The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management: #12 Stay Still and Don’t Move if You Feel Lost
You hate you’re job or career, each day dreading going to work, hating the work environment that your career forces you to exist in, working with coworkers who are out of sync with your personal values, resenting your company’s culture.
You no longer feeling passion in your work, missing that rush of play, intensity, or urgency that you used to feel as your worked on your favorite projects or with certain coworkers.
Sensing that you’ve evolved, not knowing what you’re changing to, unaware of the moment of when you changed, one day you wake up feeling like a different person, but in the same body.
Feeling Lost?
Sound familiar? There are times we all feel lost in our career, absent is the feeling of purpose or meaning, why we exist and why what we do matters, or how our lives positively affects others or a greater common good.
We are directionless as live out each work day, completing menial work tasks that fail to contribute to the next stage of our career. Perhaps, you’ve achieved a targeted level of success, attaining that promotion to senior marketing manager, achieving that director level position, or reaching your compensation goals. Despite these achievements in your career, you don’t know what to do next in your life.
There may be times when your values fundamentally shift, becoming discontent to work with others who values differ from our own, resenting an office environment that’s too sexist or market driven, signaling that you’ve out grow your job or career.
Action Items
What can you do if you’re feeling lost? Stay still. Don’t move if you feel lost, so you can find yourself or let the opportunity find you.
Stop flailing around as you desperately try to find your new job or career opportunities, pursuing new direction after new direction, each idea off target as the preceding one.
Instead, sit and reflect, like you’re meditating, observing each thought as it approaches you, assessing if it fits you like a glove, pointing you in the right direction, discovering a new path that helps you transform from being lost to found.
Once paths are presented to you, identify your best options, trying each one on for size, paying attention to one that resonates with you, speaking to your core values.
Prioritize each new direction and then chose the most likely course of action, identifying how you’ll implement this new opportunity, determining research or work projects to test out your new path, outlining the steps you should take leading you to your next job or career stage.
Trust me, your next career move will present itself to you when you are ready for it. All you need is patience and quiet reflection to learn what it is and why it’s meaningful to you.
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The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management series outlines my rules of personal and work success. After reflecting on my personal values, I made this list, realizing values are my rules of being or life management principles. Based on your experiences, I hope this list inspires you to identify your own rules. Here are the rules to my success that may help you over the course of your journey:
- The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management
- The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management: Overview of the Pyramid and Its Levels
Level 1: Rules for Our Fundamental Nature
- #1 Find your own spirituality and practice it.
- #2 Know what you want or the Universe (or God) won’t know what to send you: If you don’t know what you want, how can you get to where you want to be?
- #3 Fate or free will? Regardless of what you believe, we all have a purpose to being here. The tricky part is discovering what it is.
- #4 Don’t wait for your future to happen to you, you have to be vigilant in making your future happen.
- #5 Understand your dark side, but don’t give into it or indulge it.
- #6 Aspire to always help and teach others.
Level 2: Rules of Continuous Learning and Modeling
- #7 Watch or read media sources when you need inspiration. Reflect on why you like a certain movie or TV show, so you understand why it moves you.
- #8 Always be learning. Continue learning through books or any source that gives you new ideas on how to approach your work or feeds your passion.
- #9 Become self aware. If you aren’t, then how will you know you’re screwing up?
- #10 Accept responsibility and make peace with your decisions and the consequences of those decisions. They have created the person you are today. The trick is, do you like what you’ve created? If not, then how can you change?
- #11 Keep a lid on chaos. Never let situations or emotions get away from you. Be the calm in the eye of the storm as strength, reflecting confidence for the most vulnerable people in your life.
Level 3: Rules for the Actual Journey
- #12 Stay still and don’t move if you feel lost, so you can find yourself or let the opportunity find you.
- #13 Always be course correcting.
- #14 Surround yourself with trusted and loyal friends. Be prepared to deal with betrayal without ambivalence. But be prepare to forgive (if the person is sincere, I mean really sincere).
- #15 Learn to channel your inner extrovert, if you’re an introvert. Learn to channel your inner introvert, if you’re an extrovert.
Level 4: Rules of Adapting to Environment and Interacting with Others
- #16 Make peace with your weaknesses. We’re not perfect. Even your strengths will turn into weaknesses. The trick is knowing when your strength has become a weakness.
- #17 Master your emotions and body language. Use them strategically in life and work.
- #18 Mentor yourself via the Space Time Continuum. What would your future self tell your present self? How can you get back on track? What have you done well? What more can you do? What would you tell yourself as a child, teen, 20 or 30 something?
Level 5: Rules of Humility
- #19 Never take your success for granted. Always prepare for the worst case scenarios. Be prepared for two steps forward and one step back.
- #20 Be humble. Treat others well, don’t be arrogant, and don’t drink your own Kool-Aid.
Level 6: Rule of Being
- #21 Be compassionate.
Similar Posts:
- The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management: #19 Never take your Success for Granted
- The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management
- The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management: #10 Accept Responsibility for Your Decisions
- The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management: Overview of the Pyramid and Its Levels
- The Smart Lemming Rules of Life and Career Management: #4 Be Vigilant in Making your Future Happen
