Strategies to refresh your career once again!
When we hear the word ’detox,’ we probably think of increasing our vegetable content, eliminating alcohol, and tending our skin. Just like detoxing our body is crucial for our health, detoxing our career can bring us just as many benefits. Just as unhealthy eating habits and poor choices negatively affect our health, being unhappy in our career is just as toxic to our well-being. We need to understand what gives us a sense of fulfilment and enjoyment in our career, as we spend significant portion of our lifetime working in the same. Here are few steps you can take to detox your career:
1) Start Inwards – Do a career audit. Let all the bad experiences of work and career drain out as you choose to reprogram your life. Understand what has been your career journey so far, list down your strengths and weaknesses and identify your areas of expertise. Identify where your areas of interest lie, identify where your passion rests and can what is it that you may want to focus on for the remaining part of your life. Discover your sweet-spot where your interests, experience and passion converge. Probably that will be a new starting point for the remaining part of your career.
2) Re-configure your skills and package a completely new career – It is possible that you are good in financial management, however, the idea of working in finance related career roles doesn’t excite you at all. May be you are good with sports too, however, considering your age, you cannot consider a career as a sportsman. In that case - mix up the two. Mix-up your interest in sports and skills of financial management and probably you can work around a career of managing finances for sport celebrities. Likewise, you can mix-up two or more career fields, skills and create a fresh career avenue – which is totally unique to you.
3) Keep Learning – Signup new courses, explore deeper into the subjects you are good at or signup into a career stream that is totally new to you. It gives you a fresh perspective, not necessarily in understanding a new field, but also give you a perspective of managing your current career situation better.
4) Seek Expertise – It may not be a bad idea to meet a career mentor or get counselled by a career transition expert who can offer you direction, guidance and right resources at this stage of your career. However, be sure of your expectations and how you think expert can be of help.
Indeed, we are living in tumultuous times. Days of people working in a job for decades are long over as we move from a full time economy to skill based economy or gig economy. At one point it is feared that advances in Artificial Intelligence will eliminate most basic jobs to robots and computers and on the other hand we all are constantly in jobs which we could have best avoided. Whatever be your reason to detox, there is always a way out... Hindi Version of this article appeared in Dainik Jagran (India's No#1 Daily News Paper) this Monday.