Career cycles

Careers start, grow, plateau and decline. None of it is bad, in fact each stage is necessary for careers to grow. Each stage comes with feelings and emotions. If you feel any of the eight signs below it may be that you are ending one stage and entering another. Career coaching is a very good way to understand where you are located in this cycle and learn techniques for how to live with the changes and move gracefully into the next stage of your career.  The key to all of this is to not get stuck in any one quadrant.  The life skill involved is movement, always movement, always change.

HEALTH CHECK ASSESSMENT | Eight stages of gradual decline.

• The first stage is to feel disconnected from what you enjoy in terms of the tasks at work.
• The second is to feel like you are trapped with the answer being, work harder, smarter, longer and sacrifice what you enjoy. Such a condition leads to work disengagement and the “whatever” mindset about working hard because working hard is not making a difference.
• The third stage is to lack confidence about yourself and your abilities until some future goal is achieved only to see that there is another goal and then another and thus you never feel good about yourself.
• The fourth event is to feel resentment against the corporation, against your boss and others on your team who make you do even more of what keeps you from what you enjoy. This thought process is unconscious and has a life of its own that you adapt to as a survival mechanism.
• The fifth is to get anxious, stressed, mad and angry, oftentimes anger directed at little things, like the cafeteria being closed at lunch, or kicking inanimate objects like when the kids’ toys are in your parking space.
• The sixth is when feedback about your work is experienced as criticism and criticism becomes resentment and this feels like attacks on your self-image fueling an angry strike back.
• The seventh is to work harder and receive less until the goal is to minimize your time at work by planning vacation days as much as possible throughout the month to mitigate the discomfort that comes from slowly failing.
• The eighth stage is burn out. Busy people oftentimes use hospitalization as the only honorable excuse for taking time away from work to reflect, rethink about what to do next as they move into the next stage of their career.

Where do you go next? We suggest you consider these five steps below.

• Design the chapters of your life with work that holds meaning and purpose at each stage.
• Embrace necessary career transition points, see plateaus as times of intense learning.
• Entrepreneur and manage each change, take control of your life your career and be the master of transitioning your life, creativity is king!
• Make self-renewal not progress the central feature of your lifestyle and workstyle.
• Keep future oriented drawing upon your emergent vison and energy. Refresh and relaunch.

If you are interested in learning more, schedule a no-charge thirty-minute career coaching session and learn about the options and tools available to help you move forward. Schedule your coaching session here.