In a recent coaching session, the client was talking about having no enthusiasm and feeling frozen about her job search. She could not figure out why.
Some details about her is that she had taken a year-long break from searching due to a health issue and now she was feeling great and ready to do what she had been working on doing a year ago – quit her current job and find something new.
She picked back up where she had left off figuring it was going to be easy since she had already done the heavy lifting with her resume and LinkedIn profile before her break.
She planned to keep going after the roles she had been pursuing. She had her target roles, salary range, and titles figured out.
What she did not take into account … she is a different person now. What she wanted 12 months ago was no longer what she wanted now.
Feeling frozen with no energy to do her job search were the intuitive signals that she needed to take a step back and discover what she wanted to do now.
Forcing things was only going to slow down her search and sap her energy even more.
Taking a step back and starting over was hard. She wanted to change jobs. She was ready to search. She just wanted to do what she had been doing before the health issue. That was no longer an option.
It was time to start experimenting and creating a new plan. Here are the steps she took to reinvigorating both herself and her job search.
If you have been feeling frozen and deenergized in your job search, try these steps for yourself.
🔥Warming up your job search
- Write down a list of all things you do not want in your new career. This is always a great place to start because it can also shine a light on thosethings you may have been considering because you thought you “should want” or “should do” but you can now eliminate them.
- Create a list of all the things you know you want in your next career. You can put all kinds of things down and still decide not to pursue certain avenues right now for whatever reasons you decide on later. Do not hold back! This was not a TO-DO list. This was your Career Dreams and Desires List.
- Begin experimenting. The best way out of the freeze state is by doing some little thing. We learn nothing when we do nothing. We spin in the lie of telling ourselves we do not know what to do next. Saying you don’t know does not serve you. When we say we do not know what we really mean is that we are afraid that if we say what we want we might not get it. We would feel disappointed, and we want to avoid that feeling at all costs so we do nothing. Accept that you might feel disappointed and then do something anyway. Pick one thing you feel curious about and do that!
The beauty of recognizing when you are frozen, and choosing to bring it to coaching, means you now have the chance to know yourself as you are today, not just as you were 1 year ago, 3 years ago or the last time you were on a job search.
You get to make a new plan for how you want your career to evolve because you have evolved.
