Do you try to do some career decision making, and find you’d rather be plucking your eyelashes out one by one?
It’s excruciatingly painful.
But career decision making doesn’t have to be so hard. The problem is that when we sit down to make career decisions, especially the decision about what to do next in our career when we don’t like what we’re doing right now, we over complicate things.
I’ll show you what I mean.
The Way Most People Do Career Decision Making
The way most people go about career decision making is smart, if you think about it, but it gets you no where. The reason you do it is because you’re a highly evolved thinking machine, designed to calculate at a million miles a minute.
Normally, you look at what your career options are, and you quickly eliminate choices:
- I can’t do that because it’s too risky.
- I can’t do that because I don’t have the skills.
- I can’t do that because my partner will think I’ve lost my mind.
- And so on.
In regular life, we have to think this way.
What do I want for lunch?
- Not tuna, I’m allergic.
- Not turkey, it wasn’t so great here last time.
- Not ham, had that yesterday.
- Roast beef!
You can’t spend an hour and a half making a decision about your sandwich, for obvious reasons. Your brain is designed to think quick and make decisions constantly.
Career Decision Making Isn’t Like Other Decisions
Career decision making is the exception to the rule. You can’t make these decisions like other decisions.
Why?
Because it’s a different kind of problem. It’s a problem where you don’t know a lot of the information.
Career Decision Making Walks Into a Deli
Imagine if you were ordering lunch and you’d never eaten anything before. What do you want for lunch now?
You’d have to try out some stuff, right? You’d have to learn what you like and what you don’t like, what you’re allergic to, what works for you.
Same is true with your career.
You can’t just walk into the career store (!) and order up some Marketing Operations Manager with a side of sour pickles. You have to try stuff out first.
So when it comes to figuring out what to do next, you have to slow things down. Way down.
Don’t just bang your head against the freezer case and wonder why in the heck you don’t know what you want to do next.
Give yourself the time and space you need to do the career exploration you need to do.
Career Decision Making Process
There’s more to career decision making than learning every option that’s out there, and even trying things (even virtually, i.e. learning about them). There’s also a process that I use in my coaching that will help you figure out what you need in your own career so you literally design your dream job.
You may not be able to find a job that matches your dream criteria 100%, but that’s ok. You’ll know what you’re looking for, where you’re compromising, and most importantly, you’ll be sent in the right direction so you can make the career decisions that are giving you so much trouble now.