Seeing the Change
How clear is your journey?
A client of mine recently lamented that she has not landed another position, despite being laid off for nearly three months. “I feel as if I haven’t accomplished a thing during this time and I’ve gotten no where.” This made me chuckle a little. This client is hard extremely working and has not wasted a moment of her time preparing and seeking out her next position, yet she feels that she has done nothing!
Sometimes it’s hard to recognize the progress you are really making. When you are moving to fulfilling a large goal, such as making a career change or starting a business, there are so many things to do that you feel like a little wave in the middle of the ocean. Does this sound familiar to you?
Fortunately, I keep notes from our coaching sessions and was able to give this client a long list of her accomplishments during the past few months on her career transition journey. After we reviewed all the things she had done, she calmed down and felt much better about her situation.
Celebrate your successes!
I now request that all my clients keep a journal or time line with notes so they will always have a visual record of achievements. What should be included in this journal? Everything! If you are at the beginning of the career transition journey, maybe you will be marking down that you updated your resume, or took a webinar on interviewing tips. Perhaps you secured a meeting with a manager from a targeted company where you’d like to work. Other examples might be completing a skills assessment, networking by telling the next person in line at the store about your job hunt, signing up for a training class or realizing a talent you possess could be transferred into a working skill. The list is endless! Give yourself credit for all you do!
The human mind is made to adapt to differing situations. We see this around us all the time. We managed to adjust when the gas prices skyrocketed. We’ve all had loss and changes in our lives to which we’ve had to learn acceptance and even modify our entire lifestyle. Change always seems difficult at the beginning, but over time, the difficulty eases as we learn adaptive skills. Sometimes we even excel because of the change!
Part of the adaptive skills however, requires that our minds move things that were in our conscious efforts, into our non-conscious. This is a survival technique so as not to overload the conscious working mind. When things get moved into the non-conscious realm, it is the time we begin to “forget.” Things are not completely lost to us, they are just not in the high visibility portion of our efforts and they then blur out. This is what causes us to begin to think that we have not accomplished anything, because we are no longer focused on those specific successes.
By keeping a journal or success time line, it is easy to look at where we are now as opposed to where we started. This can change our entire outlook from “no where” to “now here” by providing a slight shift in our perspective! Keep the negative, self defeating thoughts at bay with written proof of your own greatness!
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Lesley V. Ingves
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