Practising Self Care & Self Compassion During a Career Change
Whatever stage you’re at in navigating your career change, it can stir up a whole host of emotions. Whether it’s a smaller scale change from one similar role to another within the same organisation or completely rethinking your professional life altogether, it’s normal to feel anxious, excited, hopeful, frustrated, lost or confused during transitions. So how do you deal with all of the challenges that accompany a career shift and the emotions that comes with it?
As a Professional Certified Career Coach, when I work with my clients to support them through significant seasons of change and transformation, I actively encourage them to practise effective self care and self compassion. Investing in this journey can require lots of energy (emotional, mental and physical), so it’s really important to ensure you prioritise and attend to your own needs particularly during this season.
If you are about to embark upon your own career change or have already begun the process, here are my top 10 tips for navigating the ups and downs of it all:
1. Become more self aware
One of the biggest benefits of coaching is increased self awareness. By gathering deep insights about yourself you’re more enabled to affect positive change and to put into place effective strategies. So, consider the narratives circulating your mind and the emotions you’re experiencing with this career change. Accept them without judgement whilst reflecting upon whether they support or undermine your progress moving forwards. You might find it helpful to write down your observations to process and make sense of these.
2. Replace negative and limiting beliefs
When you become aware of the thought processes and the beliefs you hold about your circumstances or your ability to change things in your professional life, you want to identify new positive thought patterns and beliefs to support this unfolding journey. How would you like to feel about this next chapter? Perhaps you want to move from a position of fear and anxiety to a state of excitement and possibility. Maybe you would like to feel confident in your ability to make good career choices. Pinpoint the belief(s) you want to carry forwards and start to practise embodying these. For some, this looks like repeating statements of affirmation or recording your achievements in a journal. Changing our beliefs and mindset is a marathon rather than a sprint but committing to consistent action to move towards these more positively framed thinking patterns will only benefit you along the way.
3. Operate within your circle of control
We spend a lot of time and energy worrying about things that may sit outside of our immediate control i.e. the economic climate or changes within your industry, which can lead us to feeling helpless and inadequate. Proactive people identify those things that you can influence or control so that you channel your time and energy in a positive and constructive way. What are the things that you can control within this career change journey? Use that to guide your next steps. (If you’re interested to learn more about the circle of control model, search ‘Stephen Covey’s Circle of Control Model’.)
4. Learn from past career ‘mistakes’
I speak to so many clients who look back on their career choices with regret. Some received poor advice at a significant stage of life that took them down the wrong path. Increasingly there’s recognition that a traditional career path no longer exists. The lovely team at Amazing If talk lots about ‘squiggly careers’; careers that are much more fluid in nature and can take many different directions. Seek out the learning from your previous job roles. What skills did you hone? What did you discover about yourself that could inform what comes next? What did you enjoy, what was missing, what would you have liked to see change? Approach your work history with curiosity rather than criticism.
5. Surround yourself with a strong support network
Sharing this journey with those you have high trust relationships can be such a valuable source of support. Be clear about your expectations and boundaries. If you’re not looking for advice, then politely assert your needs and tell them what you need during this season of change. This might be a friend, family member, coach or mentor. If you have a sense of the area of work you’re heading, be strategic and connect with someone who knows more about the sector than you do to learn from their experience. Reach out for a virtual coffee or even better meet up in person to pick their brains.
6. Seek out sources of inspiration and success stories
On those challenging days when your energy is low, you’re feeling frustrated by your lack of progress or confused and lacking clarity, this is the time to seek out sources of inspiration. Look out for success stories from others who have navigated a similar journey and can share with you their learning along the way and offer some perspective. There are numerous blogs and articles online you can take a look at (do check out the Careershifters website) as well as reaching out to those in your network you can connect with to ask them to share their own first hand experiences.
7. Remind yourself of your strengths and achievements
Within my coaching programmes, I always support my clients to carry out a strengths and skills audit as well as inviting them to identify their key personal and professional achievements. There are a number of benefits to this; you are able to recognise the things that stand out to you as being important and most likely reflective of your values, you’re able to identify some of the things you might want to present to potential recruiters and employers when you’re reach that stage in your career change journey and it also moves you into a more positive and confident mindset. We all have a negativity bias, so we have to be intentional about creating space and opportunity to recognise our successes.
8. Create a vision for your future
Even if you’re not clear at this stage on the specifics of what you want professionally, you might have a sense of what your life goals are in the next 5 to 10 years. Create a vision you’re excited to work towards and if you’re a visual person you might like to produce a vision board to provide a physical reminder of this. You can then start to see how your career choices could support and enable the achievement of your bigger life goals. It’s so important to look at your career in the context of your whole life so that these work in synergy as much as possible.
9. Break things down to manage overwhelm
When you have a clear goal or long term vision in mind, begin to work backwards from this point bridging the gap from where you are now to where you want to be. What are the milestones you need to achieve to get you closer to the bigger picture? Break these down into daily, weekly or monthly actions and focus on just one thing at a time to help you feel motivated to take consistent action in a more manageable way to avoid that potential sense of overwhelm. For many people, carving out the time to focus on a career change whilst juggling everything else in life can seem an impossible task, but committing to do just one thing within a 10 minute time frame is much more realistic.
10. Practise effective self care / state management
When seasons of stress, change and transition occur, it’s especially during these times when we need to have a foundational level of effective state management to fall back on. By formulating healthy habits that keep us emotionally and physically well, we’re better supported to navigate our way through the challenges. By eating and sleeping well, creating time for regular exercise and building opportunities for connection, some of our most basic needs are met. Even if you do just some of these things, you’re going to place yourself in a stronger position. Call it ‘self care, self compassion or state management’ - making sure you have what you need will ensure you have resources from which to draw to help you approach this season of change in the best possible mindset and therefore help you to achieve your own version of success.
I really hope you find these suggestions helpful for managing your career change journey this year.
If you would like professional guidance and in-depth support in figuring out what you want from your next career move to go from confusion to clarity, from overwhelm to action and to pursue your new career with confidence, then book in for a completely free strategy session to explore the support options available.
We'll identify where you want to get to in your career, we'll dive into what's going on for you right now, what is and isn't working and we'll identify the challenges and obstacles that are preventing you from making more progress, so you can put in place a plan of action to move forwards.
I run free monthly workshops, covering a range of topics for navigating career change to confidence and mindset. You can book for these here
If you want 2023 to be the year when you finally get to do work that really matters to you and you're ready to make a change, do book in for a completely free chat to figure out your next steps.