Life establishes a rhythm and a pattern. It is often referred to as the status quo. As the world continues to evolve, it may feel like your life is adapting with it, or your career never changes, grows, or advances. Days go by and nothing changes. Your thoughts about the future are focused on getting ahead and perhaps how you will create better traction to advance the knowledge, skills, and talents you possess. He may feel underappreciated, has been passed over for positions and/or believes he is underpaid for his role. Whatever the case, his daily grind may have been consumed with timely thoughts about achieving a better future.
Then, when a major life event occurs, such as a global crisis, it creates an opportunity to reevaluate the thoughts and plans you’ve had for your career. When that happens, you have a choice, you can use it as a moment to reflect and redirect your focus, or you can give in to fear and become paralyzed by inaction. While it may seem counterintuitive, take this time to re-prioritize your goals and revisit your race plan. The reason it may seem like an inappropriate approach, as you await resolution to a situation that seems so out of control, is that being productive can actually help calm your mind and put you in a logical frame of reference.
While you are in the process of evaluating your career and developing new plans to revive it again, you will be better able to control your emotional reactions to the events you are hearing about and reading about. This is due to a change in the way your mind processes information or takes cognitive control once again of the flood of information being received through working memory. You can start this type of process by implementing a guided career overview plan and asking yourself a series of self-analysis questions.
Guided Run Overview
You first begin a revision process by cleaning up the mental clutter in your own mind. There will be information and misinformation that you have been collecting about current events, which has created doubt, fear, and probably a sense of unease over time about your future. Start by assessing your needs and those of those who depend on you or live with you. Then look for valid information sources, not second-hand information sources. Go directly to those sources that will provide you with facts, data and statistics. This is the only way you can plan with certainty and prevent the flow of speculation from entering your mind. You will find that you are also engaging the use of logic and critical thinking skills as you use this thought process.
Once you’ve mentally prepared for the basic necessities required and engaged your rational thinking skills, you can now begin to use those same reasoning skills for a career plan review. By this time, it is likely that she has changed her entire perspective on her career, priorities have changed, and the way she works has changed. He may be working from home as a remote worker or may have found himself without a job now. Whatever the case, and however difficult it may seem, now is the time for a guided career overview. Now more than ever, you are looking at your career from a completely different perspective.
To get started, detail your career goals. If you didn’t have clearly defined goals, create a list for your future in two-year period increments. This is a different approach than what you will read about in many self-help articles and it is one that I have used as a career coach to help improve the success rate in achieving each milestone. When goals are set too far out, those goals seem too long-term and can easily be forgotten. Shorter goals serve as checkpoints to keep in mind and can also become motivational cues to celebrate along the way as they are completed. If you already have career goals, you can build them back into a two-year approach as I’ve outlined.
As you think about your career goals, you may not know exactly where you are headed or what direction you would like to take next in your career. This is where the idea of ​​visualization can come in handy, as a tool for professional development. Imagine yourself two years from now, with the current crisis resolved, and describe what you see, feel, and think about your job or career. Consider what you aspire to be or become, now that you have a new outlook on life. If you are satisfied with your career and now want to spend more time with your loved ones, perhaps your next goal is to see yourself in a stable position, becoming an expert in this role.
Self-analysis questions
Now that you have begun the process of evaluating your career, from the perspective of examining what your future could be in the next few years, you can ask additional specific questions to continue the process of self-analysis. I have implemented the use of the following questions in various ways as a professional development coach and they may help you as well.
Objective question #1: Am I inspired by the career goals I have set?
What you want to develop are specific career goals, not generic ones. An example of a generic goal would be: I am going to be recognized for my hard work in two years. In contrast, the most effective checkpoints to develop every couple of years are those that inspire you to grow and progress, depending on what your priorities are for your life and career. For example, if you want to remain steady and steady, visualize yourself becoming an expert right now, period. If you would like to advance, please name a specific position you are interested in filling. For example, if you aspire to a managerial position, set this as a marker for your first checkpoint.
Objective question #2: Is there something that prevents me from achieving these professional goals?
When you have established inspirational checkpoints, during specific two-year periods, you can determine if anything will be needed to ensure you are prepared. For example, will you need training or continuing education? Will you need to gain new knowledge and/or acquire new skills to progress or advance? You may need to think ahead and do some research to prepare your self-development plan. After doing some research, you can map out the next few months and further refine the steps you’ll take to work toward a new result.
Objective question #3: Have I been involved in any form of negative self-talk?
You may or may not be aware of the thoughts that are being held about you, and this is something I recommend that you start to become more aware and pay attention to. This self-talk can be supportive and help you feel good about your life and the decisions you make, or you can get caught up in a pattern of negative self-talk that belittles and undermines your best intentions and efforts. Some of the hardest lessons I’ve seen others learn as a career coach is that of self-empathy, or being able to forgive yourself for past events and perceived mistakes. If you can support yourself, even when you’re in the worst possible situation, you’ll find that recovery comes much sooner.
Leading question #4: Do I think I can reach and complete the first established race goal?
This question ties directly to the self-talk question above and relates to your beliefs about yourself. If you were to look at the career plan that you have developed for yourself, would you honestly say that you could achieve it? Do you believe that you have the potential to complete what you set out to achieve? Those may seem like obvious questions, and yet if you can’t reconcile your beliefs with your career plan, you may never achieve the goals you’ve set. A belief starts with feeling some level of hope instead of hopelessness. If you are developing a plan for the future, you must believe to some degree that your future can change. If you’re creating this plan for any other reason, it won’t happen. This is the moment to decide: I believe in myself and I believe that I can achieve these goals.
Leading Question #5: Do I know what I am capable of achieving?
To solidify your beliefs and make them meaningful rather than empty statements, you need to start with an assessment of your strengths. Your strengths are the foundation that creates your ability to change, learn, grow, and adapt. You will use these strengths to also work on areas of development. As you look to the future and assess what you need to be prepared for, don’t consider yourself lacking or weak. These are opportunities for professional development. You also shouldn’t be afraid to identify areas that need improvement, just be vigilant and ready to prepare. You can adapt, and you have both the capacity and the potential to learn. This renewed sense of self-awareness will ultimately make you stronger as you look to the future with confidence.
Is it time for a new career path?
Carrying out a career analysis can be an eye-opening experience, especially if you have a new sense of self due to the conditions of work and the world. Once you’ve completed the above process, you can know for sure which direction your career path is headed, assuming working conditions return to normal soon. You may feel a sense of renewal about the type of work you are doing and want to stay in the same job and with the same employer. However, the analysis may cause you to consider a different perspective. Perhaps now your priorities have changed, or been re-emphasized, and you now have the firm intention of finding a new career path. The analysis now helped him move in another direction and he established a plan to begin a journey to another destination. Regardless of which of these scenarios applies to you, you should feel empowered to be better in charge of your career and ready to take action once the business world is back up and running.
The value of productive thinking
The economic health of the nation is worrisome and it is unknown when businesses will return to some level of normality. However, this should not prevent you from developing a career plan and preparing for the future. If history is any indicator of how humanity and the economy operate in times of global crisis, there will eventually be a period of recovery. It may not happen quickly, and for many companies, it may take a significant period of time to return to growth. However, you can still keep your mind sharp and focused on your own personal development, which in turn will allow you to better deal with both a time of crisis and recovery. As you work on your own development plans, you engage the rational side of your mind and this keeps emotional reactions in check. The more you can keep thinking productively, the better you can take care of yourself and others as well. Perhaps logical thinking will help support yourself and the business you work for while you wait for the crisis to subsidize them.