A few weeks back we decided to have a yard sale to clear out some of the old junk that we’ve accumulated over the years.
A lot of it wasn’t actually junk – a Crate & Barrel rug, some nice furniture that didn’t work in our house anymore. But our yard sale didn’t go as well as we’d hoped, and we ended up with a lot of our stuff back in our garage.
I needed to purge.
But, of course, bombarded with about 8,000 other things I had to do, those things sat longer than I care to admit, taking up parking space in our garage and in my brain.
How often is what you want in your life and what happens in your life two different things? How big is the space between desire and action?
The problem is, sometimes the actions that we need to take aren’t entirely clear.
When it comes to knowing how to find the right career for you, or reaching other important goals in your life, it’s not always about procrastination. It’s often about not knowing what to do.
While cleaning out the garage might seem easy for you, I struggled to find time to do it, to decide what to donate and what to try to sell, and what I should secretly sneak back into the house because of its sentimental value.
Those things kept me paralyzed for weeks, but I guarantee that if I had called in a professional organizer, that garage would have been empty in a matter of hours.
Knowing how to move forward is the secret. Once someone can show you the path, you can move ahead full force.
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The same is true with your career change.
I’ve talked to a lot of folks who have said to me, “I just don’t know where to start. . . ”
Here’s what you’ve been missing when it comes to trying to figure out how to find the right career.
How To Find The Right Career: Why You Don’t Know Where It Is – Yet
There are a lot of reasons why you’re not in the right career and you don’t have your dream job, but none of them are insurmountable. You can have your dream job. You just have to overcome these 5 obstacles below. Once you overcome them, you’ll know how to find the right career for sure.
If you need to know how to find the right career, looking at the 5 steps above will unlock it.
1. You don’t know what the right career is.
Are you saying “Well, duh, Jess?”
I know, I know. You don’t know what the right career is, and it’s not a huge revelation that I just figured out. The thing is, figuring out the right career isn’t as complex as you think it is.
Finding the right career is at the intersection of what you want to do, what you can get paid to do, and what makes sense to do.
What you want to do is about what you’re passionate about, the skills you like to use, and the problems in the world you love to solve. Depending on who you are, you may place more importance on one of these areas and less on others.
What you can get paid to do is the real life application of your passions. In real life, you won’t be 100% passionate about your job every minute of every day. There will be frustrations and probably even parts you don’t like very much. But overall, if you’ve figured out what you like, you can match your passions to what you can get paid to do, even if you have to learn new skills or make changes in your life to do it.
Last is what makes sense to do. There might be certain things that don’t make sense to do. For example, you might decide you’re not going to quit your job and become an entrepreneur, go back to school for 8 years to become a doctor, or learn to juggle professionally – even though you’d like all those things. There are certain things that just don’t fit with your life (right now), and the right career for you has to fit where you are and what you need from a job.
When you can figure out all of these elements, you can get a much better sense of what the right career is.
2.You don’t know the steps you need to take to clarify your goal or get closer to your goal.
Once you have a better sense of your dream job, you still need to know how to get there.
Let’s say you want to become an author. How do you start? There’s the writing a book part. (Hard.) The getting published part. (Hard.) The selling copies part. (Hard.) The making money part. (Hard.) The quitting your day-job part. (Hard.)
And still, all you have is a desire. . . maybe not even a great story idea yet. 🙁
Getting there seems impossible.
Same is true whether your desire is to become an author or to switch careers into a completely new field, to do something different when you know that you’ll make a lot less money, or when you have no idea where to begin.
It can seem very complicated to map out where you’re going, but that’s exactly what you’ll need to do.
With your goal on one end and where you are now on the other, you can plot out each step that you’ll need to take and all the steps that you need in between to get there.
3. You don’t have the skills you need to land the right job.
The skills you need to find the right job include your ability to be clear about what you really want, and figuring out your path. But it’s also closing any skills gap you might have between what you know and what you need to know for whatever your next job is.
This involves having the ability to know what you don’t know – and then being able to figure out what to do about it. You have to think critically about yourself, which isn’t always the easiest thing to do, as sometimes the skills aren’t always hard skills. Sometimes they’re soft skills that are harder to identify.
Talk to someone (preferably many people) who are outside your industry or are in the industry you’d like to be in so you can get some perspective on what you need to be doing. The more you learn about other ways of doing things, the more perspective you’ll have on how to get out of your own lens.
4. You’re not in the right situation to find the right career.
I’ve always found it interesting that many of the great famous thinkers of the past knew each other. Like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Or C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison and Warren G. Harding.
Seems to be something to this idea of surrounding yourself with the right people and the right environment.
So how can you be inspired to do something great, something beyond what you’re doing now, when everyone in your life is just dragging you down?
This idea is so powerful, I’ll probably dedicate an entire post to it in the not-too-distant future, but for now I just want to mention that you need to begin to change your situation. Try to at least add one positive voice to the mix. . . one person who can help you see the possibilities and who believes you can do it!
5. You’re not in the right mindset to have your dream career.
What’s holding you back from having the life you really want?
Is it someone else, is it external factors, or is there any part of it that has to do with how you view the world and what you believe?
We all have limiting beliefs. We can all move closer to what we want by examining and breaking through those things that have a psychological grip on us.
The trick is seeing those things and moving through them.
You have to be open, and you have to be willing to see yourself. That willingness comes from an understanding that anything you see isn’t about a flaw or a weakness or something that’s wrong with you.
No.
It’s about your strength – your willingness and ability to look at the things that make you human (because they are there whether you look at them or not, and pretending they aren’t doesn’t make them go away.) We ALL have them. So there’s no point in being ashamed.
Be strong enough to face them and move through them so you can get what you want in your life. YOU are the only one stopping you.
How To Find The Right Career (For Real)
People have told you that finding the right career is about taking a career test or personality quiz. The truth is that while you can gain some insight into who you are with those things, what you really need is much more depth of understanding into yourself.
If you need to know how to find the right career, looking at the 5 steps above will unlock it.