Strengthen Your Adaptive Skills With a Reflective Career Journaling Practice
- Jan 28
- 4 min read
Written by Britt-Mari Sykes, Career Counsellor
Britt-Mari Sykes, Ph.D., CDP, is a career counsellor and founder of CANVAS Career Counselling, working remotely with clients across Canada.
Intentionally creating time and space to pause, slow down, and reflect on our work and career experiences is a vital practice for career maintenance. Cultivating a regular reflective practice, specifically a career journaling practice, may seem antithetical to the rapid pace of our lives and the unprecedented change in the world. Slowing down to reflect may seem counter to the quick fixes or strategies we increasingly reach for to circumvent the changes our lives and careers continually face.
However, developing a reflective career journaling practice is vital to strengthening our adaptive skills as we navigate an increasingly dynamic job market, now and in the future.
Change in perspective
Change is an inherent part of life, and our attitude towards it varies. Sometimes we intentionally seek or instigate change in our lives and careers, while at other times we resist it or feel unsettled by it.
We can be open to change in certain areas of our lives and quite resistant to it in others. This is particularly true in our careers, where we are conditioned to develop and sustain a particular career path, seeking stability and security. Yet increasingly, careers are characterized by multiple work experiences, retraining, or time away from paid work. This reality, despite our continued desire and need for stability and security, has come face-to-face with the future of work, demanding acceptance of change and the skills to navigate it.
The person who experiences change
Our individual experiences of work and career always extend beyond strategy. While any given career strategy may be situation-appropriate, help us navigate the current job market, or be useful as part of a multifaceted approach to achieving a specific goal, we remain “the person” who experiences work throughout our working lives.
We remain the multi-contextual person who also grows, develops, and changes throughout a career, who makes choices and decisions, who identifies with their work, job, or profession, who is affected by changes in the world that affect the job market, who confronts challenges and experiences fulfillment, who experiences doubt, regret, and misgivings, who questions and pushes back, who adapts, accepts, and even conforms, whose motivation soars and plummets, who gets bored and disillusioned, who gets creative and pushes boundaries, who experiences burnout, who seeks stability and security, and who aspires to belong, contribute, and have a place in the world. In short, a human being, not a strategy.
Strengthening our adaptive skills for change
So how can we begin to strengthen our adaptive skills in the face of so much change in our careers and in the future of work?
Setting aside a few minutes each day or week to slow down, reflect, and journal, and this takes practice, can help us:
Examine and become more attuned to our daily work experiences.
Foster deeper self-awareness and a clearer understanding of our relationship with work and our career journey.
Broaden our perspectives.
Create space for our imagination, creativity, and exploration.
Become more aware of the rhythm of movement and change in our lives, and how we experience and approach it.
Starting a reflective career journaling practice
Helps us stay present with our experiences. It gives us space to notice our attitudes and our engagement with work more fully. It brings into greater focus specific standouts in a day or a week and how we engaged, contributed, or generally “showed up”.
Helps us recognize and articulate our key questions, concerns, or decisions.
Helps us develop a deeper understanding and perspective on our expectations, assumptions, and aspirations related to work and career. It also highlights how these factors influence our overall career journey and our specific choices and decisions.
Helps us identify underlying and recurring themes in our careers, their impact, and any choices or decisions influenced by them.
Helps us monitor our motivation, energy levels, and general well being.
Helps us track our developing interests, ideas, and changing goals and aspirations.
Helps us monitor changes in our careers more closely and our adaptation to or resistance to them.
Helps us identify and describe both meaningful and challenging moments in our day or week, embrace them, learn from them, and integrate and leverage these experiences as we continue to build our careers.
Helps us embrace the trajectory of our careers more holistically, rather than being confined to specific roles, job titles, or professional identities.
Developing a reflective career journaling practice is a powerful tool for career maintenance that we can initiate at any stage of our careers to deepen self-discovery, gain clarity, spark creativity, and strengthen our adaptive skills for navigating change.
Getting started: 7 suggestions for reflection
Reflect on your overall relationship with work at this stage of your career. How would you describe it?
Reflect on the changes you have experienced in your career, job changes, role changes, workplace changes, and educational or training changes. Reflect on how you have responded to, adapted to, been challenged by, or resisted these changes.
Reflect on your personal growth and professional development. Reflect on how you have changed at different stages of your career. Reflect on how these changes have shaped your relationship with work.
Reflect on attitudinal changes, changes in your goals, and/or your approach to your career. Reflect on how you have responded, adapted, or resisted. Reflect on how these changes may have influenced your choices and decisions.
Reflect on times when change has been welcomed. Reflect on the circumstances. Reflect on how you approached and navigated that change.
Reflect on times when change has been challenging, unwelcome, and possibly destabilizing. Reflect on how you approached and navigated these changes.
Reflect on the changes or adjustments you would like to make in your career. Reflect on why these changes or adjustments are important at this stage.
Britt-Mari Sykes is a career counsellor and consultant. Start a conversation on developing a reflective career journaling practice. Contact her here for more information.
Britt-Mari Sykes, Career Counsellor
Britt-Mari Sykes, Ph.D., is a Career Counsellor and founder of CANVAS Career Counselling, working remotely with clients across Canada. Britt-Mari offers a reflective and strategic process to clients, one that integrates their lived experiences, values, and aspirations. This experiential approach to career counselling helps clients gain greater clarity and perspective and design practical steps towards a more meaningful relationship with work and career.
