How can PR professionals stay motivated in their career?

Expectations are important. I remember leaving college (obviously it was in black and white in those days) thinking, great, no more academic assignments, I can just earn my way and do my own thing. Within months I was starting a job filing, within comparatively few years I was freelance and having to do my own tax return/self-assessment and VAT...basically nothing is going to be 100 per cent what you want to do. A decent per centage should and will mean a great deal to you.

PR can be such a demanding area as it involves issue resolution when a crisis hits and pushes everything else aside. Then you spend massive quantities of time reacting and resolving the issue only to then have to also put in even more extra hours to get the other projects done. It's important to have your ears to the ground to anticipate issues, have templates and processes in place to save time when responding to a PR crisis. Then build redundancy into the process. Lobby to have the budget for additional staff to help cover and train them to be able to respond or to at least have an external agency on retainer and which knows your organization and can help take the load off you and your team in a crisis situation so you don't burn out.

Choose your clients wisely. Clients that work in partnership with you and give positive feedback make it easy to stay motivated. That's why clients who celebrate the efforts of their PR people often get the best results. Obviously if you work as part of an agency it's a little hard to do that. But great agencies are the ones who know to only work with clients that respect their staff.

Take time to reflect on why you do what you do. Whether you're in-house, working for an agency or freelance - really examine what your personal purpose is and how that works with your current (or future) role. It's so easy to get distracted by your company or client's objectives...but what do you want to get out of your career? What impact do you want to have?

Always stay learning new ideas and concepts in PR. Stay open to the possibility that the traditional approach may not always be the right approach. In the first half of my career I focused primarily on earned media and realized how the landscape was shifting. Now I leverage a "whatever works" methodology in really uncovering what will work for potential customers and that may mean a mix of earned, paid, advertising and content. Stay open to learning new things, expanding your skill set and exploring opportunities in ways that will turn you into a more dynamic communicator. That is the beauty of PR.

A lot of respondents maybe overthinking this. It's a people business - celebrate the people and accept that there are bound to be bits of the job that appeal to you a bit less than others.