The Great Resignation. The Big Quit. The Great Reshuffle.  
Three of the many headlines describing recent labor market shifts.

If you’ve been thinking about making changes in your career, you may have decided that this a good time.

But what if feelings of overwhelm get in the way of the changes you want to make? How do you steady yourself so that you don’t stay stuck?

Or maybe this career transition wasn’t your choice. Or are you finding it more difficult than you expected. If you’re feeling a bit lost, try the simple tool below.

Significant Changes (including Career Change) Take Time  

There is no doubt that making changes in your career is demanding. For most people, it takes longer than you expect. According to  Professor Ibarra, leading researcher in the field, major career transitions typically take about three years.

Change Events and Transition Experiences May Not Be Concurrent 

Change may begin with a sudden event. A change in your health status. An unexpected layoff. A relocation because of your partner’s job.

Change event often occur in a short space of time. But the adjustment that is part of any transition typically take longer. Understanding this difference is helpful for many people in understanding what can feel very confusing.

The Benefit of Describing your Experience Specifically (even when it’s dynamic).

Changes don’t arrive one at a time in an orderly fashion. Typically career change ripples across several areas of your life. Even changes that you plan and want can be disorienting. This makes it difficult to make the choices and take the actions needed to move forward.  

Here is a simple but powerful step to try. Leia Francisco, author of Writing Through Transitions, recommends “naming the change” as a first step.

Find a personally meaningful way to describe your experience. This enables you to step back. Naming your experience not only gives you  space to reflect on and gain insight into the things that are the biggest hurdles for you, but also to see new opportunities. 

When you’re choosing a name, trust your intuition. Begin with what comes to mind. Maybe there’s an image, experience, or object that captures your experiences. 

When I worked with families relocating internationally, one phrase that clients often used to describe their experience of moving to live and work in another country was that it was like being on a rollercoaster. Ups and downs. Highs and lows.

Even though this was a shared experience, it wasn’t the same. The same description can mean very different things, even for members of the same family moving to the same place.

For one person, riding a rollercoaster describes a fun and exciting experience. But if you are someone who is afraid of heights or experiences motion sickness, you might feel terrified most of the time.

In the same way, even apparently similar career changes may be experienced very differently. Choosing a name is a way of gaining insight into your personal experience.

Explore and Revisit the Personal Meaning of your Career Change Description

As Leia and I discuss in this article, the value comes from choosing the description that makes sense to you. Your experience is influenced by many things including your circumstances, preferences, and history. 

Insight into your own experience helps you make better choices about what you need to stay the course and make progress. Naming the change facilitates this understanding.

Your experiences won’t stay the same. As you progress through your career change, check back on the names you chose earlier. You may be surprised at how the names you choose to describe your experience change over time.

Jennifer Bradley

Jennifer Bradley helps professionals get unstuck and move forward in their career and work life. She offers individual coaching and consulting, leads workshops, and writes about personal and professional transitions.

positivetransition.com

The post How  to Find your Balance Again When Your Career Change Feels Out of Control appeared first on Positive Transition.

Have you ever experienced sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia?  The sudden pain, commonly known as “brain freeze,” is an automatic response to the sudden drop in temperature triggered by eating or drinking something very cold.

Brain freeze is designed to protect the blood supply to the brain. Significant work-life changes may also trigger protective responses.

Follow the three steps below for more clarity on your personal responses and how they may help or hinder you during your current work-life transition.

1. Recall (2-3 minutes)
2. Reflect (3 minutes)
3. Renew (3-5 minutes)

Step 1:  Recall 

Recall a significant change in your life.  Choose an experience that felt demanding, but now feels fairly complete. Don’t begin with your most difficult change.  

Describe this experience by making some notes or writing a few paragraphs. Use the questions below as a guide. 

• What was the change about?
• What areas of your life were impacted? 
• Who was involved? 

Step 2: Reflect 

Now that you have summarized what happened, it’s time to reflect on your experience with the benefit of hindsight. Is there a name or image that comes to mind when you think back on that experience from today’s perspective? If so, write it down. 

A phrase, image, or metaphor can help to capture the qualities of the experience that stand out for you.  If nothing comes to mind, don’t worry. Move ahead to reflecting on the experience by choosing questions from the list below. Feel free to come up with your own questions.

• What did you do that worked, or you feel good about?  

For instance, may you got a result you wanted, or you acted in alignment with the things that are important to you.

• Who or what was helpful?  

Examples might be people that provided informational or emotional support,  or things you did to reduce overwhelm. 

• What happened that surprised you? What did you do that didn’t work?

Examples might be outcomes you didn’t expect, or things that weren’t visible to you due to external events, or because of other people’s decisions, not having resources, or a “blind spot.”

Next it’s time to choose what to take forward.

Step 3: Renew 

Bring to mind your current change (or one aspect of it, if it’s a complex change).

As you review your answers to Step 2 above, consider what might apply to your current change? 

• What do your actions or choices tell you about what was important to you at that time?
• What strengths are demonstrated by what you did?

For example, if one of the things that worked before was to consult with trusted colleagues, that might signify relationship building as one of your strengths.  

Note down some of the values and strengths that you want to carry forward to your current change. 

Next, looking back at what didn’t work, choose one thing that feels particularly relevant to this change that you would like to be different this time.

It might be something to stop doing or let go of, something to do differently, or something new to do.

What resources might be helpful?
List anything that might make it easier to implement what you want to do. 

Awareness of your values and strengths is particularly important during challenging changes. By taking the time to reflect, you are taking an important step in this direction. 

Summary 

The change you are experiencing may be similar to brain freeze, a sudden shock to your system, or it may be a more predictable or ongoing experience of change. 

Dealing with change is a lifelong skill. Taking even 10 or 15 minutes to complete the three simple steps of Recall, Reflect, and Renew described above will enhance your resilience in the face of this and future changes.  

Jennifer Bradley

Jennifer Bradley helps professionals get unstuck and move forward in their career and work life. She offers individual coaching and consulting, leads workshops, and writes about personal and professional transitions.

positivetransition.com

The post How to Use the 3-R’s (Recall; Reflect; Renew) to Build Resilience During Challenging Work-Life Changes appeared first on Positive Transition.

A simple model makes it easier for professionals to focus during career and work-life transitions. A framework is like an aerial view. You can choose reference points that make it easier to re-orient when the landscape is not yet known. This article presents five reference points – outlined in the A.U.D.I.T. framework below – that you can apply to help you stay on track during your own work-life transition.

The five elements are: 

1. Assess Yourself and Your Situation 
2. Understand Your World of Work
3. Design a Strategy to Fit your Intentions
4. Implement your Actions with the Support of a Step-by-Step Plan
5. Test and Tally your Progress

Let’s consider each one in brief. 

1. Assess Yourself and Your Situation 

Jumping into action might alleviate anxiety in the short term but is unlikely to be the fastest path to where you want to go. Don’t just do what comes to mind first. Give yourself time lay a foundation  based on an up-to-date self-assessment. This doesn’t have to be an onerous or time-consuming process. 

Review your current situation, your strengths and your skills. Ask yourself what’s most important to you at this point in your personal and professional life. This is the basis for your decision-making.

Don’t worry if you’re not yet be ready to answer all these questions. Change is not a linear process. But keeping these questions and your reflections in mind will help you to move forward with more focus.  

2. Understand Your World of Work

This second element is about the context. Your work-life transition is about you. But it’s also about your situation and opportunities available. For example, how confident do you feel that you understand what prospective employers value and need most?

What do you need to know to feel more confident that you are clear about how you can contribute? For example, if your career transition involves moving to a work in a different field, there will be gaps to address. Or maybe you’re not up-to-date with current hiring practices because you’ve been in a similar role for a while.

Increasing your awareness of questions relevant to your world of work complements what you have learned from your self-assessment. Together these two elements of the framework provide you with a strong foundation for the choices you make as you move forward. 

3. Design a Strategy to Fit your Intentions for Career Change 

Keeping what you actually do aligned with what you intend to do is not straightforward. This is where the third element of the framework – designing a customized strategy – can help. 

There are many opportunities to veer away from your intentions. Influences range from external factors outside of your control to everyday distractions that take you off course. 

Having a strategy won’t remove these hurdles, but it can help you get back on track more quickly. Your strategy won’t be static. It will need to be adapted as your proceed. But it will help you make better choices about how you invest your efforts.

Your strategy is like a marker in the snow. It gives you a point of reference when there’s a storm that reduces visibility. It also helps to have something to return to when you find yourself going off track or feeling lost.   

4. Implement your Actions with the Support of a Step-by-Step Plan

A strategy helps, but it’s not enough without the tactics to implement it. This is why the fourth element of the framework is a step-by-step plan. The level of detail that’s helpful will depend on where you are in your transition and on your personal preferences.  

Ask yourself how much overlap is there between the actions you complete in a typical day and what’s needed to advance your intentions. It may be that when you identify specific ways to implement your strategy, you need to change what you are doing to better fit your priorities.

Identifying and ordering these activities and allocating time to do them will help you take a more realistic approach in the context of competing demands. It will also make it easier to see your progress. Observing progress is the fifth and final element of the framework.  

5. Test and Tally your Progress 

Stepping back periodically to review how things are going will help you see the big picture and make adjustments as needed. Working through a career transition is an iterative process. The fifth element – testing and tallying your progress – is an invitation to stop and review the big picture and make adjustments for easier and faster progress.

Since we all have blind spots when it comes to our own work, an outside perspective can help if you’re feeling frustrated or disheartened by your progress. A mentor, trusted colleague, or coach can provide a sounding board when you’re dissatisfied with how things are going or need clarity about the things that are getting in your way.  

Summary 

Now you have a 5-element model that you can use. It’s a simple framework that can make a difference. Adapt it to your situation.

Of course, designing your own model is an option. Here’s one way to get started. Think of a previous successful career change from your own experience. Sketch out the steps that worked. Use them as a basis for your own framework.

Whatever framework you choose, it’s one of many possible approaches. No model will fully describe your personal experiences.  But if the framework you choose reduces the cognitive overload that is often present during times of transition, it will make a positive difference.

Jennifer Bradley

Jennifer Bradley helps professionals get unstuck and move forward in their career and work life. She offers individual coaching and consulting, leads workshops, and writes about personal and professional transitions.

positivetransition.com

The post How to Reduce the Stress of Work-Life Transitions with A Simple 5-Element Framework appeared first on Positive Transition.

Once upon a time — a short time ago — if you were researching your next employment opportunity as part of your career change and job search, you would have avoided “work from home” [WFH] postings. At least the question “Is this a scam?” would be uppermost in your mind. 

Now that WFH has become of part of everyday life for many people, choices are more complex. Staying safe online is not so easy. Increases in genuine WFH opportunities also provide more opportunities for employment-related fraud. Although scams become more sophisticated over time, there are steps that you can take to protect yourself. Read below for three ways to begin. 

1. Be Aware of the Impact of Stress and Remain Vigilant 

Under pressure, we’re all more likely to do things “without thinking.” During times of change uncertainty when demands are higher it’s easier to fall into the trap of something as simple as clicking on a link that turns out to be malicious. So how can you protect yourself? 

One step you can take is to be skeptical of all incoming messages. When you are doing research as part of your career change, you are dealing with a lot of information. You may not remember all the contacts you have made. It’s easy to be caught out by unsolicited messages that are fraudulent.  

This is one of the most common ways that scammers gain access. It pays to be particularly careful about “out-of-the” blue contacts. If you keep a communication log part of you networking and research, it will be easier to spot unsolicited incoming messages.  

Depending on your field, you may work with recruiters. If you are approached by recruiters that you don’t know, do a search and review their social media profiles before providing any personal information. 

Email is not the only form of access. In addition to phishing, you also need to be on the alert for fraudulent texts (smishing) and voice messages (vishing).    Keeping track of who you communicate with and when will not only help you stay safe, but also help you with to network and find opportunities and relevant contacts in a more effective way.  

2. Scrutinize Job Descriptions and Role Requirements

As perpetrators of employment-related fraud become more sophisticated, it can be harder to detect at first glance. Here are a few clues to possible problems.

The use of language is one indicator. Pay close attention to the language used in job postings on job boards and social media. Ask ”might this be a fake posting?” Possible red flags include generic job titles and typographical and grammatical errors. 

If you are viewing information on intermediary sites such as job boards or social media, review the original posting on the company website. Most job boards and platforms such as LinkedIn now provide their users with advice on avoiding fraud. 

Don’t be afraid to ask questions of employers. Does the posting or the career page include a contact person? It is in their interest to be alerted if, for example, they are being impersonated.  

Other indicators are “surprises” when it comes to the selection process. Reputable employers want to avoid the cost of hiring a candidate that is not a good fit, even if they meet the skill requirements. They will have established selection methods whether they are recruiting for on-site, remote, or hybrid work. 

 Other red flags include salary levels that are not realistic, or requests for, or offers of, money to pay for equipment essential for the job. Maybe you are changing fields and less knowledgeable about the salary levels to expect in your new field. Consult with colleagues or do online research so that you know the typical range for positions you are applying for. 

As perpetrators of employment-related fraud become more sophisticated, it can be harder to detect at first glance. Here are a few clues to possible problems.

The use of language is one indicator.

Pay close attention to the language used in job postings on job boards and social media.

Ask ”might this be a fake posting?” Possible red flags include generic job titles and typographical and grammatical errors. 

If you are viewing information on intermediary sites such as job boards or social media, review the original posting on the company website. Most job boards and platforms such as LinkedIn now provide their users with advice on avoiding fraud. 

Don’t be afraid to ask questions of employers and recruiters.

Does the posting or the career page include a contact person? It is in their interest to be alerted if, for example, they are being impersonated.  

Other indicators are “surprises” when it comes to the selection process. Reputable employers want to avoid the cost of hiring a candidate that is not a good fit, even if they meet the skill requirements. They will have established selection methods whether they are recruiting for on-site, remote, or hybrid work. 

 Other red flags include salary levels that are not realistic, or requests for, or offers of, money to pay for equipment essential for the job. Maybe you are changing fields and less knowledgeable about the salary levels to expect in your new field. Consult with colleagues or do online research so that you know the typical range for positions you are applying for. 

3. Know your Rights, Stay Up to Date, Consult Reliable Sources & Report Problems 

Although the number of people who experience employment scams is growing fast, the good news is that media campaigns are increasing awareness and there are more resources available to help you protect yourself. 

Background checks are often part of hiring. You may not question requests for personal information. These services are often provided by third party companies and reputable employers should be happy to provide details so that you understand their process. 

If you sense that something is not right, give yourself time before sharing personal information. Ask questions. Understand what to expect and how your information is used to make hiring decisions. 

Do you know your rights? The protections vary in different locations and legal systems. In the US you can learn more from the Federal Trade Commission.  You can also research laws for your particular state.

 In the UK, the Disclosure and Barring Service website is a good first point of contact.

If you or someone you know has experienced employment-related fraud, you can help others by reporting it. For example, in the US, the Better Business Bureau publishes a scam tracker. 

In the UK, you can report scams to Jobs Aware (formerly SAFERjobs).

Summary

For professionals seeking to change direction in their work, it’s never been easier to research and find new opportunities. But increased access comes with increased exposure to employment-related fraud. 

Although the problem is growing, the good news is that it’s easier to find advice on how to proactively protect yourself.

Take preventative action by (1) paying closer attention, (2) being particularly cautious of unsolicited incoming messages, and (3) consulting reliable sources of information to stay up to date. 

Jennifer Bradley

Jennifer Bradley helps professionals get unstuck and move forward in their career and work life. She offers individual coaching and consulting, leads workshops, and writes about personal and professional transitions.

positivetransition.com

The post How Career Changers Can Stay Safer While Searching Online for Work appeared first on Positive Transition.

Why Feeling Concerned is a Good Thing

Feelings of worry don’t have to be a bad thing. If concern focuses your attention on doing what you can to prepare, it may be helpful. So where do you begin?

Preparing yourself to be successful involves both mental preparation and material preparation. This article focuses on the “inside out” aspect of preparation and describes concrete steps you can take to cultivate a mindset that will help you to be successful. 

Begin By Being Clear and Honest with Yourself

This first step is to get clear about how you actually think and feel, not how  you expect yourself to respond or others expect you to respond.

Gaps in your work history may be chosen or not. Depending on your situation, you may be dealing with difficult things.

Maybe you’ve lost your job. Maybe you took a job that didn’t work out or your under-employed. Or you experienced health problems that meant taking time off. Or you were caring for a family member.

You know your situation better than anyone else. The context matters. A positive choice to take a career break to care for a child is one thing. The experience of being unexpectedly laid off demands additional resources.

Preparation is important even if the experience is a while ago. Under stress, it’s easy to communicate in ways that are not helpful. More awareness of your own thoughts and feelings  enables you to make better choices. 

Write It Down: A Surprisingly Helpful Simple Way to Prepare

A great first step is to take a short amount of time for private writing. Write down your experience without censoring what you write. The biggest mistake that career changers and job seekers make is to avoid the issue. An understandable response to challenging experiences. But writing about your thoughts and feelings is a simple thing you can do that have been proven effective in psychological research.

For example, one scientific study of engineers who were laid off from their jobs compared the outcomes for a group who completed guided time-limited writing exercises describing their thoughts and feelings about losing their jobs with a control groups who completed unrelated writing tasks. The group that wrote about their personal experiences of job loss found new positions more quickly. The researchers concluded that access to a structured method of expressing how they felt helped them to process it and move ahead more quickly. 

Develop your Self-Awareness

 Whatever your situation, describing your career break in writing is a way of increasing your awareness. Maybe you haven’t really shared your experience because of pressure to “be positive” or “move on.” Or you don’t talk much about it because you don’t want to worry those close to you. Research tells us that psychological adjustment to change does not necessarily happen at the same pace as external change events.

Set the timer on your phone and write for around 15 minutes. As you write, pay close attention to your responses. Do any emotions surface?  Emotions come and go, but by increasing your awareness, you are taking an important step toward being more mentally prepared. Read back over what you’ve written and reflect on the experience by asking questions such as “What stands out?” or “What do I notice.”

Personal Writing

Personal writing is one simple way to listen more closely to yourself. If you don’t find writing helpful, try having a conversation with the right person. Choose someone who can listen in a non-judgmental way, such as a trusted friend, mentor, or coach. The experience of being listened to in this way is a powerful means of getting unstuck and rebuilding your confidence.

Preparing from the “inside out” gives you a good foundation on which to build. Self-awareness is key to the confident communication that will be essential as you move forward. You will identify new opportunities in the context of relationships with others. In the next blog post, look for ideas on how to connect through more effective communication.  

Jennifer Bradley

Jennifer Bradley helps professionals get unstuck and move forward in their career and work life. She offers individual coaching and consulting, leads workshops, and writes about personal and professional transitions.

positivetransition.com

The post How to Boost Your Confidence If You’re Worried about a Gap in Your Career appeared first on Positive Transition.