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Articles on Career Matters:

Top 7 Reasons Your Career Has Dried Up & 7 Solutions

Is your career all dried up? Do you feel as if you are wandering in a professional desert? If this describes you and your career, then this article was written for you. You are a desert traveler. There are seven reasons your career has dried up, and there are seven solutions.

Reason #1, there is one specific area, which stands out more than others, in which you have allowed your career to get off track. You must identify this area where your career is all dried up. I know, for some of you, it feels as if your entire career is going nowhere, but there is a root cause. Try to take a 10,000-foot overview of your career and find the one area that is in the most need of repair and start there. If you are having trouble identifying this area ask others whom you know and trust. Believe me, they have noticed that you are wandering in a desert and they will have opinions as to why.

Reason #2, in addition to the specific area that has you feeling dried up; there is a specific difficulty. You need to identify and resolve your specific difficulty. There are four difficulties and four solutions that are common to people who are wandering in a professional desert. Those difficulties are doubt, disinterest, discouragement and dissatisfaction.

Reason #3 is doubt. Doubt is insidious and can grow quicker than you think. It takes on two forms, one being self-doubt and the other is external doubt. Self-doubt may begin with a slight hesitation when you start a task you have previously completed without a problem, but then you hear a little voice that whispers "what if." What if you mess this up? What if your skills aren't as sharp as they were in the past, before you began to doubt yourself? What if your strategy worked before, but now it is outdated? Once you start listening to the voice that is saying "what if", you have entered the desert and are on your way to being all dried up.

External doubt is self-doubt projected onto your circumstances. Maybe your little voice is saying that your career is all dried up because your boss doesn't recognize your potential. Maybe you think your boss recognizes your potential, but your boss hasn't made the connection as to how your potential will benefit the company. Or, maybe you have convinced yourself that your career has stalled because your particular market or profession is slow. Circumstances and challenges exist for the sole purpose of being overcome. You can choose to blame your current circumstance on external factors or you can choose to overcome whatever you face.

If doubt is your difficulty, then your solution is belief. Sounds simple enough and the solution is simple. You need to choose to believe in yourself more than you believe in your doubt. You've been successful before, and you can be successful again. You still have the skills you had when you started your career, choose to believe in your ability. If you doubt your current strategy, work with a career coach to develop a new strategy. You can be the voice that tells yourself "I can." When you tell yourself that you can do something, you are washing away your self-doubt and quenching your thirst with a drink of cool water from a fresh stream.

If you have succeeded in externalizing your doubt, i.e. blaming it on others, then you need to step up and take control. If someone isn't recognizing your potential, you need to point it out to him or her. If someone isn't recognizing your benefit to the company, you need to point it out to that person. If your market is slow, then you need to be innovative and find ways to overcome this challenge. You can take the power and you can overcome your doubt.

Reason #4 is disinterest. If your difficulty is disinterest then the root cause probably lies in one of two areas. Either your motivation to succeed is based on selfish pursuits or you are simply bored. Selfish pursuits are great motivators to start a career. After all, having a designer wardrobe, or simply having plenty of cash to support your life style are great motivators and keep everyone interested in moving forward, at first. However, interests that only benefit you and are superficial only last for a short time. After awhile everyone needs a greater purpose in life. If you are finding that doing your job is not as fulfilling as it once was, then maybe you are doing your job for the wrong reasons.

It's pretty easy to determine if you are bored. If you just aren't that excited about your career and you can find more reasons for staying home than going to work, chances are you are bored. Maybe you aren't challenged, maybe you have mastered your job or maybe you have simply been doing the same thing for way too long. If any of these sound familiar then it is safe to say you are in the desert and you are bored.
Did you discover that you are more disinterested in your career than doubtful? If this is your reason for your career being all dried up, then you need to reconnect and commit yourself to a higher cause. It is when we are committed to something greater than just ourselves that we get re-energized. You need to know that you are really making a difference. If the company you are at is not making the world a better place then you can commit to making the lives of those people you come into contact with a better place. Make a difference! Or, finally find a cause that you can rally around. Not into making your co-workers lives better? Then find a cause you believe in and start contributing either monetarily or with your time. The energy you will generate from participating in a greater cause outside of yourself will carry you out of your desert and bring new life to your career.

Reason #5 is discouragement. Discouragement is a real difficulty for many desert travelers. The two main symptoms of discouragement are envy of others and, a focus on how things were in the past. Discouragement begins when you are feeling a little bit down, but it really has its' roots in envy and lack of focus.

If you have found yourself looking negatively at your peers or others who have already been promoted, moved forward, or have surpassed you in some way then you are envious. You may be finding one thousand and one reasons why they are better or one thousand reasons why they had an advantage, but if you are convincing yourself that others have something you don't, then you are envious.

Maybe your discouragement is rooted in external factors. Are you convinced that the leads used to be better, there were more opportunities in the past, or the competition knows something that you don't? If you have convinced yourself of any of these, then you are discouraged and on your way to being all dried up in the desert.

Is discouragement the cause of your feeling all dried up in your desert? If you found that you are discouraged because you are being envious or are lacking focus you can be cured. Go back to basics.

What is it you were doing before you began wandering in the desert? Make a list of the basic skills you leveraged to get your career started, then go back and start applying them all over again. Next, make a list of what it takes to move beyond where you are in your career. One by one start applying those skills until you have moved from simply wandering around to a point where you can see your promised land straight ahead.

Reason #6 is dissatisfaction. Finally, dissatisfaction is often at the root of a career that is off track in the desert. Dissatisfaction is all about impatience and a feeling of just not being happy with your circumstances. If you find yourself spending less time doing your best and more time finding short cuts then you are dissatisfied. If you find yourself doing enough to get by and are being passed by, then you are dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction simply takes away our motivation to try harder and do better.

If dissatisfaction is the culprit that made you loose your way you can get back on track. First, acknowledge that you aren't pleased with where you are right now. Know that it could take a while to get to your goal, but you can begin the journey right away. Switch your focus from feeling dissatisfied to instead focusing on "this is what I can do to be satisfied." Make a plan and stick with it until you get to where you are going. Focus on what works and make it happen.

Reason #7 is your reality. Now that you know your desert and have identified your specific difficulty, along with its' solution, you can determine your reality. Make a decision to reject the reality of your past and substitute it with a new reality starting today. Your desert will get bigger and wider if you focus on the lack of the past, but if you choose to focus on new possibilities, and an abundant future, you will begin to feel like a freshly watered garden whose waters never fail.

Remember, deserts are necessary, because without them we become complacent. When we are complacent we do not grow. Make the decision to bloom in your desert, instead of being all dried up.

If you would like more information about developing your own self-awareness in the work place and finding new ways to make different choices, then contact one of our SmartWork Career coaches @ 805.376-1906 or e-mail Suzanne@smartworkcareercoaching.com . Our coaches will help you to become more self-aware, develop clarity, and create an action plan to get from where you are to where you want to be in your career and in your life. You may also visit our web site at www.smartworkcareercoaching.com .

© Copyright 2006 Suzanne Freiberg. All Rights Reserved.

Suzanne Freiberg
10 Feb 2007

Suzanne Freiberg, with 20 years of executive experience, founded SmartWork Career Coaching to empower women in management and leadership to make the changes necessary to become break through leaders. She has received extensive training in emotional intelligence; leadership development; and managing stress for executives. She is a Certified Career Coach and a Certified Executive Coach, as well as a member of the International Coach Federation.

Make A Living In Your Underwear

Bill finished college in May, it was a beautiful ceremony, and was the culmination of many hard years of study. “So what are you going to do now?” I asked him, as we were having a cup of coffee in a local cafe. “Get a resume together and start looking for jobs” was his reply. And that is the reply of about 99% of the people getting out of college. It’s the way we are socially programmed to think, it’s the same thing that everybody else does. Now just because everybody else does it, doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do. I believe that if you have a reasonable amount of intelligence and an entrepreneur spirit there are many other far better ways to make a living. People have the attitude that I need to work hard to support my family, but in my opinion it’s all for nothing if you only get to enjoy time with your family a small portion of your life. I don’t know about you but when I am gone I don’t want my kids to know me as a good provider, I want to be remembered as a good father, and I cannot be a good father when I am a serving and making another person wealthy and I am never around.

Goals

The first thing that you need to accomplish is set some goals for yourself, I cannot stress to you enough how important goals are in your life, set personal goals and spiritual goals. Goals will give you something to shoot for, write them down and read them everyday. Now don’t set your goals unrealistically (ie. I want to make 20,000 a month in three months) start small young man and meet the reachable goal then set another one and meet that. Be specific in your goals and structure the steps to meet them, don’t write a goal like I want to be a millionaire. We all want to be millionaire’s but we have to be a thousandaire’s first. There are plenty of books and articles on writing goals, so your first assignment or goal will be to write down a set of goals and the steps to reach them, and read them everyday, it will be your motivation to keep you on track.

Your Passion

What is your passion? What do you have or what can you create that others will pay you for? Can you create art that people would love to have hanging in their home? Can you create music that others would love to listen to? Can you write computer programs that others just can’t live without? Can you make beautiful websites? Can you write informational articles? There are no limits, choose something that you are very passionate about that others will pay you for, then monetize it. At first you might have to get a job while you monetize your passion, take baby steps, start a goal to make an additional $10.00 a month with your passion, and once you meet that, bump it up to $50.00, keep this momentum going until you are able to quit your regular job and do your passion full-time, then you will be successful.

Obstacles

I want you all to ponder these next seven words that I am going to say. “As you think, so shall you be” Thoughts are things, if you think you can then you will, If you think you can’t, then you wont. Get rid of your obstacles that you have conditioned yourself to believe. It drives me crazy when you hear people sabotage themselves by blaming things that have happened in the past for the reason they cannot succeed in the future. I’m not smart enough, I never had a chance, I was raised in the ghetto, I’m too poor, I’m too short, too old, too young, enough with the excuses, quit using other people and other events for excuses why you can’t do something or are unable to succeed. It is all too easy to do this, because the other choice takes a little effort and in reality the person down deep inside really doesn’t want to change or improve themselves, they just want to use excuses. Think about this parable, Imagine yourself in the back of a truck riding down a dirt road. Now you are standing in the bed of this truck looking out the back and seeing the trail in the dirt from the tires, these tracks in the dirt is your past. Now think about what is moving the truck forward, it is the engine, consider the engine as the drive of yourself to improve your life or become successful. Now ask yourself does the tracks that the tires are leaving in the dirt make the truck go forward? The answer of course is NO. So enough with the excuses of things that have happened in the past, and it is now time to start moving forward.

Residual or Passive Income

When you are owned by another company, in other words trading your time for money, you only get paid while you are working. Wouldn’t it be nice to make money all the time? This is the definition of passive or residual income. The simplest example of this is having money in a mutual fund drawing interest, it doesn’t matter if your sleeping, eating, playing with your kids or whatever, you are always making money. This is what you must set in place to make a living and also do whatever else it is that you enjoy doing. Again going back to your passion, write a software program and put it on a web site, where people can pay for it and download it, and you will make money at all times, put some photographs on a site that people can buy, create a web site that generates a massive amount of visitors and sell your ad space. There are thousands of ways to create residual income, try them out see which one works for you. Generate multiple sites and put different items on them, get rid of the ones that don’t work and keep and duplicate the ones that do.

Success and Failure

Before success comes in any man’s life he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps, some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do. Napoleon Hill

Being challenged in life is inevitable, being defeated is optional. Roger Crawford

Defeat never comes to anyone until they admit it. Josephus Daniels

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success. Dale Carnegie

Keep in mind if you are not failing, then you are not moving forward, so don’t get discouraged, keep the strong will going and you are destined to succeed. One of the biggest fears that you will go through in your mind is I don’t have anything to offer others, maybe getting a job is the best option for me. Don’t fall in to this line of thinking, it is just part of the social programming that you are accustomed to. You already know that getting a job is not the option that you want to take, so don’t listen to others that try and discourage you. “That is crazy talk, that wont work, just get you a job”. The reason there are so many people including family members that try to discourage you, is that when you try and do something different to better yourself, it makes others feel guilty, and well you have heard the old saying Misery loves Company, they try and discourage you. Learn to trust your Intuition, even if the whole world is telling you it can’t be done. Years from now when you look back as a successful Work at Home entrepreneur you will thank heavens you had the intestinal fortitude to stay on the straight and narrow and become a success.

Angela Bailey
22 Feb 2007

Angela Bailey lives in Houston, TX with her 4 year old son. She does freelance writing and Internet Marketing for a living. Her hobbies include Yoga, Meditation, and Cooking. Angela's Blog lists legitimate work from home opportunities go to http://findworkfromhome.com.