How To Shape Your Career With Purpose – Figure Out Your Next Career Move In 6 Steps
- Feb 22, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 21, 2024
Written by: Ricardo Brito, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Our world is changing at an incredible pace – industries and jobs are being reshaped overnight. Artificial Intelligence, Pandemics, Economic crises, and generational shifts – are all contributing to fast and dramatic changes in the workforce and the nature of work itself.
But the transformations are not only driven by the external world, for we as individuals and our inner worlds are also constantly evolving. Long gone are the days when we could spend our entire lifetime pursuing one or two careers. Our interests and priorities shift, we want something different, evolve, or a totally new direction. Our relationship to work is not static, it evolves and requires care.
Although exciting change is hard – we are not equipped, trained, or educated to reinvent ourselves. But now more than ever, this skill is crucial to our survival, sustainability, and happiness. The better we get at self-reinvention, the more chances we have of creating the life we want. By need or will we will need to reinvent ourselves often in our lives, is time that we get better at it.
If you're struggling with reinventing yourself and seeking guidance for your next professional move, consider focusing on the following key areas:
1. Understand your relationship to work
Have you ever asked yourself what would you do if you didn’t need to work?
Your work occupies a significant part of your time and life. How are you ensuring that your relationship with work is healthy? So often, we find ourselves bouncing from one career milestone to the next, with little idea of the big picture. Only planning our next step is not enough, we must go
beyond that to seek and embrace a longer-term vision of how work serves us and our lives.
Reflecting on these can help you understand the role work plays in your life and guide your reinvention.
I have observed that the nature of our dissatisfaction with our professional lives is not what we think it is. Often it is not the job, the company, or the crappy boss. It’s deep-rooted beliefs, behaviors, and stories we tell ourselves that we never question. In my case, I was driven by financial anxiety, despite all the external success and apparent passion.
2. Explore and ask the hard questions
This is a process of exploration and curiosity. Understanding what you truly want from your career is about getting to know yourself better. Learning what lights up your passion, what brings joy to your work, and how you can contribute positively. But it doesn't just stop there. It's also about facing and challenging your inner fears, doubts, and the limiting beliefs that are holding you back. This journey calls for you to ask those tough questions – the ones you may have been avoiding – thus creating a pathway for growth and new possibilities.
Understand, this isn't about what you're expected to do or what you've always done. It's about honoring your deepest convictions and desires, allowing them to guide your career and life decisions. Giving yourself this permission is a critical step in the process of career reinvention.
3. Uncover valuable, hidden (Transferable) skills and experiences
Taking a fresh perspective on our achievements and passions can reveal incredible insights. It's all too common to downplay our strengths, frequently underestimating our capabilities. There may be areas where we
shine, unknowingly possessing skills or experiences that we tend to overlook.
Learning to acknowledge our inherent superpowers, those transferable skills, and experiences can significantly enhance our future reinvention. These skills and experiences can lay the foundation for a whole new career direction or even be the start of a business idea.
A recruiter I worked with discovered that her previous experience in hiring, interviewing, and reporting skills were transferable and malleable to a career as a User Researcher. Instead of being afraid of her background, she turned into a superpower.
Find how you can discover your transferable skills and create a future-proof career.
4. Don't just think, act and experiment
I believe in action. Too often this process can become very intellectual. Doing is as important. Real-world experiments are crucial to feel transformations for ourselves most holistically, involving mind, body, and soul.
It's a process that taps into your emotional self. Your feelings offer rich insight about what's working for you and what isn't. They are your personal barometer, helping you gauge whether a particular path resonates with you or not. By experimenting early and often, in situations where you've got nothing to lose, you're also giving yourself the chance to build that confidence in each decision.
That’s why in my programs I always encourage clients to create experiments to test their assumptions as quickly as possible. Do a workshop, take on a pro-bono project, talk to experts. No matter what the experiment looks like, the important thing is to make it actionable and practical.
5. Address your career story
The narratives we tell about our careers shape our identities, influencing our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. Recognizing the ways in which our career stories limit us can help us reshape them, letting go of inhibiting self-perceptions, sparking opportunities for growth, and increasing self-worth.
By looking at our career stories, often chaotic tales of experiences, we might discover there was always a red thread and a logic to it. Despite all my years doing branding, developing products and innovation strategies, what I truly enjoyed was facilitating collaboration, working with people and facilitating their growth. I never saw myself working exclusively with people like I am today as a coach.
It was by exploring my career story and experiences that I was able to realize which role I always played and that brought me the most pleasure. It was always about the people.
If you’d like to create a stronger career story, check out my Career Storytelling Workshop.
6. Embrace the journey of continuous reinvention
It's no accident that you're reading these words right now. Something inside you is ready for transformation. Career reinvention is rarely a single event; in fact, it's a never-ending journey of personal and professional growth. And you're not alone on this journey. Embrace the cyclical nature of this – and get better each time.
Ricardo Brito, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Ricardo Brito is not just a work and life coach. He is someone who stands by your side as you navigate your professional development, aiding in your discovery of new paths and opportunities while fostering a healthier relationship with work. His mission is simple: help you discover the path to your 'what's next' in the world of work.
