Back in June 2015 (a whole five months ago) I wrote and published my first blog dedicated to my career change journey. Five months actually doesn’t seem that long ago, but I’ve covered a lot of ground in that time.
Although I am still working at the same place, I have taken many steps and made many decisions, many of which still surprise me now.
Anyone who knows me knows I don’t manage uncertainty well. I am a planner and I like to have things in place and contingency plans to boot. However, the decision to finally go for change has required me to challenge my habitual way of living and will continue to be a source of uncomfortableness until I am used to it being the norm.
Taking stock
So what have I done and more importantly what have I learnt? Have I found my ideal career? Do I know what I should be doing next? Hell no! Don’t be so ridiculous! If I knew what I should be doing, I’d be doing it now rather than writing here, but this in itself is an interesting point. I actually quite like writing about what I am doing; I am strangely enjoying this discovery phase.
What have I learned? I’ve learned that having fun and enjoying myself is crucial and a major part of discovering what I want to do next. I want to understand my purpose and what drives me, but I want to have fun along the way. I’ve found that regressing back to child hood games is actually an eye opener and playing like a child awakens areas of the brain that have laid dormant for too long.
Routine dulls the senses
I honestly feel that this discovery phase has awakened my senses. I guess we are all guilty of routine, our days are pretty much the same five days a week, give or take different activities we might participate in on an evening, but even then that may be similar week on week. For example, I get up, commute to work, get to work, do the same sort of work day in day out, commute home, do some exercise, go to bed. Repeat. On an evening I may meet with friends, get some food and drink and catch up. It really doesn’t differ massively unless we have specifically put some time in to planning something different.
The past few months have allowed me to plan in lots of different things and more so, take time to reflect on how I have felt doing them.
To study or not to study
When I first thought about career change I didn’t really know where to start. My usual thoughts were what field could I move into and what I needed to study in order to get me to where I want to be. Having grown up jumping through educational hoops, my instinct is to accumulate qualifications. The issue with this is formal education is expensive and often quite boring. I am not an academic and I have never really thrived in an academic environment. I am very much an experiential learner, a pragmatist as I said in a previous post.
Having now read a gazillion books and blogs about career change, I’m very much in agreement that we need to really get to grips with understanding who we are in order to realise what the next step should be.
If we are detached from ourselves — our values, our beliefs, how can we know what’s right for us? We make the wrong decisions, follow the wrong leads and end up even more lost than we may already be.
My world is my playground
A lot of advice talks about finding your passion and following it, but what if we don’t know what our passions are? To find my passions, I am experimenting with things, playing with ideas, having fun. I’m back in the play ground, only this time it is the world. I’m off to find a climbing frame I enjoy. My frame of choice this week is Lisbon, I’m off to see what it has to offer.
