The Dangers of Reframing Your Situation
“I feel like working in fire extinguishers is better and more important than just mixing paint. Like I’m making a difference.”
“I don’t like the clients we work with or what our company does, but I get to work in Customer Success making people happy and I like that, so I shouldn’t complain.”
“I’m so tired of the same routine day in and day out but many people aren’t as lucky to have a stable job like me in this job market so I shouldn’t say anything.”
Have you ever heard yourself saying something like this?
You can easily trick yourself into thinking that things are OK because you keep reframing and scaling down your current circumstances to try and fit your own preconceptions into a vision of the future that you have. Attempting to put sharp boundaries around the pieces of your life that you like to try and keep the parts that you don’t like at bay.
The problem with this is that diminishing your own needs and wants and trying to fit them into a little box to convince yourself that you are satisfying your own desires isn’t the answer.
Like trying to whittle a piece of gnarled wood into a beautifully smooth and even box. First you chip away at one side, then quickly move to the other to match, then back and forth gradually chipping away but never quite meeting an equal plane on both sides, inadvertently making the box smaller and smaller until it is just a mere child’s building block from what was once a great trunk.
Like trying to put a fence around a part of the ocean. Constant ebbs and flows, and shifting sands that undermine the integrity of your fenceposts, inexorably eroding away until you are left clinging to smaller and smaller bits and pieces of hope and pseudo-gratefulness but left with a deep, profound, wound of discontent growing inside.
Stop reframing your situation and chiseling away at your self-worth and your dreams.
Stop using “but” as a buffer or as a way to list simple “pros” against a long list of increasingly wearisome “cons”.
Sometimes there is no “plus” big enough to make up for all of the detractors to your situation.
Sometimes unlimited holidays and monthly wellness stipends aren’t enough.
So, how can you fix this?
Well, now that we know exactly what we’re doing, justifying things to ourselves, we can get to work.
Do you have a job*?
Yes? Great.
*Even if you’ve never had a job but have some volunteer or other type of “work” experience, this still applies to you.
What type of industry would you like to work in that would make you feel good everyday? Is it working in a hospital? Fighting crime? Teaching? Research? Art? Museums? Travel?
What skills do you already have that could be applied to this industry? Are you a great Project Manager? Do you love the excitement of event planning? Do you want to work with numbers? Can you name every piece of work at the Uffizi Museum and tell an anecdote about the artist?
Really look at your transferable skills and see where that type of role could fit into the place you want to be.
Next, identify the gaps in your knowledge and start closing them. You’re a project manager in IT but want to work in a hospital? Great. Go to the Careers section of the hospitals around you and start looking at the types of jobs that are available. Read through the descriptions and see what types of education and experience is listed. You can do this in any industry. Want to plan weddings? Google “wedding planners” and start analysing websites.
From that, match up your education and experience to what is being requested in the roles that you want.
When you see where you have gaps, don’t panic and don’t abandon your dreams at the first difficulty.
Check for courses online — accredited or not, to see if you can pick up some of the knowledge and get a taster of the role you’d like to work in. You might have built up an image in your head of a certain role in a specific industry, but taking a sampler course of the actual knowledge required might totally put you off the idea. This is not failure. This is learning what you like and don’t like. Readjust and move forward.
Coursera is my go-to for all online courses as they have a vast library in almost any subject you can think of for learning something quickly.
They have started working with some universities that will even grant you credit for the courses, and in most cases, paying a subscription fee for the course will provide you with a certificate to link to your LinkedIn account later.
I find this to be one of the single most important websites out there today to further your career. You can sign up for Data Science to get some fundamentals in Python, or check out a Managing Innovation course to help you with a new position at your current job.
Once you have a good idea of your knowledge gaps, you can try some other approaches to see how you can get up to speed as efficiently as possible. If you’ve noticed that your skills fit a current role and the title of this role is standardized across different companies you could look up associated bodies online to see what they require for certification. If you want to work in Health Informatics, check out National associations in Health Informatics. If you want to work in Event Planning you can look up regional or global associations for this too. These types of sites will almost always tell you what you need to apply and where you can find courses to upgrade or become a better candidate.
After identifying your knowledge or skill gaps you might find that you have already identified potential work opportunities with the skills and experience that you do have and can start applying for jobs.
Next step. Brush up your CV and your cover letter.
Check the job description and modify your own CV to use the exact language of the listing or to remove skills that might not be applicable to your new role. If the job description is requesting experience that you already have, be sure to put this in the first few points under the job you held that gave you this experience. If there are parts of your role that you know are not applicable to the industry or role you want to move into, remove it from the CV. This is for brevity’s sake. If the skill is even tangentially useful, leave it.
Keep in mind that recruiters see hundreds of CVs everyday for several different roles, so help them by making your CV concise, to the point, and highlighting exactly what they are looking for as listed in their job descriptions.
Next, avoid sending a generic cover letter at all costs. Each company is different, every person is different, so let individuality shine through. Generic cover letters tell HR that you are either blanketing your CV everywhere in the hopes of using a “volume based” approach to getting hired (“If I send out 100 CVs at least ONE of them has to take me!) or worse, that you didn’t bother reading through their job posting.
Tell them why you should be considered for the role. Use their job description to write your cover letter. Show them that even though you might not be a 100% fit with their requirements, you’re someone they want on their team just because of the time and effort you took to apply for their position. State what you are doing to close any knowledge gaps that you have and let them know that you would be a valuable asset to their team and culture. Match their tone.
If they’re funny and witty, be funny and witty (unless you’re not, then you might want to avoid this). If they’re formal and “corporate”, be formal and “corporate”. Remember that the tone they use is also a precursor to the general culture of the company itself, so pay attention to that too. If the language is formal and corporate with little room for humour, most likely the organization will be the same. The same clues you used to model your CV and cover letter can also be used to reverse engineer the company’s culture.
Almost no one is a perfect fit to any role, so if you don’t tick off all the boxes, apply anyway (with discretion — if you don’t fit any of the boxes, the role is not right for you). Often times companies will have multiple positions open or they might have an idea for a position that hasn’t been advertised yet and your CV might fit those requirements.
The most important thing is to not give up.
Now that you’ve seen how you are causing yourself more harm than good by reframing your situation, you can stop reframing, stop making justifications, and start taking action.
Go conquer your empire.
