Changing Your Path and Shifting Careers
By changing your path you can shift careers and create freedom and opportunity.
I love the analogy of a career being a pathway.
A path is your ability to move around and explore.
A path is freedom.
However, when we become stuck and unfulfilled. Our job has
become the lack of a pathway. The path becomes confinement.
Like any path, a career is only useful and serves a purpose if it gets you where you want to go. If it’s not doing that, you’re going to feel stuck and you’re going to be frustrated.
When you shift careers, it requires changing your path.
Or, even better, it requires forging a new path.
Is your career a path of freedom or confinement?
How do you know when your career has become an unfit path?
It’s when your ability to move around, explore and be invigorated stops being possible. The pathway has become stale terrain. There are no fruits to be picked along the way and your friends no longer share the journey. It’s just a dusty old road.
When a job has become an unfit path, it too no longer has fruits to offer. Where you need to go, it is unable to get you. It too is a stale path.
A job or career is often looked at as being good or bad based on what society deems to be a lucrative profession. Does it offer good perks, pay and benefits? What about vacation days?
How fit a job is, can’t be judged by any outside scale or standard. We experience it as being useful or not based on if it’s a path of freedom or confinement to us.
A job that someone else judged one way can be experienced by someone else as offering the other.
Unfortunately, there are many people who stay on a path they experience as confinement simply because others see it as a comfortable career.
Is your career a path taking you where you need to be?
It’s worth reminding ourselves. What are the things in your livelihood that are uniquely important to you? Which job attributes?
- Schedule flexibility
- Growth
- Challenges
- High Salary
- Impacting others
These are just some examples but there are many others.
The job attributes we value can change and vary for us over time. The job itself can also change. It may no longer offer what it used to as time passes or your role within a job may change.
An important common misconception
This is why the career as a pathway is such a powerful analogy.
So often we get confused into seeking job attributes as though they’re inherently important on their own. Rather the importance is not just in having them. It is in having freedom or a “path” to attain these attributes on our own accord.
For example:
If we're inspired to do so. The ability to put in more hours, work hard and earn more is freedom on a path. Even if we don't always choose to exercise that option.
Even if we don’t currently need or a job attribute, we want the capacity to act on it as required.
We want access to grasp the levers as we are inspired to do so.
Career goals change. At one point, someone may value growth and to be challenged over the attribute of high salary. Then later, this individual might value schedule flexibility and the ability to have an impact on others.
But, if this person is unable to grasp these attributes as they are inspired, their career is going to be experienced as a path of confinement.
Their path won’t be getting them where they need to be to their hearts content.
When this is experienced, they feel compelled to change their path.
It’s experienced as being stuck.
A stuck path is one defined by desperate searching.
It is a path of feeling lost and seeking for:
- Hope
- Possibility
- Abundance
- Healing
- Answers
At this time, there's something that's required that's not within grasp.
Hearing the call and changing your path
In our careers, a stuck path becomes a driving force for change.
A stuck path is felt as discontentment. It’s a pushing voice calling you to get a move on.
Too often when people find themselves stuck, they begin seeking a convenient path in life. A path that’s end destination is predetermined, safely cleared and free of any uncertainty.
However, this isn’t how meaningful change works.
What gives a career transition meaning and what’s ultimately valuable is in how we challenge the definition of who we are and what’s possible.
As you forge a new path, this is literally what you’re doing.
Being able to carve out and create a path is the great differentiator in building an intentional and rewarding life.
Creating any meaningful new path is like shining a light into a dark forest of uncertainty. You begin cutting down the foliage one step at a time.
Only then can you lay new footing for a new path.
It’s not an easy path but it is a rewarding one.
The problem is we think we need to know the end destination before we act towards it.
However, we never see the entire path. You only see the second step once you’ve courageously taken the first.
Why it can be so challenging to change your path
The challenge in any journey isn’t in where you’re going. It’s figuring out how to start based on where you are.
That’s why any meaningful career decision is such a personal endeavour. Ultimately, it’s in having to make the journey from where you are is what gives it significance for you.
The problem in any career shift or change in path lies in that we always greatly underestimate the journey.
When you change your path, you’re literally forging a new way, that’s why it can seem so painfully slow, tedious and difficult. All the challenges, stumbles and setbacks make it seem like you’ve made a mistake.
When everything feels chaotic, uncertain and messy, this is just a necessary step along the way. It’s just part of the journey.
However, nothings ever lost. By changing your path, you’re challenging the core level, life struggles that were holding you back.
I mean, really.
What could be more important than that?