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.
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.
When it comes to managing our lives, and especially our careers, we can be so terribly, and stiflingly earnest. It’s like it’s this serious weighty problem we have to solve, and that the only way to solve it is to spend all our time making To Do lists and five year plans, and screwing up our foreheads and trying to come up with the most effective, efficient, sensible, pragmatic, responsible life choices. In other words, we feel like we have to be an ‘adult’ – and that this means leaving behind the playful, exploratory, intuitive way we went about our lives as children.
