How to plan for what will go wrong in your career
Embarking on a career journey is exciting, yet unpredictable. While we often envision success, it's crucial to prepare for potential setbacks. Let's delve into strategies for anticipating career challenges and developing resilience to navigate them effectively.
April Rinne, author of Flux: 8 Super Powers for Thriving in Constant Change
You can’t always control what happens, you can control how respond and how you contribute to the future you’d like to see.
- Getting better with unexpected changes require a different mindset.
Let Go of the Result
Letting go of a need to control can be empowering
- Rinne suggests scenario mapping, imagining different possible futures that might play out
- Shift your mindset from trying to predict future to preparing for many possible futures
- Expectations from the idea that your plans will work out to assuming they will change
Look for the Best Case
Don’t default to assuming the worst scenario
- Instead, train your brain to look for the best possible thing that could happen from the change
- Look over your lifetime and identify those events that didn’t go as planned yet had good outcomes
Let Go of the Ladder
Think about your career more like a portfolio you curate rather than a singular path to pursue
- Society tells us that success is at the top of the ladder, but this is outdated
- Thinking you’ll succeed if you make it down a predetermined path leads to hurt, disappointment, and a potential identify crisis when the path doesn’t work out
Change Your Focus
Focus on what you still need to discover. What we don’t know is far greater than what we do know.
- The great thing is that life gives you opportunities to practice change every day, and the vast majority aren’t bad. The key is knowing what to do when you don’t know how to do.
Assess Your Relationship with Change
Get clear on your relationship with change and control
- What things do you love about change and what do you hate?
- Where are you tripped up with what you can and can’t control? Control shows up in different ways
- When you find your triggers, level up your self-awareness and get clear that you are in driver’s seat of how you respond but not in the driver’t seat of the actual end result