Career Change: A Glittering Invitation To The Emotional Stalker
As much as you are yearning for career-change, and as much as the trends actually favor it, just contemplating a shift is a glittering invitation to four emotional stalkers who love nothing better than to play a nasty game of team-tag at your personal expense. When you unmask these bandits -- even a little -- they begin to lose their emotional charge ' leaving you free to more fully explore the opportunities to re-invent yourself.
'''
Stalker # 1: The Devil You Know. Just imagine that you're headed for work. You're at the station, briefcase and newspaper in hand, waiting in a narrow sea of gray look-alikes to catch the 6:10 train. Or, jailed in your car, radio droning, you crawl along the highway, hypnotized by the swaying bumpers ahead.
You arrive in town, grab your daily coffee, rise silently in a packed elevator and pad to your office, numb before you even start your day.
Work done, you reverse direction, back and forth, each day more effort than the one before.
After ten or twenty years, once colorful work has faded. Yet how good it feels to know the ropes! How seductively easy it is to stay stuck in what you know!
'
To break out of your comfort zone, tap into the most inspiring, personal benefit that your career change can bring you: More intriguing and challenging work' Being your own boss' or, perhaps it's the luxury of more personal time to pursue additional interests.
'
Mentally scan your list of friends and acquaintances who are fulfilled in their work. Who has a working life that you would like to have' Who is demonstrating that hard work and life in full bloom are not mutually exclusive realities'
Stalker #2: Clueless in Seattle. If you have a passion for particular work, or specialized expertise that you intend to lever, Fortune is smiling and waving you forward. Count yourself lucky, indeed! The rest of us face the thorny battle of believing that there is work out there for us that is we can embrace with our logic brain and our heart brain. Two different animals, worlds apart! Intellectually, lots of options exist, but how do you make the visceral leap that one of these options is right for you'
This was my #1 dilemma in 1999. Objectively, I knew that I had good skills that I could leverage. But emotionally I was not a believer. Since I didn't know what THE work was, how could I believe it was possible' I would have given up then and there, if it wasn't for a friend who suggested that I was trying to accomplish too much, too early. He saw me desperate to 'swing from tree to tree' and challenged my need to nail down exactly what I was going to do for work before I even started the change process.
'
'Figuring out what to do for a living IS the process,' he explained. 'The answers unfold slowly, with diligent work.' He encouraged me to explore my talents and work preferences fully and methodically. And to think with my heart. 'It's your heart,' he advised, 'that allows you to leap.'
'
Stalker #3: The Slippery Slope: Money. 'Our desire for financial security screams at a deafening crescendo and sabotages our willingness to step forward even one inch. Fat paychecks, bonuses, expense accounts, paid vacations and health benefits -- perks to flutter our hearts and, on occasion, puff our egos with a sense of status and independence. The green stuff pays our bills, educates our kids, entertains us and gives us a sense that all is well with the world.
'
Car' Mortgage' Health insurance' All of these are completely valid issues. But as long as you are still drawing a paycheck, worrying about financial ruin is completely self-defeating. Spend your energy constructively, working the math in a deliberate way and letting the results dictate your path ' not your fear.
Once I 'got' this wisdom, I scratched out budgets like a miser obsessed. The results weren't ideal, but they weren't devastating either. After chopping expenses and eliminating debt, my savings would support ......
Read More ...
|
