How To Get Out Of A Career Rut and Discover New (& Better) Work Possibilities
Alert: Enriching career possibilities ahead!
If you set out from school with no real career in mind, you wouldn't be alone. Many people stumble into jobs and careers, based on what makes sense at the time. And often it isn’t even related to your area of study.
Then, after being in that line of work for many years, you sit at your desk, or you’re heading into work, and boom! You realize that you’re miserable.
But what can you do? You’re invested. You have commitments, bills, and obligations. You can’t leave your job or start down a totally new career path.
Or can you?
Before you do anything drastic like quit your job (no matter how satisfying that might feel at the time), it’s worth putting on the breaks and doing some introspection. This may involve talking to a trusted advisor, mentor, or coach to get more insight.
It could also mean leveraging other resources, such as a career assessment. Some assessments examine personality, some interests, some values; others measure ability and aptitude. You can find a number of career tests online; however, beware of what you’re getting. Free assessments are not created equally, and most do count as psychometric instruments with research to back them up.
The true value in taking a relevant and reliable psychometric assessment is to create awareness and remind you of your strengths and potential so that you can confidently move in the direction of greater career fulfillment. And debriefing with a certified coach allows you to digest the information in a methodical way. The process brilliantly allows you to hold up a mirror to yourself, discovering things like:
Your preferred way of interacting with the world is with spontaneity. This means you may prefer tight deadlines, varied assignments, or new experiences.
You prefer to work on your own rather than on teams, or you get your energy from work that allows you to think through a problem very thoroughly.
You possess a great deal of empathy and you are motivated by helping others, and not so much by persuading others in a business setting.
You thrive on making decisions with a degree of risk and at a fast pace.
You have an aptitude for verbal reasoning, as opposed to numerical reasoning, but overall you have tremendous learning agility.
You value teamwork and you need to be in a work environment that puts a premium on that, too.
Insights such as these help you to create a picture of who you are and what type of works is ideal for you. And, working with a coach can help you envision possibilities that you might never have considered alone.
Many of my clients also want help deciding on their target job. There are many more options these days, and determining work that fits can be daunting. I work with them to sift through the information in an objective way — especially when everyone else in their life has an opinion.
Much of the work in career exploration involves shifting your mindset and dispelling limiting beliefs about what is and isn’t possible about a mid-career transition, and figuring out a way to get what you’ve decided you want for your life.
No matter how lost you are on your career journey, you can get back on track again. You don’t have to feel stuck in your dead-end, unfulfilling job. Instead, you could be on your way to appreciating your current job more, fine-tuning your role in some way, or building a path in an entirely new and enriching career direction.
Lisa Petsinis is a certified career coach (ACC) and former HR leader who works with resourceful individuals to get unstuck in their careers and create more joy, meaning, and success doing what they love. Contact her for a free breakthrough coaching call, find out which career assessment is right for you, and create positive change in your life starting today.