4 Powerful Ways To Figure Out What You Should Be Doing With Your Career In 2016
Part of the series “Living and Working Better”
As a career success coach, writer, and researcher, I’ve had the opportunity to observe key trends among thousands of professionals around the world, particularly about how they get stuck and stay stuck in careers they dislike, and how they effectively change directions to a new path that’s rewarding and successful.
One challenge I hear literally every day goes something like this:
“Kathy, I don’t like my career and I know that I want to change it, but I simply can’t figure out what to do next. What will make me happy, give me the money I need and want, and offer more meaning and purpose. And what do I need to change?
If you’ve read anything of work or background, you know that I lived the pain of this experience – being stuck for years in a corporate identity that simply didn’t fit me and that was filled with toxicity. After a brutal layoff in the days following 9/11, I finally decided I had to reclaim my life, but to do it, I wanted to learn more about how women overcome professional crisis. I conducted my own yearlong research study and the findings were so powerful and helpful to me, I wrote a book about their stories and strategies (for more on that, see Breakdown, Breakthrough). After 10 years of career coaching now, I’ve seen that there are four critical steps that help people overcome their internal and external career challenges, and transform their lives.
The four key steps to transforming your career to something you’ll love are:
1. Dig deep to figure out what you want to keep or leave behind