What do you do if you want to make a career change, but your current job sucks up all your energy? 😞
It’s a bind, right?
The reason you want to shift is also the reason you feel you can’t!
Either work is hijacking your time or is sapping any willpower you may have had, so you find it hard to take even small steps in a new direction.
In this situation, a “bridge job” can be a great strategy.
Here’s to all the parents who’ve been juggling like mad the past two weeks of Easter holiday! I see you…
… Spending the past month coordinating complex childcare arrangements on a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet…
… Project planning a full timetable of activities, entertainment and travel arrangements…
… Multitasking between Zoom meetings, sofa deep-dives for tiny lost Lego parts and fish finger prep…
We think we see the world as it is, and we can feel so certain in our convictions, but our view of the world is clouded by preconceptions, judgements and biases.
Having worked in the industry, I know Blue Monday is PR BS, AND I also know it can be a particularly depressing time of year for you if you’re in the wrong job (a fact I also discovered in my previous career!)
So what can you do if your work is making you blue?
We humans are generally pretty rubbish about predicting what’s going to happen. Psychology research has shown that our cognitive biases mean we tend to…
… be overly optimistic about what’s going to happen to us (believing bad things happen to other people)
… assume that, however much we can see we have changed in the past, the way we are now is going to stay consistent (the “end of history illusion”), AND
… underestimate how well we’ll cope if we DO face challenges ahead.
What do you do if you want to make a career change, but your current job sucks up all your energy? 😞
It’s a bind, right?
The reason you want to shift is also the reason you feel you can’t!
Either work is hijacking your time or is sapping any willpower you may have had, so you find it hard to take even small steps in a new direction.
In this situation, a “bridge job” can be a great strategy.
If you're thinking "New Year, new job", you might be reflecting on this question, and it's one that BBC's #WomansHour tackled last week with some great advice shared by the experts.
Here are some of the most important points I heard:
I used to spend days like these crying on a bus to work. Grey, rainy January mornings on the way to somewhere I didn't want to go. Dreading the day and the week ahead, and asking myself "is this really IT?". I felt so trapped - and not just because we were stuck in a traffic jam with about eight other number 73 buses, fighting our way through London's Kings Cross. I was stuck in a career and life that wasn't one I felt I'd chosen, but that I'd somehow landed in, and I had no idea how to change.
Before I changed careers and when I was feeling pretty stuck, I landed on a great book by John Spencer Williams called F**k Work, Let's Play. It completely reframed work to me and helped me shake off a lot of the weightiness I was carrying around about "career" - even though, if I'm honest, I still didn't truly believe that kind of playful work-life was possible for me.
What does it take to turn against the tide of normalcy and social conditioning and to forge your own path?
My brilliant colleague Natasha Stanley has written a great piece on the Careershifters website on what she calls the "Renegade Mindset", and how to cultivate it for career change:
Navigating a big life upheaval such as a career change is never going to be easy. There are times where the uncertainty feels too uncomfortable or the magnitude of the task too big to bear.
In those moments, the temptation can be to tell yourself your current work situation isn't too bad, that maybe you could just stay where you are, and take the path of least resistance.
But if we really want to make a shift, we have to learn to navigate change effectively, accepting that it's going to be difficult and drawing on strategies to ensure we can do what it takes.
