Find out why this is the best time to reevaluate your career

Life establishes a rhythm and a pattern. It is often referred to as the status quo. As the world continues to evolve, you may feel like your life is adapting with it or that your career never changes, grows or advances. Days go by and nothing changes. Your thoughts about the future are focused on getting ahead and perhaps how you will create better traction to advance the knowledge, skills, and talents you possess. He may feel underestimated, have been overlooked for positions and/or believe he is underpaid for his position. Whatever the case, his daily routine may have been consumed with opportune thoughts about achieving a better future.

Then, when a major life event occurs, such as a world crisis, it creates an opportunity to re-evaluate the thoughts and plans you’ve had for your career. When that happens, you have a choice, you can use it as a moment to reflect and redirect your focus, or you can give in to fear and be paralyzed by inaction. While it may seem counterintuitive, take this time to reprioritize your goals and revisit your race plan. The reason it may seem like an inappropriate approach, while waiting for the resolution of a situation that seems so out of control, is that being productive can actually help calm your mind and put you in a logical frame of reference.

While you are in the process of evaluating your career and developing new plans to revive it again, you will find yourself in a better position to control your emotional reactions to the events you are listening to and reading. This is due to a change in the way your mind processes information or takes cognitive control once again of the flood of information being received through working memory. You can start this type of process by implementing a guided career overview plan and asking yourself a series of self-analysis questions.

Guided Run Overview

You first begin a review process by cleaning up the mental clutter in your own mind. There will be information and misinformation that you have been gathering about current events, which has created doubt, fear, and probably a sense of unease over time about your future. Start by assessing your needs and those of those who depend on you or live with you. Then look for valid sources of information, not second-hand sources of information. Go directly to those sources that will provide you with facts, data and statistics. This is the only way you can make plans with certainty and prevent the flow of speculation from entering your mind. You will find that you are also engaging the use of logic and critical analysis skills as you use this thought process.

Once you’ve mentally prepared yourself for the basics required and engaged your rational thinking skills, you can now begin to use those same reasoning skills for a review of your career plan. By this time, she has likely changed her entire career perspective, priorities have changed, and the way she works has changed. He may be working from home as a remote worker or may have found himself jobless now. Whatever the case may be, and as difficult as it may sound, now is the time for a guided race overview. Now more than ever, you are looking at your career from a completely different perspective.

To start, detail your career goals. If you didn’t have clearly defined goals, create a list for your future in two-year increments. This is a different approach than what you’ll read about in many self-help articles, and it’s one that I’ve used as a professional advisor to help improve the rate of success in achieving each milestone. When goals are set too far, those goals seem too long-term and can be easily forgotten. Shorter goals serve as checkpoints to keep in mind and can also become motivational cues to celebrate along the way as they are completed. If you already have career goals, you can redevelop them in a two-year approach like I’ve described.

As you think about your career goals, you may not know exactly where you’re headed or what direction you’d like to take next in your career. This is where the idea of ​​visualization can be useful, as a tool for professional development. Imagine yourself two years from now, with the current crisis resolved, and describe what you see, feel, and think for your job or career. Consider what you aspire to be or become, now that you have a new perspective on life. If you are satisfied with your career and now want to spend more time with your loved ones, perhaps your next goal is to see yourself in a stable position, becoming an expert in this role.

Self-analysis questions

Now that you have begun the process of evaluating your career, from the perspective of examining what your future might look like in the next few years, you can ask additional specific questions to continue the process of self-analysis. I have implemented the use of the following questions in various ways as a professional development coach and they may also help you.

Target Question #1: Am I inspired by the career goals I have set?

What you want to develop are specific career goals, not generic ones. An example of a generic goal would be: I will be recognized for my hard work two years from now. In contrast, the most effective checkpoints to develop every two years are those that inspire you to grow and progress, depending on what your priorities are for your life and career. For example, if you want to remain grounded and stable, visualize yourself becoming an expert at this point in time. If you want to advance, name a specific position you are interested in filling. For example, if you aspire to move up to a managerial position, set it as a bookmark for your first checkpoint.

Target Question #2: Is there something that prevents me from achieving these professional goals?

When you’ve set inspirational checkpoints, over specific two-year periods, you’ll be able to determine if anything will be needed to make sure you’re prepared. For example, will you need training or continuing education? Will you need to gain new knowledge and/or acquire new skills to progress or advance? You may need to think ahead and do some research to prepare your self-development plan. After doing some research, you can map out the coming months and further refine the steps you’ll take to work toward a new outcome.

Target Question #3: Have I been involved in some form of negative self-talk?

You may or may not be aware of the thoughts that are being held about you, and this is something that I encourage you to start becoming more aware of and pay attention to. This self-talk can be supportive and help you feel good about your life and the decisions you make, or it can get you stuck in a pattern of negative self-talk that belittles and undermines your best intentions and efforts. Some of the hardest lessons I’ve seen others learn as a career coach is that of self-empathy, or being able to forgive oneself for past events and perceived mistakes. If you can support yourself, even when you’re in the worst possible situation, you’ll find that recovery comes much sooner.

Directed Question #4: Do I think I can reach and complete the first race goal set?

This question ties directly into the previous question about self-talk and relates to your beliefs about yourself. If you were to look at the career plan you’ve developed for yourself, would you honestly say you could pull it off? Do you think you have the potential to complete what you set out to achieve? Those may seem like obvious questions, and yet if you can’t reconcile your beliefs with your career plan, you may never achieve the goals you’ve set. A belief begins with feeling some level of hope instead of hopelessness. If you are developing a plan for the future, you must believe to some extent that your future can change. If you are creating this plan for any other reason, it will not happen. This is the moment to decide: I believe in myself and I believe that I can achieve these goals.

Directed Question #5: Do I know what I am capable of achieving?

To solidify your beliefs and make them meaningful instead of hollow statements, you need to start with an assessment of your strengths. Your strengths are the foundation that creates your ability to create change, learn, grow, and adapt. You will use these strengths to work in areas of development as well. As you look ahead and assess what you need to be prepared for, don’t see yourself as lacking or weak. These are opportunities for professional development. You also shouldn’t be afraid to identify areas that need improvement, just be vigilant and ready to prepare. You can adapt and you have both the ability and the potential to learn. This renewed sense of self-awareness will ultimately make you stronger as you look to the future with confidence.

Is it time for a new career?

Undertaking a career analysis can be an eye-opening experience, especially if you have a new sense of self due to the world and work conditions. Once you’ve completed the above process, you can know for sure which direction your career path is headed, assuming working conditions return to normal soon. You may feel a sense of renewal about the type of work you are doing and want to stay in the same job and with the same employer. However, the analysis may cause you to consider a different perspective. Perhaps now your priorities have changed, or been re-emphasized, and you are now fully intent on finding a new career path. The analysis now helped him move in another direction and set up a plan to begin a journey to another destination. Regardless of which of these scenarios fits you, you should feel empowered to be better in charge of your career and be ready to take action, once the business world is up and running again.

The value of productive thinking

The economic health of the nation is worrying and it is unknown when businesses will return to some level of normality. However, this should not stop you from developing a career plan and preparing for the future. If history is any indicator of how humanity and the economy operate in times of global crisis, there will eventually be a period of recovery. It may not happen quickly, and for many companies, it may take a significant period of time to return to growth. However, you can still keep your mind sharp and focused on your own personal development, which in turn will allow you to better deal with both a time of crisis and recovery. As you work on your own development plans, you engage the rational side of your mind and this keeps emotional reactions in check. The more you can keep thinking productively, the better you can take care of yourself and others as well. Perhaps logical thinking will help support you and the business you work for while you wait for the crisis to subsidize you.