Helpful Ways To Think About Your Career

Our career decisions are some of the most important choices we make in our lives, but despite how important these choices are, few people have well developed strategies and guiding principles for how they make these choices. If anything, people are generally overly driven by emotions in this regard, which is unfortunate considering it should be an area where they put emotions aside and use a rational thought process. 

This is especially true when it comes to people who are making a career change, as the risk and uncertainty involved cause the emotions to heat up. This is why it is so important to have a system that you follow for such decision making. Read on for three steps you can follow to have a more systematic approach to making career decisions.

Break Your Life Into Stages

Everybody grows up having distinct stages in their lives, but after a certain point they can get lost. Elementary school, middle school, high school, and college are well defined, but after that everything feels very open-ended. Create stages for your life, and that will help you make decisions as you will know where you want to be and on what time frame you should get there. One good stage is the exploration stage. This can include schooling, internships, and other areas where you are developing your skill set, growing as a person, and figuring out what you want to do. This should not be rushed, but you also do not want to spend too much time here as you have to get to the next phase of your career.

The next step is the establishment phase. At this point, you should no longer be exploring freely and should be focusing on making it in your chosen field. When looking at jobs, ask yourself which phase you should be in and whether that job corresponds with that phase. If it doesn’t, then you should keep looking. If you want to be in the exploratory phase, reconsider a job that puts you too firmly on a specific path and doesn’t give you room to experiment. If you are in the establishment phase, you should be looking for work that is directly related to the skills and knowledge you have been acquiring.

Know Your Personality, And Make Sure Your Career Path Is A Good Match

If you aren’t a people person, don’t go into sales. If you want that high level of interaction, don’t go into programming. These seem like obvious rules to follow, but surprisingly many people pick careers without considering whether they are matches for their personalities. Whether they get caught up in the hype of a certain position, they listen too much to other people telling them what to do, or they just never put much thought into it, it is common for people to have a personality/job mismatch.

By the time you are of the age to start a career, you should have a decent sense of what your personality is, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and how to fit all of that into a job. You can experiment a bit and try different kinds of jobs out, but don’t get too deep into a career that isn’t the right match for you. Take the time to really think about the kind of person that you are and don’t get influenced by what others think is right for you or how you would like others to think of you. With that knowledge you can find the right career.

Don’t Discount Emotions

This might sound counterintuitive as the point of these steps is to get you to think more rationally and less emotionally about your career choices, but it is important to factor emotions into it, and it would in fact be irrational not to. At the end of the day, you want a job that you feel good about going to (or at least working remotely), and if you have a bunch of bad feelings about your work, then you should listen to those feelings and not try to tell yourself that you should be practical and stick to it anyway, as if that is the rational decision. 

You can combine both emotional and rational thoughts into your decision-making. For example, suppose some part of your work bothers you on an emotional level. You can rationally examine that emotion by asking yourself why it bothers you, if it should bother you, if it is something you will get over or something that will always bother you, etc. Through that process, you can determine whether or not this job actually is a good emotional fit for you. Remember that emotions will often come into your work, whether you want them to or not, due to stresses of the job, personal interactions, and other things that are bound to come up. Try to determine what you have to accept and where you will draw the line.