Inner peace is one of my most cherished values. Maybe because I feel things too much, I’m all about doing things with the least amount of emotional pain as possible.
But when it comes to making a career change, you know as well as I do, we are up for an emotional roller coaster. So what can we do?
In my experience as a career coach, and simplifying things a bit, I’ve noticed that there are 3 steps than, when followed sequentially, ease away lots of our career change fears.
And interestingly enough, the whole process resembles a lot how we cultivate a healthy love relationship, because there are lots of similarities between growing a healthy love relationship with someone and finding your ideal career.
Do you want to avoid a lot of anxiety, self-doubts and worry in your career transition?
Then, let’s identify what those 3 steps are.
The 3 step process to finding your ideal career path
Step one: Scan the horizon for potential interests.
Your attention is focused on finding any signs of attraction: career paths that seem interesting, activities that awaken your passion or engage your heart (and not just your mind) somehow.
Your best mindset at this stage is: “What would I love to do?”
The careers you’ll identify now have the potential of becoming a deep love of yours in the future (careerwise, I mean).
Step two: “Date” those interesting career ideas you’ve found.
You do this by running a series of what I call F.U.N. projects.
Your mindset now is: “I’m free to explore without any pressure”.
A note on F.U.N. projects
These are 30 day experiments designed to help you:
1) Find clarity about one question
2) Understand some aspect of yourself and
3) Fulfill an unmet Need of yours.
There are at least three kinds of experiments you could run at this stage, and choosing which one to run will depend on what kind of information you need to get from it.
However there are two experiments I absolutely suggest all my career change clients to run:
One is The Reality Check Experiment, because it will help you figure out if you really love the “doing part” of any career or business idea.
And the other one is the Financial Viability Experiment in which you get to proof that your biz idea will be able to sustain you financially.
Once you’ve been able to evaluate your ideas in real life, you are ready to take the next step.
Step 3: Make a short term Commitment.
With all the valuable information you’ve gathered in steps 1 and 2, now you are able to make a wiser career choice. Here is where you say: “Yes I do…want to turn this into my career” (or if you are a multifaceted woman, add that activity to your portfolio career).
You do this by creating a longer project with the intention of turning it into a real business, while keeping an open mind for any tweaks and adjustments you’ll need to make along the way.
The reason why this is the peaceful way of making a career change is that you’re not putting unecessary pressure on yourself.
You are NOT commiting to anything when it’s still too soon. Instead you’re getting a first hand experience, and gaining invaluable information about how you feel doing that particular thing.
Thus, when you follow these 3 steps sequentially, you gain the confidence you need to move forward fearlessly, knowing you’ve made your career choice based on reality, not just fantasy.
Charo’s Coaching Challenge
Where in the process are you right now? To figure out where you are in relationship to your career change right now, choose the sentence that best describes your current situation:
- I don’t know what I want to be doing with my life.
- I already have an idea of what I want, but I’m stuck because I lack confidence or have doubts.
- I’m sure of what I want to do but I don’t know how to get started.
Each one of these, and its variations, reflect the 3 step process I described above. So you can use them to choose your next steps.
You might need to…
- Engage yourself in some fun activities to help you reconnect with your joy and passion.
- Run a real life experiment to see how you feel with a specific career path or business idea.
- Commit to creating a short to middle term project related to your ideal career or biz idea.
Bonus tip:
If you are still confused about what career path to choose, the Career Clarity Cards may be able to help you.
Get FREE access to them by visiting this link:
http://www.tappingyourpurpose.com/freestaff/careerclaritycards/
P.S. Have you found this article useful? Please share it with your friends. Thank you!
Charo