It can feel quite intimidating when you decide to – or when circumstances put you in position to – make a big career change.
Worry and fear easily creeps in. It can make you doubt your plans or yourself, or worse, it can force you to become complacent, learn to cope, and settle into a dead end, and possibly, a lifetime of enfeebled dissatisfaction.
It’s not that easy to make big career changes. And, the harsh truth is: most people can’t.
In fact, if you’ve not been properly trained… If you lack this one specific factor in guiding your career, it is practically guaranteed that you are going to be held back from achieving your potential.
What is this one factor… We call it:
Your “Career Imprint“
Your career imprint is somewhat like your self-image, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s related to how you see yourself in the professional context, not due to your own volition or aspirations, but due to the way people – especially people in power – have been treating you.
Pay attention: Your career imprint is not something you get to decide and shape just because you said so – it’s not called your career outfit. Sure, it can be modified once you understand how it works – but, for most people, it’s something done to them rather than something they do.
Think of it this way; It’s called an imprint for a reason… It is imprinted in your mind, akin to how cattle are stamped with their owner’s mark. That analogy, by the way, is a good one worth pondering… Not to insinuate that your boss is your owner; that’s a disgusting thought. Instead, to point out the fact that, just like cattle are stamped against their will and without their comprehension, our self-perception in the professional world is also impressed upon us against our will and without most of our comprehension.
The career imprint is the chief principle that manifests in your thoughts, your feelings, your actions as well as the way you present yourself in your professional life.
Why does this matter?
Well… If you have not yet developed a winning career imprint to guide your decisions in a rational, self-interested manner, it can be extremely challenging to gain control over your career. You may operate from a subservient, approval seeking mentality. Or you may simply be in the passenger seat when it comes to the jobs you take. The variations of the limitations a poorly developed career imprint can cause is unending.
And when it comes to making big career changes, with a poor career imprint, you’ll likely find yourself second guessing your plans, wondering if what you want is possible, thinking positions are outside your reach, or even harboring anger and resentment toward the system (justly and unjustly so, doesn’t matter).
If, however, you have developed a winning career imprint, big (and positive) career changes can occur naturally, almost effortlessly, simply by the way you conduct yourself. Your plans come into place organically, and sometimes, opportunities will literally fall on your lap.
Before I teach you how to develop such a winning career imprint, let’s first discuss the 5 key obstacles to developing it, and how these obstacles can keep you down from becoming who you truly are and who you deserve to be.
1. Thinking Through Fear
It is said that courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to act regardless of fear.
When it comes to the experience of fear, you have to recognize that it cannot be avoided. Fear is a natural, instinctive, and automatic response to a certain set of stimuli that trigger perhaps the most fundamental and ancient part of your brain.
Remember: Fear is not controlled through thoughts. Fear cannot be avoided by thoughts. Fear simply is.
You have to make peace with fear. you have to recognize that anything “big” that you want to achieve in your career, will have to venture through “the path of the unknown”. And the unknown will always be interpreted by your neurology in the frame of fear.
The only way to overcome fear is to ACT!.
Not just act mind you but ACT!. It has to be this immediate, forceful, and rapid type of action that leaves no room for thoughts or feelings.
In fact, when experiencing fear, you have to get yourself in the habit of aggressively acting toward and going after what you want, regardless of any heart palpitations or sweaty palms. You must train yourself so that your fear compells you to act in defiance of it.
Once you play with this idea, you’ll start to think “I can do this” when it comes to scary challenges. And you’ll be able to trust in yourself and have faith in yourself.
What you will also recognize as you start to take action, regardless of your fear, is that your thoughts will start to change. And instead of having your thoughts driven by fear, you will learn how to think detached and unaffected by fear.
This is the key: When you are paralyzed by fear and refuse to act, you jail yourself in thoughts. For instance, if you are ruled by fear, you will think about your boss punishing you or firing you every time something goes wrong or you make a mistake. Or you may think that applying to a new job is a bad idea because your boss might find out.
But when you get into the habit of acting, and when you start to demonstrate courage, your thoughts will take a positive turn. When you go to work and you see your boss, you are no longer going to think about getting reprimanded, but instead, you are going to think about how he should be promoting you.
Your attention will shift. And that will empower you to see new opportunities.
2. Not Knowing What You’re Good At
I keep harping on this over and over again: In the professional world, value comes first. And your ability to create and control value gives you the power, the prestige and the privilege to dictate the terms of your contracts.
Unfortunately, most people – especially those who have gone through the Western education system since the 1990s – have ingrained in them a career imprint that perverts and destroys their sense of self worth. And that has a domino effect on everything.
When we don’t know what we’re good at and what value we bring to the table, we lack confidence. We become subservient. We give our power away.
The key to self-esteem is the belief that you have what it takes to rise up to the challenges in life, and that you have the creative will to overcome them.
To do that, you HAVE to know what you’re good at.
Even if it turns out that you’re not good at anything, knowing that you’re not good at anything is a useful step forward. It’s significantly better than not being good at anything, and also, being clueless about the fact that you’re not good at anything. Both, however, are quite unlikely…
You see… Most people are good at something, or at the very least, have an aptitude toward getting good at something. And being aware of your strengths is key to making a big career change, because, simply put, you’re going to need to rely on those strengths to accomplish your change.
(Sidenote – I recommend you learn how to frame what you’re good at using the 5 Core Skills and 7 High-Value Disciplines so that, you can be compensated handsomely for it)
3. Not Knowing Where Opportunities Are
Another point I keep on making over and over again is that “demand” rules everything in the business world. What people demand, what companies demand, what bosses demand – the specific problems they have that they are willing to pay to resolve – is what drives the professional world.
One of the chief mistakes people make is picking a career direction based on what they feel rather than based on immediate opportunities.
And no, I’m not saying pick a different career or settle for the easiest job you can get. No.
What I’m saying is that you need to learn how to tap into demand in the direction of your career: It’s just like setting sails. You don’t change your direction 180 degrees to cross the ocean, but you do adjust so that you can put the wind behind your back.
In the modern post-pandemic-AI-disrupted economy – if you know what you’re doing – you can make it to the top in almost every career path. From engineering to law, from accounting to teaching, from social media influencing to writing, from plumbing to dancing – all career paths are viable for getting you to your goals, and even, beyond your wildest goals.
What you truly need (outside of the career skills we teach to help you navigate the corporate world), is open eyes and attentive ears, and a keen understanding of demand.
What is growing? What do the markets want? What talents, proficiencies and behaviors do employers pay disproportionally for?
Once you figure this out (see our newsletter), and align with it’s forces, your career imprint will start to change – because you will not only claim for the sake of self-promotion, but you’ll actually know, without the shread of any doubt, that what you offer is something your employers are desparate for.
4. Now Knowing How to Tap into Opportunities
Continuing with this analogy, it’s not enough to have a ship and know which way the wind is blowing. You have to also know how to operate the ship.
You have to have the foresight into knowing which demand streams are fads and which ones are projected to last (which we have painstakingly identified – you’re welcome).
But perhaps more importantly, you have to learn how to communicate your capabilities in a way that gets people to take you seriously, especially when you are entering a field of high demand that you have no prior experience in (which we have also solved – see The Language of Value).
It’s not enough to know where you want to go. You have to have the career skills (i.e. communication skills) to get people to take you there.
Competence breeds confidence. And as you learn how to not just find new opportunities, but also how to utilize them, you’ll start to see yourself in a completely different light. Positions and titles that you thought were above you, will become the positions you expect.
5. Following The Flock
Make no mistake: One of the biggest critical failings of people with the “average person career imprint” is the subconscious desire to be just like everybody else.
By the way, this is not necessarily their fault…
You see, ever since we were kids we have been given a set of social rules and norms that drive us toward fairness and equity. Furthermore, our evolutionary background of living in small tribes also instinctively guides us to become invisible inside the group in order to increase our chances of survival.
With these two forces combined, it becomes exceedingly difficult to navigate to our careers to the top. We either self-sabotage our ascent, or feel guilty about what we get despite it being due to our genuine efforts and accomplishments.
We may even feel like “it’s not our turn” or “so and so deserves it more than we do”…
The harsh truth is that the career world and the market is neither equitable nor fair. It is competitive. It is even ruthless.
And it is a world of winners and losers. That’s a fact.
If you want to uncover high-value opportunities and navigate the career you want, rather than the career scrapps that winners toss at you… You need to overcome this subconscious urge to follow the flock and take the same “put your time in” and “work your way up” route everyone is taking.
You can have the illusion of safety or you can have greatness. You cannot have both.
Your choice.
If you want to make a big career change that leads towards a position you’re excited about, and also proud to have, overcoming the obstacles I’ve laid out above is very useful. In fact, even if you can’t overcome them, just being aware of them is very beneficial – this way, you can see their influence and spot it when they are limiting you from achieving your potential.
You may be afraid to fail…
- ACT! Regardless of your fear.
- Know that you’ll use what you’re good at to make this change, and you’ll get good at anything new you do.
- Be sure to leverage, or at the very least, consider market demands in your transition. There is a lot more demand than you imagine.
- Know that if you use The Language of Value, the odds will be massively in your favor.
- Forget the flock. The flock’s attitudes keep you down.
To take it to the next level, I recommend you learn about The Language of Value and also, how to shift your career narrative (see our newsletter for both). These will, in a very quick period, radically and positively transform your career direction, and the way employers and clients treat you.
Keep digging. You’re at the right place…