“If you want a significant change in your results, then you probably need a significant change to your strategy.
Working harder on your current strategy is unlikely to move the needle.
Before you work harder, work on the right thing.”
– James Clear, best-selling author of Atomic Habits
Yesterday, I promised we’d start by talking about the key idea that you need to understand in order to get unstuck in your career change.
It’s very likely that this idea is the reason you’re feeling lost right now: why, despite your best efforts, doing everything you can think to do, you don’t seem to be making the kind of progress you’d like…
We’re going to start with a simple question:
When I say ‘career’, what springs to mind?
There’s a whole world of associations, right? The structures, rules and actions are strong, automatic, and deep-rooted.
You’ve been taught them throughout your life; both explicitly, by teachers and career books, and implicitly, through widespread social agreement that ‘this is the way the world of careers works’.
There are practical approaches:
- Signing up for job alerts
- Making lists of your strengths and weaknesses
- Reading career / self-help books
- Doing psychometric tests
- Talking to recruitment consultants
And then there are ‘mindset’ ones:
- Your future options depend on your past experience
- Jobs are found on job sites
- Avoid risk wherever possible
- Plan strategically before you act
- Asking for help should be a last resort
These approaches and ideas have probably served you well, up until now. It would be reasonable to say you owe your career progress thus far to their careful application.
And that, more than almost anything else, is what makes a career change into more fulfilling work feel so challenging.
You’re doing everything you’ve been taught to do - you’re throwing your best ‘career’ efforts at the problem, and getting nowhere. It’s frustrating and confusing and demotivating. You might be starting to wonder if the problem is just… you.
But it’s not your fault.
Conventional career wisdom – the rules and behaviours that you’ve been programmed to follow by school, career books, social norms and first-hand experience – is great to help you move upward: to the next promotion, the next tick-box on the list, the next rung of the career ladder.
But as a career changer, you don’t want to move up your ladder any more. You’re moving sideways.
And the rules that work for ‘up’ don’t work for ‘sideways’.
So in order to make your career change happen, you have to de-program yourself of your current automatic habits and behaviours around the world of work, and then replace them with new ones – ones that are designed for career change.
The first thing we do at Careershifters is help career changers like you see the conventional career rules you’ve been living by that have been keeping you stuck, often without even realising it.
And then begins a process of:
- Unlearning Conventional Career Wisdom: getting out of those unhelpful habits, removing the restrictive filters and rules that have been keeping you unwittingly stuck, and
- Relearning a new approach to career change: a different set of ideas and behaviours that make the sideways move of finding and moving into fulfilling work feel effective, enlightening, and even fun.
A successful career change isn’t the result of doing what you’ve been doing, but better – it’s an entirely different mindset and way of doing things that, in many cases, directly contradicts everything you think you know about the world of work.
In short, you have to ‘unlearn’ what doesn’t work before you can apply what does.
I’m curious: to what extent are you already aware of some ‘conventional’ rules about work sending you in circles in your shift? (This might take some thought – they’re often so ingrained that they can be hard to spot.)
Next in this e-mail series, I’ll share 3 rules of conventional career wisdom you need to unlearn, and what they need to be replaced by, in order to make a successful shift.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about rule number 1: where to start – and what you need to have in place – in order to begin a career change.
See you tomorrow,
Natasha
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Natasha
Head Coach, Careershifters