Build A Better Career

Would you consistently agree with any of the following statements?

I don’t think I’m valued at work

* I don’t get excited on Sunday evening about the prospect of the working week ahead

I don’t know whether I’m on the right career path

I don’t get offered training or the chance to learn anything new

I don’t get to use all my skills in my current role

If I suddenly hit the jackpot I’d quit my job tomorrow

* I don’t feel I have a life/work balance

The vital question is whether you’d agree consistently with any of the above statements rather than occasionally. If you would agree with any of them consistently, it may be time to take a good hard look at yourself and what you are doing with your life. After all, you’re going to be spending about eight hours of every day working; you ideally want to enjoy those hours and get the most you can from them, and not just financially.

Everyone – even people who believe they are doing exactly the job they want to do – have negative feelings about their job sometimes. Besides, the increasingly discussed matter of ‘work/life balance’ is in effect an acknowledgement that even people who really love their jobs are only too aware of the danger of devoting too little time to personal life and family life, though exactly what ‘too little’ means here will itself be a highly personal matter.

I believe, from about twenty years of helping people with their personal career development, that in fact about two-thirds of people are actually in the wrong job or else have actually put their career development on hold and are ‘just doing a job’ which they are not enjoying. That’s not only an unfortunate statistic but also indicates the wastage of lots of human resources. Yet it’s not a statistic that will really surprise us when we reflect just how difficult planning and implementing one’s own career development actually is.

Why is it so difficult? One of the major problems is that we don’t know about a lot of the options open to us or have experience of other paths we could take.

However, this problem can be combated by research and time spent getting to know the industry. This problem tends to be more of an issue for new entrants to a particular industry or sector.

Secondly, we all have an on-going limitation: we don’t know what we can/can’t be.

Put another way, we don’t know what we’re really good at or what we’d like to do and so we guess. We use assumptions and past experience to base what we should do for the future. This leads to us ‘going with the flow’ and getting on with whatever job we end up with.

Whilst this represents a problem, it also identifies an opportunity too. If managed correctly we can use this to develop ourselves and getting better at whatever it is we do. And, if we don’t know what we can be, logic states that we also don’t know what we can’t be.

In fact, maybe we shouldn’t just be getting on with the job. Maybe we should be doing the job we really want to do. Maybe we shouldn’t accept compromise.

How do we achieve that?

An important part of the solution is to be determined. Don’t accept failure in our working life and be prepared to search for other possibilities if we find ourselves challenged or frustrated.

The biggest step of all though is to know more about ourselves. This is where the powerful personal development tool, Archetype Analysis, can help.

Archetype Analysis is tool designed to help you avoid unsatisfactory, ‘not you’, compromises in your life generally and in your working life in particular: the kind of compromises that will seem all the more unsatisfactory on a winter morning when you don’t manage to get a seat on the train.

The word ‘archetype’ is used to describe a pattern or mould from which copies are made. However, thanks to a Swiss psychologist (Carl Jung) the word now means something very different. Jung believes an archetype was a belief or attitude that isn’t developed but inherited. In other words, they’re inherited attitudes which are both supportive and restrictive at the same time.

An American, Dr Carol Pearson (a personal development specialist) has worked on Jung’s earlier work and throughout the last thirty years has developed Archetype Analysis. In effect it states that you are more restricted by your own ideas, beliefs and attitudes than you would have thought possible. By understanding these restrictions you can understand more about yourself, liberating decision making and identifying negativity and limitations.

Looking to find our more? Read the full article on Archetype Analysis, then visit Colleen Guy’s site for more information.