We’re about to get started with our Career Change Map series, where I’ll be sharing with you the three stages that we’ve seen to be most effective for finding exciting, viable options for more fulfilling work.
Before we dive into the detail, I also want to reassure you of something.
If you’re feeling stuck or lost or confused in your career change, you’re not alone, and it’s not your fault.
Nobody gives you a guidebook for navigating big life changes.
More often than not, you’re making it up as you go along: reading career change articles, making lists, losing yourself in self-help books, applying hopefully for jobs....
But there’s no overarching process that you’re following, so you’re never quite sure if you’re on the right track.
That’s why I’m sharing this series with you – to give you, perhaps for the very first time, a high-level view of what the way ahead is likely to look like.
My aim is that by the end of the series you’ll feel more grounded, clear, and confident about the steps you need to take.
And I want to start with one of the core reasons why career change can feel so messy and confusing...
The early months of a career change, in particular, can be a whirl of uncertainty.
They certainly were for me.
Was I doing the right thing? What were my skills? Which of my ideas were actually realistic? Which job sites were the best to look at? What did I need to earn?
I was utterly overwhelmed.
There were so many questions I felt I needed to answer, and they were all competing for my attention at once.
I didn’t know where to start, and the chaos in my mind was leaving me in paralysis.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight (and almost a decade spent helping career changers find fulfilling work), I know that one of the reasons career change can feel so chaotic is because it contains some pretty fundamental contradictions:
- Creativity and synthesis: you’re creating something fresh and new for your future, and at the same time incorporating elements of your past.
- Action and reflection: you need to get out there in the world in order to learn about your options and make tangible progress, but you simultaneously have to answer some fairly deep theoretical questions about yourself, your needs, and your desires.
- Uncertainty and confidence: you don’t know where you’re headed, and you don’t know exactly how you’re going to get there. But you also (somehow) need to move forward with conviction, and inspire confidence in those around you to help you on your way.
When you lay it out like that, it sounds like quite the mess, right?
How on earth do you do all those contradictory things at once without your head exploding?
Luckily, there’s another world that contains exactly the same set of contradictions, and that has developed tools and processes to navigate it all with speed and elegance: the world of design and innovation.
The processes that designers, entrepreneurs and inventors use to come up with new creations also work beautifully for career change.
One model in particular that we’ve adapted from that world to help you navigate your shift is the Careershifters Career Change Map (keep it open in a new tab if you’d like to refer to it as you read the rest of this email).
The map focuses primarily on three key stages:
- Discovering,
- Focusing, and
- Testing & Validating
As you move from left to right through the stages, you’ll gain clarity and confidence about your future career.
We’ll go through each of these stages in depth over the next few days of this email series.
For now, just notice the yellow lines that diverge and converge behind the text on the map.
This shape is based on the UK Design Council’s ‘Framework for Innovation’, known as the ‘double diamond’ model.
This approach to design is used all over the world of innovation, from designing vacuum cleaners to coming up with solutions to social problems.
And (brilliantly for us), it’s also a highly powerful approach for finding and deciding on your future career choice with confidence.
After all, career change is a process of design, right?
You’re designing the next chapter of your life – and it needs to be both beautiful and functional...
Now, it’s absolutely possible to make a career change without following this map.
I did (at least, I didn’t know I was following it when I shifted – looking back now I can see that I did in fact move through the stages, if in a fairly wobbly way).
But having a proven structure like this one can be hugely beneficial, for a number of reasons.
First, you know where you are in the process.
Instead of floating wildly about like I was at the start of my career change, unsure of how much progress I’d made (if any), or which way I was supposed to be facing, you can feel confident that you’re on the right track.
Secondly, you can focus only on what there is to focus on right now.
I exhausted myself daily, worrying about how I was going to pay my bills in my new career, before I even had the slightest idea of what that new career might be.
By attending exclusively to the stage of the map you’re in (and setting aside the rest for later), you can save energy, brainpower and stress.
Third, you can be confident you’re taking the right actions at the right moment.
No more ‘stabs in the dark’, hoping that it’s not too late to start building a network in an area of interest, or worrying you’ve narrowed down your options too soon.
Step by step, you can build your clarity, confidence, and career change capital in an organised and structured way.
Over the next four days, I’ll take you through an overview of each of the stages of the map, including how to maximise the benefits and avoid the potential pitfalls.
So you know which emails are a part of this series, I’ll put [CCM] (the career change map) in the subject line.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a dive into the first stage of the career change map: the Discovering stage.
This is where you’ll give yourself the best opportunity of finding a fulfilling career (mostly by getting less clear initially…).
Until tomorrow,
Natasha
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Natasha
Head Coach, Careershifters