Stop Trying to Find Your Next Job - Create a Thriving Career and Life

WARNING...THIS IS A LONG POST...BUT YOU SHOULD ABSOLUTELY READ THIS IF YOU ARE FRUSTRATED RIGHT NOW WITH YOUR CAREER AND YOU CAN’T FIGURE OUT YOUR NEXT CAREER MOVE.

Every week I have conversations with individuals who know they are ready to make a change in their career, but don’t know where to start.

Sound familiar?

From the outside, you have done everything right and you’re building a great career. Family and friends are proud of you and happy your career is going well. However, on the inside, you know there is more to life and work than this.

You’ve reached your breaking point. Waking up, you question how you’ll get through another day. Your gut is constantly reminding you this is the wrong career for you. And you feel unfulfilled, alone, stuck and frustrated.

You know there must be a career that would bring you fulfillment – that feels good on the inside – rather than only looking good to others.

I have conversations with high performing young professionals every week in this situation.

Most have spent months or even years “trying to figure it out.”

They have endlessly scrolled job boards and Google searches looking for the opportunity that perfectly fits their experience and skills. This typically translates to a big waste of time. Here’s why:

• Only 25%-30% of jobs are advertised publicly.
• HR software weeds out applications that lack specific keywords.
• You have no referral or relationship with anyone at the company and apply online hoping for the best … how many success stories have you heard from this method?
• You are limiting yourself to the traditional interview process, rather than gaining a full understanding of the work and your potential role at the company. 

At best, the traditional job search route leads you to exactly that, your next JOB.

Are you are ready to create a new career? Ready to blast past your comfort zone and make things happen for yourself and your career?

If your answer is “YES,” Let’s begin. I’m going to lay out how to Get Clarity, Get Connected and Get Confidence.

1) GET CLARITY

IT ALL STARTS WITH CLARITY.

As I mentioned in the top of the article, one of the largest obstacles you need to overcome is knowing where to begin the career change process. Gaining clarity on what you actually want to do for a living is the first key to making the change.

Here is an exercise to help you Get Clarity:

The name of the game is taking action. You don’t have to come up with the perfect plan or ideal career right away. In fact, attempting to do this will lead you to stay in your current position. Take some time to focus on what you want to do and what can turn into a career.

Ask: What do I do well? What do I enjoy? What can I get paid for? Take these questions one at a time and be honest with yourself.

At the beginning of your clarity work you want to start broad, so you don’t limit yourself. However, as things progress, you’ll want to narrow things down and aim to find your career sweet spot (Shown in the Chart Below)

All three areas have their pros and are an essential part of the career sweet spot puzzle, but the combination of all three leads to a sustainable and fulfilling career. 

2) GET CONNECTED

Find People Not Jobs

Chances are you’re going to come up with more than one possible career change scenario. You will want to try to narrow it down to three career change scenarios to explore.

Now, begin to find people – not jobs. Remember, you’re creating a career that you will love; you are not looking for your next “job.” This means a different approach is needed.

Instead of spending time alone looking at endless job posts, you will build real relationships with individuals to get a true understanding of an industry, company, role, etc. Some of these approaches will get you out of your comfort zone, but will pay big dividends in the long run.

You will no longer approach the search trying to make adjustments to appear as the perfect candidate for a particular role. You get to be honest with yourself and the people you connect with. You will get to come from a place of genuine curiosity, being your authentic self and even show vulnerability at times. This allows you to find the right fit.

The best approach to find people is to use what I call the Dart Board Method. There are 5 levels.

Level 1: Start with your own network: colleagues, friends, family, acquaintances.

Level 2: Step up to your network’s network – ask colleagues and friends if they know people who work in the fields you’re interested in. Ask for introductions.

A quick side to show you the power of your network at Levels 1 and 2. Social scientists say on average you keep 150 meaningful connections with people in your life. Each one of those 150 people, in turn, have 150 meaningful connections of their own. Meaning when you access your network you are not just accessing 150 individuals but 150 squared which equals 22,500 people. That is 22,500 people at your fingertips that can potentially help you find the career you want.

Level 3: Attend relevant events, classes, seminars and meetups in the field to create new contacts.

Level 4: Search LinkedIn for connections.

Level 5: The Direct Approach: contact someone you don’t yet know, whose work and role interest you.

Now that you’ve found people, let’s talk about how to approach and interact with them.

? Be passionate, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable.

? Make it easy: Suggest a time limit, work around their schedule and interact with them in the best way for them (by phone, in person, via Skype or Zoom, etc.) - if you're meeting them in person, meet at a coffee shop or restaurant close to their office.

? Use the Advice Angle: You’re looking for advice, experiences, and tips, NOT a job.

Please read: Especially for reaching out cold, people love to help other people, but they don’t want to feel used. Take the approach of being honest and looking for advice/more information on what they do rather than “Hey, can you help me find a job in your company.” It makes a big difference. Building a real relationship with individuals you didn’t know prior to reaching out is key to moving things forward. 

? Establish a give-get relationship. Offer them value and help in exchange: Contacts that could be useful to them, your time, feedback on their work, whatever you have to offer.

Experiment

Now that you’ve gone out and started talking with people, building relationships, and are beginning to narrow down what your next career move will be, it’s time to experiment. This is when you find your inner entrepreneur and make things happen for yourself. It’s time to get out of your comfort zone and think differently.

In a traditional job search, you look at job descriptions attempting to find the role that fits perfectly with your experience. If you’re making a career change, chances are your background won’t line up precisely with potential jobs. This is one of the biggest reasons people hold back from trying to make a change because you are conditioned you have to move up a straight line in your career path, and you always directly build off your last role. How boring is that?

What people fail to realize is you have far more skills that are transferrable to another career that you give yourself credit for.

So, how actually do you experiment? I’ll spare you some reading – see video below:  

3) GET CONFIDENCE

Confidence is the dirty little secret you won’t hear about too often with career change because it can be regarded as “soft advice.”

Getting Clarity and Getting Connected are pivotal for your career change, but if you don’t work on your mindset, chances are you are not going to make the change happen.

As previously mentioned, this process calls on you to push past your comfort zone time and time again. This is scary at first – who wants to face fear or move towards it rather than running from it? Most of us are wired to prefer the pain of the known over the unknown, and often times one of the main factors why you are still in a career that is unfulfilling.

If you can develop a new mindset of seeking fear to point you in the right direction, it will pay dividends for your career – and your life!

The question is how do you develop a mindset to push past your comfort zone and seek fear? The first step, start small. Grab a notebook and use these two simple exercises to get things started:

1)     Gratitude Journal - Every morning, first thing when you wake up, write down 5-10 things you are presently grateful for in your life. It takes less than 3 minutes. Don’t overthink it.

2)     Brag Book – Every night write down 5-10 things you are proud you accomplished. Again, less than 3 minutes. If you have trouble finding 5-10 from the particular day go back a week, month, year, your childhood, it doesn’t matter, simply get down 5-10 things that make you proud.

 These two practices make a HUGE difference. They will keep you in a healthy mindset, lower anxiety, combat overwhelm, and keep you pushing toward your goals.

Next, another small step, do something that’s out of the norm for you. Browse meetup.com and find a subject you are interested in and attend the event alone. Or join Toastmasters. Even something as simple as calling an old friend or family member you have lost touch with will help your confidence.

These practices will help you build up to the action needed when making your career shift. The more small actions steps you take that make you uncomfortable, the more quickly you realize that when you get to the other side and everything is ok. This is when progress is made.

“Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.” – Robert G. Allen

Your small actions will build into larger ones, but you will have now developed your mindset to understand that fear is where you need to go to make things happen. This allows you to go out and create career change experiments as mentioned in the video above (make sure to watch it if you have not done so!).

Here’s another secret to the process – it won’t go perfectly. You can do everything on your end in the best possible way, and things still aren’t going to go as planned.

You may think you’ve found the exact career you want to move into, but during your experiments, you realize it’s not all you hoped it would be. Or you may have to pivot before moving forward within the broader career theme. This means you are going to have to make some adjustments, and that can sometimes be discouraging. Don’t give up – keep building your confidence and moving forward.

Or you may love the career theme you discovered during your clarity work, then went out and built great relationships, created some experiments (maybe shadowed at a company and did a side project for them, and they are hinting at bringing you on full time). You get excited. All your work is about to pay off! Then out of nowhere, there is a hiring freeze, and they can’t bring you on. This can be a momentum killer.

These examples are just more reasons why continuing working on your mindset every day is so important. It keeps you going when things get hard, and helps you enjoy the process instead of only focusing on the end result.

Are you starting to see how all of these pieces fit together?

I know this a lot of information that just came at you all at once. It might seem a little overwhelming and a bit complicated. Here’s the truth. A true career change isn’t a super easy process and takes hard work, but it’s by no means impossible.

The worst thing you can do is prevent yourself from taking action. The longer you wait, the more your excuses grow, the longer you stay in the same place. There will never be a “right time.” I have never worked with a client that had “perfect timing” for a career change.

The beauty of this process is it does not require you to quit your current job; this entire blueprint can be – and I encourage it to be – completed while employed.

So what are you really waiting for?

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P.S. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Does the Career Change Blueprint resonate with you?

One last thing, please feel free to send me a message here on Linkedin with any questions you have about the Career Change Blueprint or any career change questions in general.