#CareerAdvice – #YourCareer – 5 Things You Can Do Today To Start Moving Toward A #JobChange . Here are Five Things you can Start Doing Immediately to Steer your Work Life toward Greater Purpose and Meaning.
What do you do when you find yourself unhappy with your job despite being reasonably successful and decently paid? This is certainly a privileged problem, but that doesn’t mean you should leave it unaddressed. Your life is too precious to spend it working bored and detached.
According to Gallup, 70% of American workers rate themselves as “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work. And while some of them are in toxic environments with significant reasons to be disgruntled, many more find themselves in decent, reasonable jobs that are misaligned with the work they’d enjoy most.
If this describes you, your nagging dissatisfaction may have you slowly draining energy at work like a leaky balloon. You aren’t just tired, you are thoroughly uninspired.
Perhaps, like me, you are oriented towards safety and security. You have always believed that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and would prefer to settle for the safe and comfortable career path you’re already on than to shake things up with little certainty around where you truly want to go next.
But here’s a secret: few people ever know exactly what their dreams are or everything they want from their career. Even those experiencing extraordinary success in arenas that are notably hard to break into started out on an uncertain path and simply took one step after another.
So while the “follow your passion” advice is almost certain to overwhelm you with analysis paralysis, taking small actions helps you get going so you can make progress and gain clarity along the way.
Here are five things you can start doing immediately to steer your work life toward greater purpose and meaning. Will these first steps lead to a dramatic career change? Maybe down the road, but that isn’t the point right now. Your only goal for today is to get reenergized about the potential for your work life and head toward something new.
1. Schedule an exploratory call
Reach out to someone in your network that you trust for career advice or know to be plugged into an area of work that interests you. Email them today and ask to set up a call or meeting to touch base in the next few months. This lack of urgency is perfectly fine—just get it scheduled. People are busy and they appreciate flexibility, which also indicates that you genuinely want to connect rather than needing something. Schedule several meetings like this over the next few weeks and use each one to help discern what ideas capture your attention.
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2. Set up Google alerts
If you have more than one passion, you may get confused about which one to pursue next. Take the time, right now, to set up one or several Google alerts that will send you daily relevant articles and updates for the keywords you chose. Start each day learning more about a new and different area.
Read these alerts as often as you can and assess how each piece of new information makes you feel. Do you want to read more or are you starting to get bored again? Did the information spur a new awareness, project or direction? Rarely will your passions spark without provocation; do the work to seek out and trigger fresh motivation.
3. Share a new career interest on social media
Whether you are trying to or not, you are branding yourself and attracting or deflecting new opportunities through your social media use. Be careful to attract the people and things that will help propel you toward what you truly want.
Start by sharing an article or tweeting on a new area of interest. Even if you don’t get an immediate response, by continually sharing content in a new area, you will be rebranding yourself slowly but surely. It is only a matter of time before someone brings you an opportunity to further engage with your topic of interest.
4. Interact with a luminary
Send a direct and well-informed message through email or social media to a thought-leader in a business, industry or company you are feeling drawn to. Comment on a recent project or news story involving them and how it is shaping or impacting your life. You may worry that they might find your message unwanted, but the reality is that most people doing influential work are driven by deeper motivators to help others, so your feedback is welcomed and personally gratifying.
Avoid the megastars (e.g. Oprah Winfrey or Jeff Bezos) and there is a good chance your message may receive a response. But either way, reaching out to people doing work that interests you is the first step to neutralizing your perception that luminaries are special and inaccessible. These people are not any different than you are, they simply have a head start.
5. Embrace the now
You are not stuck in your current job, you are just there presently. Say this out loud right now if you’re alone: Yes for now. “Yes for now” is a mantra to remind yourself that where you are today is perfectly fine, but it is not where you have to stay. Each new moment will present you with a new reality and you are already taking steps today that will lead you to a different tomorrow.
Kourtney Whitehead is a career expert and author of Working Whole. You can learn more about her work at Simply Service.
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