life@work

Career Decisions, Part 1: When You Have Too Many Ideas

Are you asking yourself any of these kinds of questions right now?

• Should I stay at this job?
• What do I really want to be doing?
• How important is money to me?
• How will I find a better balance between work and home?

If so, you're far from being alone.

Making a career decision can be confusing, exciting, stressful, liberating, and even agonizing. You can do it quickly or ponder it for years before making it.

Helping people make important career decisions is the heart of what I do. I know there are a lot of different reasons why the process can bog people down. Four of them stand out as the ones I hear about most often, so I'm going to write about each one in a four-part series of posts.

Four Major Reasons Why Making a Career Decision is Hard

1. You've got a jumble of different ideas in your mind, which add up to one big confusing mess.
2. It looks like you'll have to decide between two important, yet competing priorities, and who wants to do that?
3. You like keeping your options open in general. Making decisions is stressful for you.
4. You're pretty sure your parents, spouse, friends and/or society would judge you negatively if you made the decision you're leaning towards.

The focus for Part 1 of this series is what to do with that jumble of ideas.

Nurturing ideas and dreams is wonderful, but it has its dark side. When you have 18 different ideas of what you could be doing in your career and no focus, you can feel tired and worn out by cycling through them in your mind over and over.

Also, sometimes life throws you complex, interwoven relationships to sort through when it comes to planning your career. A recent client's example comes to mind:

"If my project gets renewed for another year, then I'll continue at this company and put off having another child. But if my project gets canned, we may move to Atlanta where my parents live and have another baby. But maybe this is a good time for my husband to be at home with the kids. He isn't happy at his career and has been talking about getting an executive MBA or maybe starting his own business. But we can't decide about the MBA until we know about my project. And if he starts his own business I'll need to get a better paying job."

When too many options occupy your mind, making a career decision can seem impossible. So what can you do?

• Describe the tangled knot or multitude of options in writing.

Write down the facts, write down your feelings about them and just get it all out. Write down the questions that need answering. Be messy - this is not an outline for a paper for your comp class.

• Talk about all of it, too.

Bribe friends with lunch, drone on to your spouse, or talk to your dog. Say what you're thinking and feeling out loud and listen to yourself.

• Notice themes, threads and major headings and write them down.

This is where a little organization to the process comes in. You may be able to identify several questions to be answered or list out eight possibilities to explore.

• Identify what is already decided, what can be decided later, and what needs to be decided now.

You don't have to think about everything today. For example, you may know that staying in your current city is already decided, choosing a grad school can be decided later, and deciding which of five career options you should explore first is what needs to be decided now.

The first step to solving the jumble of ideas and options is patiently untying the knots. You need to lay out what you're dealing with verbally and in writing or a drawing or chart. Then you can see more clearly the specifics of your situation and not be so overwhelmed with the vagueness of all of the unexamined ideas.

You still may be overwhelmed, but organizing your jumble will prepare you to move ahead with some kind of decision making process.

Stay tuned for Part 2 in the Career Decision Series, which is "What to do when making a career decision looks like it's about choosing between keeping your right arm or your left foot."

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Technorati Tags: career, career decisions, career change

Sane Advice on Career Change

Some of us fall into a career, some of us choose a career, and most of us will do one or both of these activities at least three times in our lives.

If choosing a new (or first) career is on your mind, I recommend you read this post from Penelope Trunk's blog, Brazen Careerist.

There are about 6087 assorted bits of advice about how to choose a career out there, and Penelope manages to summarize the really good ones all in one post.

A sampling of wisdom:

• Choose your lifestyle first.
• Find out what career areas are growing.
• Don't over-analyze; take action and try things.

This is one of the few articles on career change I've read that emphasizes relaxing into the process and foregoing perfectionism. I'm all for that!

There's a reason that I talk with my clients about what they want in their lives (for example, time with the kids or opportunities for travel) before we spend a moment talking about what they want in a job. Most people I work with want to feel an increased sense of well-being, and that happens when you build your career plans around your life plans.

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Technorati Tags: career change, penelope trunk, brazen careerist

cross-posted on Career Hub

Job Boards - What Are They Good For?

I said a while back that I'd stop with the posts about job searching, but I just can't help myself. Several of my current clients are in full-on job search mode, and that's where my head is at right now.

I've been thinking that too many people are placing too many eggs in the job board basket, and this article by Shawn Auguston of CollegeRecruiter.com does a great job of describing what we all wish were happening when we click "Apply Now" (hungry recruiters who are waiting to hear about us pick up the phone and dial!) and what instead does happen (oftentimes, our resume is viewed by no one).

This NY Times article about job hunting using the big boards is a year old, but it offers a balanced perspective that is still relevant today about how to use job boards. 

Applying for jobs through the big boards seems like it would be such a civilized and efficient way to find a job, doesn't it? After all, who really wants to go through all of that networking work? It's scary and awkward for most of us. Hiding away behind our machines feels much safer.

The fact is that no one in the career advice industry is saying that spending most of your job hunting time searching for and applying online to the job boards is a smart strategy. Does it hurt to go to Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, etc. and see what you can find? Absolutely not. But be aware that less than 20% of job seekers find a job from those methods (and that's a liberal estimate based on my cursory research of articles written about the subject in the last three years.)

If you want the most out of your online job search time, try Job Central, Indeed, Simply Hired, and the like, who compile listings from all kinds of boards and do a decent job of making it easy for you to search for what you want. (If you've got another fave board, please let me know.)

Mixing technology with old-fashioned personal connections is a way to go, too. Try LinkedIn and Ziggs to enlist and expand your network (best to do this way before you are looking for a job).

In the meantime, you still have to talk to actual people and do actual research to have the best chances of securing your next job.

So who will you have coffee with this week?

Heather Mundell
Dream Big Coaching Services
www.dreambigcoaching.com
heather@dreambigcoaching.com

Technorati Tags: job boards, networking, collegerecruiter.com, job search, vertical search engines