Are you making the right choices in your career?
Laura Cloke
Leadership expert helping people to create careers they love. Chair of trustees at Friends of the Vox. Seeking a NED role.
Welcome to the July edition of The Inbox Coach. This month I’m making some big shifts in my own work, so I wanted to share with you my thoughts on making the right choices in your career.
“Rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right.” - Dr Ellen Langer
One of the most frequent questions a client brings me in a session is “how do I know if I’m making the right choice?” It is a topic which fascinates me, as there are so many layers to what looks like a simple question, so this month I want to explore some of those ideas.
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What should I do?
When you are making a change in your career, big or small, you want to know that you are making the right choice. This sounds straightforward. No one wants to make a wrong choice, one that is going to be stressful or that they regret, but when you start to unpick what it means to make the “right” choice, it becomes more complicated.
From hearing how my clients talk, I get the impression that they think the one right answer is out there and they just need to find it. Yes, there are choices that are going to be wrong for you and others that will be a good fit, but there isn’t one ideal option with no compromise waiting to be found. It would be so much easier if we all had a handbook to follow to create the career we want, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.
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Taking an action
Making choices that are right for you requires you to be uncomfortable with uncertainty. You can identify all the things you want to know before making a decision, but there will come a point where you will need to take an action and try something out to truly know if it is what you want.
?This is where wanting to know that you are making the right choice can cause you problems. The search for the right choice can mean that you make no choice at all. You get so caught up in the domino effect of making one decision, if I do this, then that happens, then that and so on, that it becomes too overwhelming to know what to do. What started as a decision about the next step in your career becomes a decision about your whole life and the thought of making a wrong choice stops you from doing anything. If we learn through taking actions, then taking no action won’t help you to know what is right for you.
Reflection
*If you can’t do the exercises now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do it and add them to your calendar
One of the things that gets in the way of people knowing what is right for them is the noise of expectations from friends, family or society. Career fulfilment at work comes from defining success on your own terms and working towards goals that will make you feel good. When you have a choice to make, knowing what your measures of success are will help you to pick an option that will meet your needs. Clarity on your measures of success will make you more confident in choosing an option. ??
If you are faced with a choice in your career, ask yourself:
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Action
We make choices at work every day, some of these are straightforward, with almost no thought at all, and others leave us paralysed and unable to decide what to do. If you can identify what is happening when you get stuck, or rather what isn’t getting in your way when you make a decision with ease, you can better understand the thinking you might need to do when you find yourself stuck and unsure about what to do.
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Task
Notice when you have made a decision with ease. Think about what it was about that situation that allowed you to decide what to do without concern. Maybe the consequence of making a wrong choice was low, or perhaps you had enough information to know what the best way forward was. By understanding what happens when you make a decision with ease, you can identify what you may need to do when you are struggling to decide what to do.
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“Rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right.” – Dr Ellen Langer
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I saw a video of Dr Ellen Langer talking about not stressing over making the right decision and instead focusing on making the decision you choose the right one. What she goes on to say is that you can’t regret a choice, which is what I think is what people are worried about doing, because you can’t know for certain what the other choice would have been. If you make a decision about your career and it doesn’t work out, you can’t know if choosing the other option or staying put would have been any better, it could have been worse!
I also love this idea about making your choices work. You can have all the right conditions in place for your decision to be the right one for you, but once you are in that new situation, there will still be challenges to overcome. When you focus on the decision itself, and not about how you will make it work, you are forgetting a key component of what a right choice entails. When you think about decision making this way you know it’s not about making the right choice, but the best choice you can with the information you have and then making the best of what you decide to do.?
We all want to make the right choices for our career, but if you accept that there is no one right choice for you to make, but instead it’s about finding the best choice and making it work for you, the pressure eases. There are so many uncertainties when choosing to make a change, the best you can do is trust that you will listen to your version of success and whatever comes after you have made your choice you will be able to deal with! ?
I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on making the rights choices in your career
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See you then?
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Laura
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