When you decide THE answer to career happiness is wholesale career change, not just ONE answer, you’re officially out of your mind. Check this out. You want out of the foul situation you’re in now and you want out 17 minutes ago. Danger!
Can You Say, “Compound felony”? Not only do you want change for the better, a lot better, you unknowingly have hit upon a decision that not only calls for a job change, but a new job you have never done before. Very likely it’s also in a “foreign” field, and with which your chances of excelling are slim and none. And the job market is vicious.
Too harsh? Unless you are serial career changer, like Richard Branson, with great resources, sorry, you’re like a lot of us. You are running “from” something, instead of “to” something that is better, is researched, and is real. Re-read. Is that what you’re doing? Re-think it.
Most Of What We Want TO Do Usually Equals What NOT To Do!
Merriam (not her real name) had background professionally preparing and serving food and convinced she was good making ceramics. People at her workplace liked and bought her creations. She wanted out of corporate life. Her idea was to open café and serve customers sandwiches and salad, while they made kiln-dried figurines and amazing pots. It never happened. She got stuck. She discovered she was unable to cause seamless transition from 9 to 5 decent paying job, job, to being an independent business person totally dependent upon her own whit and guile.
What TO do!
1) Do what Merriam did not do, your homework. Try on the idea she had by, for example, working part time a few evenings or as weekend fill-in for someone who owns a Ceramic Café or some other discipline you love.
2) Pour over Dr. Barbara Reinhold’s classic one pager, “10 Mistakes Career Changers Make” via her site: Barbara (dash) Reinhold (dot) com.
3) Experience solid advice in the form of real-life stories about others who have made significant career changes, written by virtual colleague, Herminia Ibarra, author of non-self-help book, Working Identity. I think she’s a genius because she agrees with my philosophy of making career changes, “Try on the new career before buying into it”. That’s the theme of Working Identity‘s series of true stories voiced by successful career changers.
Don’t believe what I write and say, just read and listen and decide. Do your homework like you mean it. Ignore naysayers, “You’ll never make it in the ‘outside world’!” Get acquainted online with Dr. Barbara Reinhold, author Herminia Ibarra, and others who are not pitching you to pay them money. Connect. Clarify. Collaborate. Cheerlead. Commit. You’ll soon discover how serious you are about your future, and how you can be less distracted by your present circumstances, which, by the way, are subject to change in less than 24 hours. Stay hungry.