With 2014 on the horizon, you may be reflecting on the past year and thinking of what changes you’d like to make in the year to come. If you’ve been asking Santy Claus for a career that feels like home, there are some things you can do to make sure you don’t end up with a stocking full of career coal.
After having ushered dozens of clients through career change, I’ve picked up on some patterns of who has the best career change experience. Sure, once you get to me I walk you through the transition process step by step, but what about before you get to me?
What can you do before you embark on your career change in earnest to set you up for success?
Today I’m sharing 3 things that my most successful clients do before they come to me, and some resources to help you make them happen.
3 Ways to Prepare for Career Change
1. Get your life crisis-free.
You’re not going to find your dream career when you have higher-order crises going on in your life. Need a divorce? Major health problems? Crippling debt? Those trump career change. You don’t have to be perfect or have all your “stuff” worked out before you’re ready to welcome a new career, but you do need a certain level of stability.
You are a limited resource. Clean up the big stuff, get that foundation set, and then you’ll be ready to ease into a new career.
Need help getting out of crisis? Pay for it. Get a therapist. Get a financial advisor. Get a life coach. This is your life. What could possibly be a more worthy investment?
2. Reconnect with yourself.
It’s self-exploration time. People are often out of career alignment because they’ve lost touch with some part of themselves. This is an erosion. It happens subtley and over time, and it totally ruins any chance of fulfillment in your career.
If you don’t know who you are, how can you expect to get what you want? And don’t try to rely on who you were; you need current information. What you majored in in college or wanted to do as a kid is probably irrelevant by now.
There are many resources out there for this kind of thing. Here are some client favorites:
The Desire Map. (affiliate link) Desire Map people love them some Your Career Homecoming, and vice versa.
Unravelling. An ecourse from writer-photographer Susannah Conway, this course primes you for personal realizations.
The Artists Way. If you have any creative leanings, this book a nice self-guided way to reconnect with your creativity.
3. Join a world where your dream is the norm.
So you don’t know what you want to do yet. You do know that you want to do something meaningful, be energized by your work, and support yourself with it. That combination may feel impossible right now. Maybe you even think that it’s a myth, or only for other people. If you’re honest, for people with sugar daddies, trust funds, or some kind of hippy fairy dust that you’ll never posses.
News flash: if you don’t believe it’s possible for you, then it’s not.
Start hanging out with people, online or offline, who have the kind of career you want. Or who are at least working towards it. Right now as you read this, there are people living the kind of life you’d like to have. And this life is 100% available to you. Start shouldering up to it now!
Peek through the windows and you’ll start to see that what you want is not unrealistic. Join a community where your outrageous dream is what’s accepted as normal. When you’re ready to go for it, it will be a much easier transition, and you’ll people to help support you.
Your turn. In the comments, let me know…
How will you prepare the way for your Homecoming Career?