I recently had the pleasure of speaking to a group of Bay Area communications professionals about their career trials and tribulations. While one-on-one conversations remain my favorite, I love the rigor of rapid-fire questioning in a Q&A context.
As a career coach, I always have to listen well, but when the questions come in thick and fast, it’s an opportunity to test my mettle.
The thing about career guidance Q&As is, the various career navigation questions really all have two rhetorical answers: “Are you sure you know what you really want?” and “What’s possible, in that context, given your current skills, resources and opportunities?”
I hate to sound like a broken record, but I’m going to repeat these again, for emphasis:
1. What do you want?
Seventy-five percent of Americans are unhappy at work, and a big reason is that most of them have not done any intentional work in their careers. For some reason, in an era when we’re taught that we deserve to be happy, that we can have everything we want, and that happiness is easily within our grasp if we just make the right purchasing decisions, for example, very few of us seem to value ourselves highly enough to do much intentional thinking about what we want and about what’s possible.
Now, I’m not critiquing capitalism. But our willful blindness when it comes to career navigation does seem a little nutty to me. My mission is to give folks the opportunity to stop kidding themselves when it comes to what they want out of their working life. It’s a lot harder to kid yourself when you start writing things down and having conversations with people who can test your assumptions. You need to be open to exploration, and it helps to have a consistent set of questions that tease out your priorities when you’re having those career clarity conversations.
This post, though, is focused on the second part of the process that comes when you’re considering various possibilities: Making a final decision about what you might pursue next.
2. What’s possible given your current skills, resources and opportunities?
During last week’s Q&A, many in the audience were considering different options: whether to pursue a master’s degree, accept a particular job offer, take on a new opportunity, leave an organization, move to a new location, or take a different challenge altogether, perhaps even pursue an entirely new career path.
When you’re at that point, with a juicy (or just new) opportunity dangling in front of you, how do you know when you know enough to make the leap?
First, you need to go back to your written prioritization and review what you said you wanted to keep and change about your next job. It helps if you did this in the first place. See what I said about not kidding yourself as much if you wrote something down. Now you need to compare your criteria against what is true of the opportunity you’re facing.
If you’re like many people, you may be so excited about the next move that you struggle to see it clearly or have a sense of grounding and perspective. At this point, it’s a good idea to share your thinking with a couple of people you really trust and respect, who have what I call “standing” in your life, to get feedback. Ask them if they have concerns or questions that might still need to be answered.
If there are still questions to be answered, then it's time to think about which ones you can answer from an “inside” perspective, and which ones you might need to answer from an “outside” perspective.
“Inside” questions are the questions you might ask a would-be employer directly, in an interview, for example. So, you might ask about the organization’s culture, management style of your boss, or standard onboarding process. Be mindful, of course, that the people you’re asking “inside” questions of may have a vested interest in giving you certain answers, or they may be too close to be honest. At this point, you might want to go “outside” and reach out, perhaps to some folks who’ve worked there before. Do your internet research. Find out what others who know, think.
All you can do, at this point, is gather the answers to your key questions. When it’s a big decision you’re making, I encourage folks to store this in a document or folder, rather than just keeping it all in their minds. Label it like it was a top-secret FBI file, if you like. Anything to give it the weight and drama it deserves.
Again, if you’re making a decision about where you spend the majority of your time, the least you can do is show that you value yourself enough to capture and compare your thoughts. Think of all the reams of paper you’ve wasted on less important decisions.
Still with me? Good. You’re about to make a smart, considered decision. The last thing to do is the “gut check.”
How are you feeling? What excites you about this opportunity? It’s OK to feel some anxiety, but hopefully, on a scale, there’s more excitement than anxiety!
It’s also important to know yourself and to understand the emotional context in which you tend to make big choices. If you’re someone who’s always reacted to change primarily with anxiety, then again, you may wish to turn to the people in your life who you know you can turn to and who can give you the kind of advice you might need now.
Good luck.
