Are you feeling a bit stuck in your career?

 

Wondering how you can get unstuck and get your career back on track?

 

Keep listening and I will explain 5 ways to help you get unstuck and give you career clarity ….

 

how you can enjoy what you are doing day each day at work

 

and how to build a great career along the way.

 

In this episode, I’m going to be talking about being stuck in your career

 

What it means to be stuck

Why we get stuck in our careers

What’s at stake if we remain stuck, and

How to get unstuck – think of this episode as being like WD40 for your career.

 

Hello again everybody

 

Thanks for joining me again on the podcast

 

So, let’s dive into today’s topic. 

 

Being Stuck or to bastardise the word – Stuckness – You won’t find that word in the English dictionary, but hey ho!

 

What does it mean to be stuck – in either your job or your career?

 

 

•      Well in simple terms it’s the state of being unable to move or progress in your career

 

•      Not knowing whether you should look for another job or career

 

•      If you did look, what job or career would suit you

 

•      Not knowing what the options are

 

•      Wondering whether it’s normal to feel this way, and maybe thinking you should just get on with it

 

•      So, being stuck is a combination of not having clarity and Feeling paralysis to do anything about it

 

•      Being stuck can feel frustrating and to be honest a bit depressing

 

 

So, this might be you right now, or maybe you felt this way in the past.

 

Or this could happen to you in the future, 

 

so, it’s an important subject for us all

 

So important in fact that I want to cover what’s at stake right at the outset:

 

And, if you think about what is at stake, it’s those things that are the other side of being stuck.

 

What is beyond the stuckness for you?

 

So,

 

As an absolute minimum this probably means having career clarity and no longer feeling stuck, feeling ok about your career

 

And that’s a pretty good place to be

 

But I want you to think beyond this, to go a little bit further in your thinking

 

To, having career clarity, becoming unstuck and moving towards a job and career that you will love, that will give you enjoyment and satisfaction.

 

•      Because enjoying your job is important, you are going to be spending a long time at work

•      When you enjoy your job you are much more likely to be more successful

•      You will have better health, including mental health

 

•      And you will have a more positive impact on those around you, family and friends for example

 

So, having career clarity, options for what’s next and movement when it comes to your job and career are vitally important. 

 

So, we need to banish the stuckness.

 

But first …

 

Let’s explore why we get stuck

 

And I’m going to split this into 2 aspects:

 

The first aspect is feeling like you’re not in the right role, job or career but at the same you’re not sure how to fix that, how to find a role or career that would be ideal for you.

 

And the second aspect is the emotional resistance we have to resolving or overcoming our stuckness.

 

So, for example, I’m an Accountant but I get a sense that I am in the wrong career

 

But and here comes the sense of being stuck

 

I don’t know how to find out what career would be better suit me and I am resistant to finding out. 

 

Can you see there are 2 parts there?

 

And also, why being stuck can be so paralysing.

 

So, if we look at the first part – this is where you feel like you’re not in the right role, job or career but at the same you’re not sure how to find a role or career that would be ideal for you.

 

 

•      In terms of our Education system. We are educated but not educated well on how to manage our careers. 

•      We follow the breadcrumbs of what we are good at at school and college, but we have no way of knowing if what we are good at will lead us to what we will enjoy.

 

Then, when we start looking at career options ..

 

•      What we want from a job doesn’t necessarily equate to what we enjoy doing, we focus on the extrinsic aspects of work, rather than our intrinsic needs

•      So, there can be a mismatch between our values, skills and interests and what our job asks of us

 

•      Added to which the employment system, the job market, focuses on the efficient use of people resources rather than employee happiness. It isn’t the responsibility by and large for organisations to manage our careers

 

•      That’s up to us. But we haven’t been shown how to do this …

 

•      We don’t know how to look at our options and match these to our intrinsic needs

 

And, on top of all this, 

 

•      Society sees work as something to be endured not necessarily enjoyed

 

All this can contribute to the feeling that you’re not in the right role, job or career but at the same you’re not sure how to find a role or career that would be ideal for you.

 

 

And the second aspect of why we get stuck is the emotional resistance we have to resolving or overcoming our stuckness.

 

You wouldn’t think that we would resist doing something about a situation which we feel unhappy about or we need to change. But we do.

 

And the reason is to do with our brain’s evolutionary response to change.

 

This idea that we may need to look at other career options or job opportunities sends our ancient part of our brain into a tizzy. 

 

Our potential change idea represents uncertainty, and this fires our stress response and we become resistant and defensive, 

 

or we might withdraw from thinking about it or, 

 

and no surprise here, we get brain freeze.

 

When I first understood this it all made sense to me.

 

You feel like you’re not in the right role, job or career because frankly it would have been a miracle if you were. Based on what we know about the education and recruitment system and our own probably impoverished self-knowledge when it comes to choosing a career.

 

And at the same time

 

No wonder I was stuck …

 

So, I hope all that makes sense?

 

And in the second part of this episode, I am going to be giving you 5 ways that will help you to get unstuck and get career clarity ….

 

Ok, in the first part we talked about the reasons why you get stuck in your career.

 

Now, I am going to give you 5 ways that will help you to get unstuck and get career clarity ….

 

The first thing you can do is to Accept your current stuckness

 

Accept that you feel uncertain about your job and career

 

Accept that you don’t know what you next move should be and how to deal with that uncertainty

 

Accept that somehow, you are feeling resistant to making any changes

You can’t change how things are until you see the situation exactly as it is 

 

I also think Acceptance helps you to work from your prefrontal cortex which as we discussed earlier is the part of the brain responsible for critical thinking.

 

Acceptance just calms the whole primitive part of your brain down.

 

From this point of Acceptance, we can then devise the next step. 

 

Which is:

 

Now, this is a short podcast, so I am giving you an overview here

 

But I want you to start thinking about what you enjoy doing, your values, what you are interested in, what skills you want to use, what are you drawn to?

 

What were you interested in when you were 10, 16, 21?

 

What have you forgotten that you once loved to do?

 

Spend time thinking about what you are good at and what you could be good at

 

What interests you

 

What you enjoy doing and what skills you like using.

 

If I can use myself as an example

 

For years I spent a lot time reading career development, business, self-development books. I was very interested in these topics.

And even though I was working as a Chartered Civil Engineer these were the subjects that I kept going back to.

In the end, it became obvious that was what I wanted to do in my career. 

 

I became a Career Coach. And I love it!

 

 

When I work with clients to look at options, the way I do it is to look at:

 

Roles similar to those that you have already done

 

Roles that are different but complementary to the work you have done, maybe there is some kind of overlap

 

And 

 

Breakthrough job ideas which are completely different.

 

So, for example, If I’m working with a project manager who is working in the civil engineering industry

 

A similar option would be to work as a Project Manager for a company in the same industry

 

A Complementary option would be a Service Manager within the same industry or even a Project manager within a different industry

 

And breakthrough ideas would be Teaching, retraining to be a Dentist and starting a new Business selling stunt kites

 

Ok, the 4th step would be to ..

 

 

Once you have a couple of options of interest

 

Next step is to get your ideas out of your head and get some movement

 

So, for example

 

•      Could you speak to people in industries you would like to work in?

 

•      Could you network with people in organisations you are interested in?

 

•      Could you start something on the side to see if you like it?

 

•      Could you get a qualification or invest in some training and development?

 

The Career book, Working Identity, by Hermina Ibarra, is still probably the best I have read. Some Key Points: - The biggest mistake people make in career exploration is to delay taking the first step until they have settled on a destination - Run small experiments to explore new identities of who you could become - Action is crucial. It’s very difficult to think your way into finding your new career

 

So, 

 

Finally, step 5 is to

 

 

When you first begin to have movement in your mind or in your actions towards what you want, you will experience some resistance 

 

This will be partly be the inertia of getting started

 

But there may also be things that pop up that I call your ‘blocks’.

 

These tend to be anxiety based around, say

 

•          Confidence

•          Feeling like an imposter

•          Not wanting to leave your tribe

•          Having to do interviews

•          The thought of meeting new people in new organisations

 

I talked about this earlier. This idea that we may need to look at other career options or job opportunities sends our ancient part of our brain into a tizzy. 

 

Our potential change idea represents uncertainty, and this fires our stress response and we become resistant and defensive, 

 

The thing is though, your blocks, these repeated worrying thoughts that you start to have

 

Most of these will dissolve when you move towards them

 

It’s a bit like when you don’t feel like going to a party, you have some resistance

 

But when you get there you have a great time

 

The thought of the party (how you experience that thought), is different from how you experience the party and it’s not a reliable way to measure how things are going to go.

 

In the same way your worries about making a change in your career are not a reliable measure of how things are going to go for you.

 

Knowing all this is a further aid to you getting unstuck.

 

Ok, so that’s the final way that you can overcome your stuckness – dissolve your blocks

 

 

I’ve talked about what it means to be stuck in your job or career

 

Why we get stuck in our careers

 

Whey being free and having career clarity matters

 

So, I hope that all makes sense?

 

Please let me know what you thought about the content

 

As this is a new podcast, feedback really does help me to shape future episodes, and make the content as relevant and helpful as possible.

 

You can email me at mark@bravocoaching.co.uk and you can find the show notes at bravocoaching.co.uk/podcast

 

If you are interested in working with me, you can book a free discovery call on my website, here: https://www.bravocoaching.co.uk/30-minute-coaching-discovery-call

 

And to remind you that you can download your free Should I stay or should I go guide at https://www.bravocoaching.co.uk/go

 

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 I will speak to you all again in 2 week’s time

 

Bye for now.