I love that you’re reading this post to find out what you got wrong. You’re just so thorough!
Being wrong can actually be a good thing, GREAT even.
Here’s why:
12:00pm at work
It’s lunchtime at work and you’re wishing it was time to go home.
You were tired last night and not as patient as you’d like with the people you care about. You feel kinda guilty about it and you’re hoping you can somehow make things better.
You have a look on Amazon and see if maybe there’s a gift you can buy; maybe that’ll fix things. In your heart you know the problem is that you’re not spending much time with the people you love. It’s going to take more than a gift to fix things.
You buy lunch from the deli ‘round the corner and treat yourself to a cupcake. The coffees you buy just keep getting taller, but they’re not dulling the feelings you have about your work.
You wish you didn’t have to face the endless number of meetings you have, but there doesn’t seem to be a way out. There don’t seem to be that many options for you, so you feel really stuck.
There isn’t time to go back to school and it’s not as though you’re going to win the lottery anytime soon.
You tried going to a networking event or two, but really wish you hadn’t. There only so much small talk you can stand and you really don’t want to have to ever see another name badge with a smiley face drawn on it!
If you only could get your resume sorted out, that would surely make a good difference and you feel you’re really going to have to double down on your job search efforts. You keep staying up late Googling what you should do with your life.
It’s so frustrating when Google doesn’t know the answer.
Then there are those career quizzes. You’ve taken so many you feel you could write your own book on personality types. This makes you a little distracted and you wonder whether you should be a writer.
You then move onto the same fantasies nurtured by Hollywood movies – maybe you should move to Italy and open a bakery in the Umbrian hills or to France and open a chocolaterie?
Both of these could be possibilities… apart from the fact that you don’t like being in a kitchen.
Big dreams like those take time and you don’t feel like you have the time. You want out of your current career and you don’t want to have to wait years to make that happen.
It’s really hard to see past your career blind spots on your own, because they’re just that, blind spots.
Now, let’s pretend…
12:00pm at work
It’s time for lunch and you go out onto the roof garden at your new workplace. You’re working with people that you would honestly be glad to spend your free time with. They just “get” who you are.
It’s not that you’re all the same, you have in common that you’ve work that you care greatly about and that you’re able to make a difference in.
You look out over the view and you think of how far you’ve come and what a huge difference you’ve made in your life. Your family and friends have noticed the change in you. They see how joyful you are, how you’ve regained your optimism and the best thing is that you feel it too.
It wasn’t about redoing your resume, it wasn’t about reading all the job alerts and you didn’t need to go back to school to move to this new career.
You’re able to move past your blind spots to learn what you really wanted and then worked step-by-step towards that.
What might your blind spots be holding you back from reaching?
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