Take the pressure off the process of choosing a career

Take the pressure off the process of choosing a career Most of us will change careers. Most young people will change careers at least three times after they find one, when they are thirty. So work life is really about a series of careers, and we all need to get good at the process of choosing a new career. We all need to get comfortable with the inherent uncertainty during the process. Here are nine ways you can make choosing a career less stressful: 1. Squash perfectionist tendencies and get comfortable in gray areas. Its fine to be lost and not sure what youre doing, so dont rush yourself to solve the problem. Maybe you can just look at the problem differently, and it wont look so bad. And, dont feel like you need to get the right answer in your hunt for the right career. Being right is not important. Just do your best and see what comes of it. 2. Dont wait for a new career to start being creative. Every job is creative. Every job presents problems that need solving, and problem solving is a creative act. If what you mean by creativity is that you want to paint with watercolors, then go home at night and do that. Why do you need to get paid to make art? Its enjoyable and fulfilling and a fine thing to do in your free time, even if you have only fifteen minutes of free time a day. Raymond Carver is famous for writing short, short stories because he didnt have enough time in the day to write long. 3. Stop looking for a career to save your life. A job is not a life. A job is something to do with your time that is rewarding and fosters personal growth. A career cant make you happy. Relationships will make you happy. Figure out what you can get from a career and what you cant. Once you recognize that you will rescue you, not your career, theres a lot less pressure in the career hunt realm. 4. Relax about the career choices you make. Try something. If you dont like it, try another thing. There are not rules that say you have to stay in the career you choose. In fact, moving from one career to another at a breakneck pace til you love something might be good for you, and taking ten years to figure something out is fine. The life or death decision is about living below your means. As long as you do this, you have lots of choices in life. If you dont live below your means, you get stuck in a career. 5. Dont wait until you know yourself. You never really know yourself. Its a process. If its a precondition for finding a career, then you could be learning about yourself forever and never feel ready to choose a career. Forget the soul-search and just try something. Ironically, the best way to learn about yourself is to do things and see if you like them, so the inactive, soul-searching time is, in some ways, counter-productive. Try testing the waters with a lot of lower risk moves, instead. 6. Stop choosing dead-end fields. All things being equal, youre better off choosing a career in a field that is growing, not shrinking. Once you identify your talents, focus them on a field that has a future. If you write well, go into interactive marketing one of the fastest growing fields and not print journalism, which is in trouble. If you like to help people, go into nursing huge demand, and not centralized, slow-moving nonprofits, which are falling out of favor with donors. 7. Dont overlook the good points of the job you have. You can save the world from almost any job, you can shift from a dead end to a hot spot in almost any field, and you can learn and grow if you get good at managing your boss. These are all things you can control. You dont need a specific career to accomplish these things. So maybe you dont even need to pick a new career. 8. Make a lifestyle choice before you make a career choice. Figure out what you want your life to look like, and then choose a career that will enable that life. If you dont know what you want from life, how can you possibly know what you want from a career? What we want from life might change. Thats okay. You have to start somewhere. So figure out what you want, and an try out careers that might give you that. If you change what you want from life, you can change your career. 9. Talk about yourself the way you want to be. To figure out what sort of career will suit you, try talking about yourself like youre already there and see how it feels. We intuitively know what stories feel right, and we can make a career change more efficiently if we create stories about our process. You might actually surprise yourself by figuring out what you want to do by figuring out what story seems natural to tell.