People Who Master These 10 Challenges Almost Always End Up In Jobs They Love
Reimagine what work can do for your life.
nortonrsx | Canva Are you wondering how to find a career you love during these turbulent and tumultuous times? It's perfectly normal to feel confused about what to let go of and what to endure to create a better future.
There's a balance between continuity and change we all wrestle with. Start with what endures, and adapt to what will enable you to feel more confident to embrace change.
Ten challenges mastered by the people who end up in jobs they love
1. Imagining a better future
Understand your values and purpose to reimagine your life. You already have skills and aptitudes. Think about what provides satisfaction to you first before seeking to replicate what you've already done. Imagine what your new work can do for you. Be bold!
Hard skills are useful — finance, marketing, analytics, sales, etc. But soft skills are essential — likeability, communication, collaboration, and active listening. Take inventory of both your hard and soft skills to show your whole person.
Know how to ask the right questions for self-guidance. If you can determine what kinds of people, work circumstances, projects, organizational structures, autonomy, and flexibility work best for you, then you can reimagine where you best fit to be truly engaged in your work.
Success factors in your next career phase are determined by your commitment to focus on communicating, networking, lifelong learning, and flexibility.
Reimagine your career paths to be broader than just one field or role. Rather than being fixed and predictable from present circumstances and experience, be open to possibilities.
No need to narrowly define yourself to what you already know.
Career coach Lisa Petsinis advised, "When I coach my clients, I take them through a journey of connecting with their authentic selves. This process includes exploring their needs, drives, values, interests, passions, talents, gifts, personality, and ways of operating. It also helps to reflect on your role models and why you hold them in such high esteem. Often, you embody the same characteristics — exploring them can give you profound insights into who you are and what you're meant to do with your life."
2. Avoiding pitfalls
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Besides narrowly defining yourself to the job you have had, other pitfalls can diminish success in your career planning.
Too many people hinder themselves by having an idea to change the organization to their agenda. Young people in particular have been characterized as having entitled attitudes or expectations for continuous affirmation.
Employers and team leaders hire you to find solutions, solve problems, contribute to a team, and be dependable — not to create problems or become a time drain on them and the company, as explored by an article in Business Horizons.
3. Thinking about their own lived experiences
Assess your "lived experience" — the experiences you have accumulated that make you a unique knowledgeable actor. Mine those golden insights, and start to compile those experiences that satisfied you the most. From those experiences, create a list of your preferences and proclivities.
"There's no way you can make a choice unless you first know your options," stated life coach Karen Finn, "Self-awareness exposes and clarifies those options. It holds a mirror up to those life experiences that have shaped your thoughts, triggered your feelings, and inspired your values. It connects your sensory experience in the present to its deep-seated history. And it gives you the opportunity to verify the applicability of that history to the experience at hand."
4. Considering where they fit in
Cultivate awareness of where you prefer to fit, what environment best suits you, and where you add value and are most valued.
Build your experience on what you know. Expand your comfort zone in terms of the region, field, or industry that you may choose in the future.
For example, a finance professional at a bank or consulting firm could transfer those skills and experience to become a CFO at a non-profit or foundation.
That individual may find applying those finance skills to a cause they care about is more satisfying for meaning and purpose.
5. Networking
Who do you know? Who knows you?
Networking enables you to connect with others to up your game, open mutual and shared opportunities, and develop business.
A lot of professional work is virtual so your reputation and branding will also be virtual. Build your online community so others can know you, provide opportunities, and champion you to their contacts.
6. Choosing where to live
Different regions can expand your experience, making you more valuable because you have varied contexts to bring to your work.
Today, you can live in one region and work virtually with anyone, anywhere, at any time, and in any way. A study in the Journal of Management & Organization explored how a geographically dispersed worker is becoming more the norm, and the Internet enables both work mobility and living stability.
7. Taking advantage of freedom
There's a permeable wall between sectors: government, universities, corporations, nonprofits, and start-up and entrepreneurial enterprises. Experience in each sector broadens your outlook and increases your professional contacts.
For example, working for the IRS for several years can enable a lawyer to become a more valuable tax litigation attorney because they have a better understanding of how the IRS works.
Parallel paths (working in several fields simultaneously) or sequential work (working in a client organization before you work as an agent or supplier to that company) is a viable approach to your career planning.
8. Finding a work culture that's a good fit
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The more aligned your values are to the culture, the better suited, the more successful, and the more comfortable you will be.
Success in a transition may depend on your fit with the boss and the organization’s business culture. Be discerning to avoid a bad match for you. Inquire, research, and recognize signals that a boss or a company may be wrong for you.
Develop relationships with clients, associates, and professionals who can help co-create or introduce you to opportunities. Go for the longer-term match for your career development.
9. Feeling empowered to choose a better human environment
Success in a transition may depend on your fit with the boss and the organization’s business culture, as explained by a report in Asia Pacific Management Review.
Develop relationships with clients, associates, and professionals, who can help co-create or introduce you to opportunities. Go for the longer-term match for your career development.
For example, a mergers and acquisitions broker will work with management in several companies. Even if some deals do not go through, those CEOs will get to know the broker. That relationship could blossom into a position in the company through the association on a project.
10. Being flexible and be able to pivot
Flexibility and the ability to pivot come more easily when you master something and you have autonomy, because you can work anywhere for anyone.
Focus your game plan on these things to be a good team member — lifelong learning; being able to read and send nonverbal and verbal communication signals; critical thinking, writing and speaking, and being flexible and able to pivot.
Times may have changed, but character, hard work, grit, and relationships endure as lasting virtues and values.
The most significant change is that virtual work is here to stay so you can reimagine your life and career: How you want to work, live, and engage life in a way that makes you feel whole, alive, shiny, and purposeful.
Isn’t that the point of it all?
Jeff Saperstein is an ICF-certified career coach and memoirist who works with business professionals who feel stuck and want a career transition.