Top tips for career rough patches

Photo credit: Sasha Freemind

From time to time, all of us hit a bumpy patch on our career journeys. It could be a new boss who you just can’t seem to gel with, taking on a new role and realising the culture it totally toxic, a restructure that doesn’t have a place for you or just a creeping sense of dissatisfaction that there MUST be more to life than whatever you spend your waking hours doing. For anyone who is going through that, I offer you both my support and my best tips for getting back on track:

1. You need to remember that this happens to everyone at some point or other. Even to the people who seem to have the most amazing, perfectly manicured careers. You just don’t always notice because some people are very adept at hiding what is going on in their lives.
2. Be careful of getting trapped in a downward spiral in this unsettling period. If you feel in any way threatened, your survival brain will take over which means you will genuinely be less creative, less collaborative, less smart than you are when things are going well. Can you think of ways to check in with yourself (or possibly trusted allies) to make sure that your responses to the situation still reflect well on you?
3. Practice mindfulness multiple ties a day. You can keep it short, just a couple of minutes at a time. This will put your survival brain on pause and let your better self represent you and keep you from doing and saying things you may regret.
4. Be objective. If you were counselling yourself, what would you say? Are there things you can do to improve things or is getting out as quickly as possible the right thing to do?  Get into a calm state of mind and ask your wisest self for advice.
5. Can you see the positives? My experience of being in a role or organisation that I had fallen out of love with was a strong sense that getting out was a very positive step that would get me back on the right track for me. What can help is to get curious. A rough patch is a good indicator that something isn’t working. If you treat it as a symptom rather than a disease, you can do the detective work to find the root cause and correct it.

You may be going through “interesting times” but being in the right frame of mind about it allows you to see it as a blessing rather than a curse.