7 videos with career change advice that makes perfect sense
As a career coach, I'm a compulsive researcher. There are thousands of articles and thought-provoking videos on career change. I love tracking down interesting and occasionally contrarian perspectives on making successful career transitions.
Some of what I've learned has led me to question aspects of the conventional wisdom around uncovering your singular hardwired 'passion' as the holy grail of career and indeed life fulfilment.
Given that most of us are destined to change careers around five times in our lifetimes, do we need a more complex and nuanced discussion around purpose and passion?
If your career change is proving elusive, at least for the moment, these seven pieces of randomly ordered, somewhat contradictory advice may help.
Beware of backward swimming fish (11 minutes)
If you're falling foul of some common career change assumptions, this TED Talk is for you.
Presenter Isaac Lidsky is powerfully placed (for reasons I'll let you discover for yourself) to explain how 'faulty leaps of logic' fuel our assumptions and fill our heads with 'backward swimming fish.'
He gives a lucid, entertaining account of how each of us creates our own unique visual virtual reality largely shaped by what we feel and fear. 'Awfulising' - the fear-driven art of going straight from 'unknown' to 'awful' 'is on Lidsky's list of things ways we sabotage our vision of what's possible and what's desirable.
He challenges us to distinguish between sight and vision. He asks us to check the logic and evidence backing our assumptions around who we are and what we can achieve.
Bump into new opportunities (14 minutes)
If your trusty network isn't generating juicy career change leads, lend Tanya Menon your ears. Her TED talk is about bumping into new opportunities by being a bit braver and a bit less predictable. She contends that your best opportunities lie with someone you haven't yet met.
Changing careers is unsettling, chaotic even. So, it's only human to want to stick close to home and who you know. Then again, changing careers means finding fresh insight and exploring unchartered waters. So, where to begin?
As a researcher and organisational psychologist, Menon has done some exploring on your behalf. She has some excellent and intriguing tips on 'resetting your social search engine' to connect to new people. These include 'fighting your filters' and talking to the least interesting or the most irritating person in the room.
Success fuels passion (11 minutes)
One of the potentially paralysing obstacles to successful career change is getting stuck believing you're hunting for one BIG high-impact job. Writer and brand guru Terri Trespicio's witty rebuff of the 'single passion myth', is a refreshing insight into the downside of searching obsessively for just one path to a purposeful career.
She believes that 'success fuels passion' and that we can find purposeful work in unexpected and underrated roles. Maybe we need to do unspectacular-looking jobs well, at least for a time. After a fruitless wait for her dream job to appear, Trespicio gave in to her mother's plea to 'just take a job, any job' (it turned out well and launched her improvised and impressive career path).
So perhaps consider not holding out for your dream job if it's just not appearing. Instead, hold your nose and jump into a job that looks less than ideal. Against the odds, it might propel you towards your purpose or gently point you in the right direction.
Act first, reflect later (15 minutes)
Writer and 'cultural philosopher' Roman Krznaric advocates turning the conventional career searching 'plan and implement 'approach on its carefully structured head. This approach makes sense to me and forms part of the exploration process I use with clients.
Get your 'don't know' mind on and expose yourself to a range of possible and improbable options. Ask to shadow someone in a job outside your comfort zone that appeals to your braver self. You can learn amazing things about yourself and the world if you give something new a try, even just for a day. Volunteer or experiment on the side. Set up what Krznaric calls 'a branching project' outside of work time, doing something you love to do, and watching where this leads.
Ask your eight-year-old self (24 minutes)
Find this surprisingly smart advice in a touching piece of career change storytelling from Ian Sanders, founder of the 'Do - Encouragement Network.' When you're stuck for inspiration and direction as Saunders was, remember who you were at eight.
Why is this a good idea? At eight, most of us are still fearlessly honest and fairly clear about who we are. The angst and insecurity of adolescence and beyond is still to come. Chances are, eight-year-old you will give you a straightforward and remarkably sensible answer to any 'what next?' question.
I was a quiet and curious kid. I loved solo adventures, battling through nature to the stream near our house, powering through endless books with my cat on my lap, and baking creations with my mum. If I asked eight-year-old me for unsticking thoughts, I'm pretty sure she'd say something like, 'You're smart enough to fix this. You've done it before. Wait a bit, have a good look, you'll know when to move and what to say. In the meantime, bake a cake and eat it in the sunshine.'
Rise to your own occasion (18 minutes)
Don't stay in a job you hate because someone tells you it will 'build your resume.' This is step one in Live your legend's founder Scott Dinsmore's take on successful career change. Step two involves 'becoming a self-expert.' Dinsmore suggests journaling to connect your daily experiences to your strengths and values. He encourages aiming to do seemingly (for you) impossible things and staying attuned to the qualities of people around you.
For career changers, this means filtering out advice and opinion that doesn't support your well-founded sense of self, setting impressive personal goals, and connecting to a community of positive people whose energy and direction match your own.
Go 'home' (8 minutes)
Writer Elizabeth Gilbert gives a lucid and moving description of how to find 'home' as a safe place from 'the random hurricanes of outcomes.' As Gilbert describes it, this particular home is not physical. Gilbert's home is her writing - where the success or failure of her work matters much less than her 'singular devotion to writing for its own sake. When confronted with the fear-laden prospect of writing a follow-up to her wildly successful 'Eat, Pray, Love,' she simply went home and wrote.
How can you find your home? You'll know it as that positive, life-affirming pursuit that you love doing regardless of any success or failure it brings. It's that place where you're so absorbed by the thing you love that you lose track of time. You can go there when you're afraid or inspired or excited or lost. No matter how you arrive, you'll find creativity and perspective and balance, and the courage to continue.
By Jo Green, Career Change Coach
I know what it feels like to be lost in your career. I also know that when you find what you love, heart and soul, your life changes. I work every day with people who are reshaping their current careers, starting new enterprises or searching for a new direction. Basically I help people who don’t like their job to figure out what to do instead!
As a Careershifters and Firework Advanced Certified Coach and experienced career changer myself, I can help you figure out what fulfilling work looks like for you.
Drop me a note to organise a free 20 minute consultation to chat about your career change and how coaching could help.
