Get Off the Bus and onto the Right Road for You

I have worked one-on-one with over 3000 individuals during the past 15 years.. And each one has their own story with unique elements. However, there are common themes too.

For example, many people end up in a misfit or in career pain because they get on the wrong bus. They realize the bus is headed somewhere they don’t want to go. The journey they are taking is not one they would have chosen if, when they got on the bus, they knew where they wanted to go.

Here are 5 kinds of bus rides I often see. Perhaps you’re riding one of these buses right now:

1. You hopped on the first bus that came along. You needed a job early in life to pay the bills, to establish independence, to get you started in life but you never got off. Now, you feel stuck. Your career has hit the glass ceiling. There is nowhere else to go with this job, this company, this profession. Or, you’re struggling with work-life balance, struggling with childcare or eldercare. Or, you feel constant pressure to upgrade your skills. Or, you are suffering burnout. Perhaps it’s time to get off the bus and find your own set of wheels before the bus crashes!

2. You followed the herd. Everyone in your family was taking this bus—military, business, medicine, teaching—so you jumped on board. Or, maybe your high school friends all went off to university, so you tagged along. Or, jobs opened up in a booming oil sector, or IT, or construction, so you stepped into this space because that’s where the jobs were. You took this bus because everyone else was doing it and you had no clear idea of what else to do. Now you’re tired of playing follow the leader. You want to find your own road, perhaps a road less traveled. You’re ready to explore other routes, or find a safe exit.

3. You bought a ticket in order to buy a job. This bus is going to Vegas. You’re on the road to riches. Your job sucks the life out of you but it pays a lot of money. But high-paying drudgery is still drudgery. Someday you’ll quit and get a job with meaning, with purpose, one that inspires and energizes you. Why not start now?

4. The bus you first took was the right one when you started out in your career. You learned certain skills, grew professionally and personally, paid off some debts and acquired some assets. You ponder the gap between your youthful ideals and your current realities. You wonder why you never transferred to another bus. So now you find yourself looking out the window and daydreaming . . . where do all those other roads go? What lies beyond those hills? It’s okay to dream again, to explore new options. Stay with the daydream…see where it takes you.

5. You’re up and out of your seat, time to get off the bus. Stop this thing and let me off! You live for the weekends and only come alive during a long vacation. You’re past the stimulation of the learning phase, you’ve mastered the ins and outs of the job, you have a financial cushion. Now you’re bored – painfully bored, and you watch the clock like a timekeeper at a sporting event. You’re ready to build your own business, ready to serve others, ready to find a more interesting job, ready to take the wheel and started driving your own dreams.

Life is way too short to spend riding around in circles on a bus going nowhere. What is needed is some clarity about WHERE to work and WHAT to do in terms of a job. Getting answers to these questions gives some direction on what to do next.

If you’re ready to make a plan to doing work you love in a very real way then start focusing on those times in your life when you were doing what you enjoyed most, when you got lost in it when you were truly absorbed by it, when an intensity came over you.

Then bring those events or activities to a session with me for analysis to see how they connect in very practical and real ways to answering WHERE and WHAT do I do next?

Your Career is Not a Problem to be Solved

 

One of the things I’ve noticed during the past 15 years of assisting individuals through career transitions is that successful transitions have a creative orientation.  What I mean by that is the distinction between a problem-solving mentality and a creating mentality.

 

Many people don’t like their jobs, and want to change.  For them, career transition is about taking action to get rid of something they don’t want, i.e. the problem, the unwanted situation, the conflict.  

 

There’s a reason for this.  Our scientific-engineering-driven society is all about problem-solving. It’s easy to talk about what needs fixing because so much does. But the mobilization of people through problems is always temporary. It works best during a crisis, like times of war. People who may not usually agree with each other can quickly join together for what seems to be a vital cause.

 

Crisis is often what motivates people who want to change jobs.  What gets them started on changing their careers is the intensity of their career pain. Once they take action, even if the action doesn’t work particularly well, there is less intensity of the problem. That leads to less future action, because the motivation to act has weakened.  In their minds, they have fixed the problem of pain because it is less intense.

 

The cycle is always the same: more intensity leads to action which lessens the intensity which leads to less future action.  In fact, what often happens is that the person stays in the same job, or gets a similar job, because the intensity of the career pain has diminished ergo problem solved!

 

This is not a bad thing per se. There is nothing wrong with improvising, hoping one thing leads to another well enough that you fall into the situations you would hope for. It is simply a less reliable approach.

 

What is more likely to happen is more reaction to circumstances, a kind of running on a treadmill where every action brings you back to where you started.

 

If the prevailing circumstances drive us, then we have one of two limited choices: to react or to respond. In either case, the circumstances are in charge and we simply react to them…over and over again.

 

We spend a lot of time “fixing” problems driven by circumstances. It is easy to organize around problems. You don’t have to think. The problem (the circumstances) drive motivation, focus, and even the types of action you would take.

 

And yet nothing really changes. Solving all your problems doesn’t mean you will have what you want. The underlying structural problems remain.  We might have a new job title, a bigger paycheque, and we put on a brave face that we’ve really got it together…but our soul continues to shrivel up and die! 

 

Even though people make superficial changes, the underlying issues eat away, and often manifest into stress disorders or more serious illnesses.  Personal health is a place where the difference between a problem mentality and an outcome mentality is enormous.

 

The traditional medical approach is to problem solve.  After all, much of modern medicine was developed on battlefields over the past 200 years, and we have a lot to be thankful for in terms of modern medical procedures and pain control protocols.

 

However, our medical system today is not over-burdened by gunshot wounds.  Instead, it is collapsing under the weight of so-called “lifestyle” illnesses.

 

Modern medicine is learning that health is a holistic issue that involves not only the physical dimension of an individual but emotional, psychological, even spiritual aspects of life. You can’t use problem solving to build anything long term. 

 

Taking action to get rid of something is the opposite of taking action to give birth to something.

 

This creative orientation was clearly outlined by Robert Fritz in his ground-breaking book, The Path of Least Resistance, when he introduced a powerful organizing principle in creating our lives–structural tension.

 

Your career is not a problem to be solved. It is a creation in process. This tension comes from knowing the end result you want to create, and knowing where we are in reality at any given moment. Tension is formed by the difference or contrast between our desired state and our actual state, and this tension is dynamic, a positive force.

 

I have seen many of my successful clients hold this structural tension as they make their next moves. They have a clear picture of their right work.  They look at their current reality objectively and accurately (easier said than done because of the negative circumstances they often live with).

 

When they know the very next step they are about to take in the context of the overall outcome they want to create, suddenly the energy they need is there in abundance. They become creative and focused. They move with momentum. They do not have to get “pumped up” because they are already on the move. 

 

Of course, the creative process begins with the question, “What do I want to create?” Without the end in mind, you are left to drift in and out of problem-solving.

 

Individuals that make successful career transitions have a clear end in mind. That is why a career assessment is so crucial to a successful transition.  If you leave your current job, where would you go, what would you do there?  Answering these two questions with some clarity gets the ball rolling.

 

The outcome doesn’t need to be all that clear at the outset to set the process in motion, just clear enough that you know what you want to create.

 

This, then, makes the question of your starting point immediately relevant: where am I now in relationship to where I want to be? 

 

Career transition is not a “to do” list followed mindlessly. Every move is related to the final outcome, and occurs within the context of structural tension

 

There is always a next move. Our lives are in motion, even when they seem to be standing still. The question is, to what degree can we determine the next move, and will it lead us where we want to go? 

 

Contrast that with not knowing the next move. When people do not have a picture of what they really want in terms of their career, they often need to force themselves into action.

 

They feel blocked or feel like they are running in a circle, with the same old thoughts, same old ideas, same old same old. Just because the underlying structure you may be in leads to lethargy, doesn’t mean you have a block or a psychological condition. You are simply in the wrong structure.

 

Change the structure, the so-called “block” goes away, and your creative juices become alive again. 

 

Without an organizing principle, it is hard to organize. And it is easy to make explicit what otherwise would have been implicit, the outcome you want to create. 

 

Once structural tension is established, the next step is the next step. I’m here, and my next move on the path to the overall accomplishment of my goal is just right over there. 

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