Career change - stressful or exciting?

There can be many reasons to make a career change or change your job. Stress and work/life balance may be a strong motivating force. Sometimes, however much you try to manage the stress and anxiety, changing the principle stressor in your life - your job - may be the only real option. That can seem even more scary than the stresses your current job is putting you under. But it need not be. Maybe the stress is exactly the impetus you needed to step back and look anew at what’s really important to you and where your job fits into your wider personal values.

Or maybe you can approach your existing job with a different mindset that no longer sees everything as a problem. How do you currently cope with work stress, and is your approach to coping no longer very helpful, even part of the problem?

What’s really important to you - relationships, friends, family, career, education, recreation, community, your place in the world……? How does work feature in those priorities? Career planning is fundamentally about problem solving and problem solving is a skill you can acquire. You may already be quite an accomplished problem solver in some aspects of life, but how you approach problems can often be context dependent. Do you have a positive or a negative attitude to problems; are they something to be feared or challenges to solve? Do you try to avoid problems if at all possible or do you see them as a normal part of human life?

Happenstance…..

Krumboltz’s Theory of Planned Happenstance offers a positive way of looking at unexpected events and changes in life and in career. There can be opportunities to be found in the unexpected, and that you can create if you approach the situation in a certain way - ‘things happen’ whether you like it or not. So how can you make the best of it? Career planning is by its nature often unplanned; events happen that affect what you do and where you work. Many if not most people’s career paths are meandering, not a straight line (mine certainly has been!), and will be increasingly so in the future. Sometimes there are chance opportunities that arise because you happen to talk to someone who mentions something to someone else - serendipity! The key is the degree of curiosity and flexibility you bring to such situations. You can also create your luck.

Seek help……

If you find yourself in an unexpected situation with work: maybe things not going so well, high levels of stress or just a realisation that you want to change course, then seek some help. It may only need a short number of sessions to get a handle on the key issues and help work out a new approach or direction. But a structured approach to working through the issues can help build the confidence to make big decisions or respond positively to potential opportunities that might arise.

Don’t struggle on your own, going over and over all the possible implications, especially all the worst possible ones, in your head. Change can be good, exciting even, but it may involve allowing yourself to accept that any uncertainty created is a normal part of human experience.

Bill Sheate, 7 March 2023