The end of the year is a time of transition (or is it?)
What to do if your career transitions are more lateral than vertical
What do you do if you’re moving to a new job but it still doesn’t feel like you’re making progress in your career?
A career is not just a series of vertical or lateral moves (although it can feel like that sometimes).
I’ve made lots of seemingly lateral moves in my career that have shifted me in a direction I could not have anticipated. But at the time it felt like I was stagnating, just falling into something for the sake of it (or, let’s be honest, for the sake of paying the bills).
Even a lateral move can add to your experience in ways you don’t realise at first.
Here’s why:
Maybe those are not the specific skills you want to develop, maybe it’s not quite the network you want to surround yourself with, but it will prove to have some kind of value later down the line, even if that’s only to make you more certain of what you don’t want so you can be more ready to steer yourself in the right direction later on.
You’re still learning a bunch of “soft skills” which are so important (and I kind of hate that term because it makes them sound trivial). Things like leadership, teamwork, staying calm under pressure, navigating tight deadlines- these are invaluable, and you can learn them even in the roles you don’t want to be in.
It gives you the time and stability to figure out what you do want. I cannot emphasise that this cannot be rushed. There is the timeline we envision for our lives, and then there’s the one that actually unfolds. Part of living authentically means letting go of the expectation of the timing in which things should happen. This is the part that scares most people because we all feel some pressure to achieve certain milestones by certain ages.
Sometimes you can be surprised and discover that you actually love certain type of work unexpectedly.
Image: The Rising Sun with Flowers and Trees of the Four Seasons, Sakai Hōitsu (Japanese, 1761–1828), Metropolitan Museum of Art
If this happens to you and it feels like you’re not making progress, remember to do this:
When you’re working towards a complete career changes, a lot of the progress has to happen outside office hours. This means you need to save time and energy for that. Boundaries are not an option, they’re a necessity.
This is the time to let go of people pleasing and perfectionism. Those two traits are detrimental to changing your career but they’re not easy to unlearn when you’ve been using them as a coping mechanism since you were a kid.
Planning is your friend. Pencilling your priorities into a calendar to satisfy the analytical left brain; creating a vision board for your creative right brain. Writing things down is the precursor to actually doing them. Think of it as the private moment between you, your thoughts and the page before you go live by putting your plans into action.
I love the end of the year for so many reasons. Even if I’m not moving to a new job, it seems to mark the beginning of a change- whether that’s a change of environment, a new challenge I’ve set for myself. new creative projects to look forward to or even a refreshed sense of optimism and an updated perspective on what I’m already doing.
Whatever you do this year don’t allow this very special time to pass you by without a moment’s pause to reflect on all this year has been, everything you’ve become and how much still awaits on the other side of 2023.