Accelerate Your Career GPS Into Top Gear

What motivates you to get out of bed for work each morning? Your 25 year mortgage, the kids education or maybe just to make ends meet. Putting on that career life vest while experiencing the Sunday afternoon blues (Saturday afternoon blues for our friends in the Middle East) to help you get through the working week sounds all too familiar. Most of us have gone through that phase of coasting through our careers for months on end and then one day to awaken to the realization that the last 3 years have just passed us by. When I worked in London, I recall one of my colleagues saying to me on a Monday afternoon that she wished it was Friday already! Granted, that the UK has the longest number of working hours in Europe with the greater proportion of employees working more that 48 hours per week, but this is a dismal approach to life.  Most people just get by the working week and only come to life in the evenings or during the weekends and then there are others who work so hard during the week day that they end up sleeping the weekend away.

What if you could enjoy your work, if you were incredibly good at what you did and got paid handsomely for it? By embracing a career that comes naturally to you or one that you immensely enjoy, you stand a chance of aligning all areas of your life. If for example, polar bears were moved from the North Pole to the Antarctica, what do you think would happen?  The female polar bears prefer snow banks to frozen ice and land (most of Antarctica is actually land covered in snow). The polar bear might make the transition but would it continue to thrive in a habitat not so natural to it without experience some degrees of difficulty? In a similar vein, if you love working with computers and speak the programming language as if it was your native tongue and you found yourself working as an accountant because it is what your father had wanted you to do, you will experience that trapped career crisis that some experience in their 40s and 50s.  If only you could reprogram your genetic code, who would you be if you were totally free in every part of your life?  Your talents and natural self expression will allow you to defy self imposed limitations. There will be no need to take a vacation from work because you will be pursing work/ projects that you love and the best part is you get paid for it.

Ways to rewire your Career GPS

• Time for you to start using your own career GPS, not one borrowed from your uncle or granddad! Punch in the coordinates so that it takes you to your desired destination.

• Rewire your mindset and set the scope to unleash your creative capacity.

• Re-connect with the child within you. As a child you knew personal greatness, you also acted without fear and knew no limitations, as an adult you became blinded by social conditioning, negativity and layers of conformity.

• Innovate your options, if you seek to create success and opportunities by focusing on how to be resourceful instead of the problem, you will surely find solutions.

• Take a day or two to create two lists. The first list should hold the things and aspects that jump right out at you. For example; I have a friend whose eyes light up every time she talks about fashion and she literally comes to life when she pages through a fashion magazine. Use details to include your interests, passions, strengths and talents. Your second list should include what you will require to be able to reach your dream job. For example; you might secretly be a social media guru and you know a lot about the different functionalities of social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn etc. Marketing & Public Relations come naturally to you, and social media consultancy is calling out your name, however you lack a qualification in social media. So you would try to bridge this gap by obtaining a qualification in social media.