your job or career. Consider what you aspire to be or become, now that you have a new perspective on life. If you are satisfied with your career and now want to spend more time with those whom you care about, perhaps your next goal will be seeing yourself in a stable position, becoming an expert in this role.