How To Use Intuition To Navigate Tough Career Choices

I once was in an interview process for a job I thought I really wanted. Deep down though I had a feeling that maybe it wasn’t the right job for me. Something just felt off. But I didn’t listen. Instead, I learned the hard way that those small inner nudges and gut feelings we have - they really do know what’s up. And (sometimes at least) we’d really benefit from listening to them.

Collectively, I would call these feelings, inner sense, or nudges our intuition. Accessing our intuition is particularly helpful in situations where our rational/logical mind can craft seemingly well-reasoned, good cases for either side of an argument or for multiple different choices and we’re left feeling confused and unsure. This happens both in navigating major decisions in our career and day-to-day at work. Tapping into the wisdom of our intuition can provide additional insight to take into consideration and help us make the choice at hand.

The challenge is that we are often so used to making decisions with our conscious mind - using logic and rationality - that we can easily dismiss or miss this other source of crucial information.

So, how can we cultivate being more in touch with our intuition?

Reduce Stress

We can’t hear the signals from our intuition when we are stressed. When we are too stressed our body is in survival mode and the only signal it’s sending is to get out of this situation. So reducing stress levels is a primary first step in being able to tune into our intuition. Perhaps you’re thinking that reducing your stress is easier said than done, but even just taking a few slow breaths to calm your nervous system can help you tune in. My next point can also help lower stress levels.

Meditate

The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School teaches that through meditation we can gain greater awareness of our thoughts. And while we can’t stop our thoughts, meditation can lessen our natural tendency to identify with, believe, or get hooked by them. In my experience, meditation creates space for us to see and feel things more clearly - the space we need to tune out those arguments spinning in our mind and tune in to our genuine selves.  So, if you’re not already a meditator, give it a try. Headspace is an app with some fantastic introductory 10-minute meditations. It doesn’t have to be a lot of meditation time to start being able to tune in. After you’ve experienced the mental space and peace meditation can bring, you can try to access that when you’re in a situation where your mind is chattering away when you’re trying to make a choice.

Try listening to your intuition and see what happens when you take its cue!

A great way to start getting familiar with your intuition is to start small with “low risk” decisions at work or at home. Maybe as simple as deciding where to take the team for lunch, or what movie to watch with your partner. When a decision point arises, try to tune in, then take the option your intuition is telling you. Observe the result. This builds your muscle for tuning in and builds your experience in taking the actions it suggests. As you experiment you can reflect and fine-tune your ability to read yourself and build more confidence in the information your intuition provides. Over time you can begin to use it for choices that feel more “risky.”

Imagine yourself in future scenarios and observe

When you’re struggling to make a decision, imagine yourself having already made the decision to do X. For example, imagine you’ve already accepted the job (ex. you have the salary, the title, you’ve been at the desk with the window view for 3 months). Now, in this future hypothetical reality, how do you feel? Do this again for each option (ex. with the option of not accepting the job, or accepting a different job). Try to find the option that once taken feels the best. Note: just be aware of fear tripping you up. You can still take an action that feels good and is what you really want, but also have it be a bit scary - fear is often a normal part of stepping outside of your comfort zone or trying something new.

With all of this I’m certainly not saying we shouldn’t listen to our mind and logic when making decisions. But, sometimes our intuition can have a lot of helpful information to add to our decision-making process. And I, for one, on many past occasions in my professional life wished I had checked in and listened to it more.

Breaking Up With Your Job: Four Things You Need To Know To Come Out Stronger

When we leave a job it can feel very similar to a romantic relationship breakup. Whether you resigned, were fired or let go, there can be a sense of loss and many other feelings to navigate your way through.

Here are four ways leaving your job can be similar to a breakup and how to handle the fallout so you’ll come through the other side even stronger and ready for what’s next.

1) Trust you’ll find who you are without that role. You’ll find your bearings again.

After a breakup you may find yourself asking, “Who am I without this relationship?” Likewise, after leaving a job you may question who you are without it. Our roles both as partners and as employees naturally over time often become part of our identity. So when job change happens, there is also a shift in our identity. You may have to spend some time untangling who you are now from who you were in that previous role. Know that this is a normal aspect of big life changes, try to relax and trust that you’ll eventually find your bearings again.

2) Don’t push yourself to “get over it.” Let yourself go through the process.

After a relationship people may be encouraged by others to “get over it” but, as you may have experienced, that’s often just not possible. There’s a natural process to moving on that takes time. In her groundbreaking book, On Death And Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the 5 stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As the title suggests, it was written about grieving the approach of one's own death or the loss of a loved one. However, Kübler-Ross later stated the stages may be broadly applied to many situations where we are experiencing a form of loss like the loss of a relationship or job. You may experience one to all of these stages after you leave your job or even in the time before you leave - we can hang on to jobs like we hang on to relationships long after we know it’s not going to work out.

The key is to be patient and loving with yourself as you go through the stages and when you find yourself experiencing intense emotions it can be helpful to remind yourself it’s part of the process. Give yourself space and time to feel what’s coming up for you instead of pressuring yourself to just “get over it.”

3) A new future is waiting for you. And it may be even better than you imagine.

When we break up with someone we can suffer the loss of all the hopes and dreams we had for our future with that person. The same goes for when we leave a job. We may have had a future planned out in our head and expectations about how it was all going to go. So, when it doesn’t work out that way it can feel painful. And we may be telling ourselves it means something negative about what’s to come in our future (ex. perhaps some variation of “I’ll never be successful.”)

But the thing to remember is that we can never really know what the future holds for us. It could even be something much better than what you had planned out for yourself. We just never know and often what we see as bad events actually lead us to good things. A life coach teacher and mentor of mine, Martha Beck has a little exercise to help illustrate this point. Think of something good that has happened or positive in your life now. Then, look backward in time to see how it could not have come into existence for you had some “bad” things not also happened.

The point is to try to see how what you’re going through now could all be unfolding into something beautiful that may actually be in your favor.  Like in the hit single, “Since U Been Gone,” by Kelly Clarkson, “I’m so moving on...Thanks to you now I get what I want.” Which brings me to the last point.

4) Use the opportunity to gain clarity on what you want. And stay positive.  

Just like how failed romantic relationships can help you gain clarity on what you’re looking for in a partner, your experiences with past jobs can make you wise to what you want. Reflect on why it didn’t work out, what your takeaways are and what you might look out for in your next job. In doing this you may be able to avoid repeating this situation in the future, but also the more we get in touch with what kinds of work and work environments are right for us the higher our chances of success and, more importantly, happiness in our work.

When reflecting, I want to note two things to look out for in your thinking. First, we can get a bit jaded. After relationships some may come away with negative and broad-sweeping statements like, “All relationships are doomed.” Similarly, after leaving a job, we might take on beliefs like, “All corporate jobs are terrible,” or some other negative global statement. While jadedness can be a coping mechanism to deal with our pain, these kinds of statements are rarely ever true and often just serve to limit us. So observe your thoughts.

Second, don’t get discouraged. Some may declare after a breakup that they’ll never find love, but we know that probably isn’t true; similarly, know that there is work out there that’s right for you. It may just take some time to uncover what that is and find your groove. The important thing is to get more curious about and focus in on what you would really love in your work and to keep a willingness to go after it.

Will You Be Happy At Your Next Job? Ask Yourself This Simple Question

I’m a career coach that helps people to be happy at and enjoy their work. There have been times when someone I’m working with will have a job offer at hand and come to me asking, “Should I accept this job?” Naturally, I ask, “Do you think you will enjoy it?” Then there is a long silence...and it becomes clear that while this person does want to love and be successful at what they do, this question hasn’t really been considered.

So, I follow up with the question, “Why would you take this job?”

And then out comes all the other factors that have been rolling around in their mind and taking precedence over a very important thing: whether they would really enjoy the work. Factors like how it’s a “good opportunity”, how their peers are in similar roles, how their family would never understand if they turned it down, how they need to get out of their current job and this is the only offer they have or for various reasons they feel that they don’t have any other options - ultimately, many arguments that make them feel like they “should” accept the job.

While I understand all those reasons - all those “shoulds” - if you want to enjoy your work, allowing them to be your sole motivation for accepting a job is not ideal. If you want to enjoy your work, you’re going to have to reflect on who you are, what you like doing, what cultures and environments you thrive in etc. and have those factors be of greater significance in your decision making. You have to make your happiness more of a gating factor.

Identify your motivations for accepting the job

If we want to know whether we’ll be happy in our next job, the one question we can all ask ourselves before accepting is, “Why would I be taking this job?” Take a deep look at your motivations and be very honest with yourself. If one of your top reasons or motivations is not, “because I’d like and enjoy doing this job,” then there’s reason to pause. So, if you’re going to accept primarily because of another reason, that’s fine, but if you can’t also say that you’d genuinely enjoy the job you may want to reflect on that before proceeding.

How to know if you’ll enjoy the job

For some, they may be very aware that they don’t really like the kind of work or job being offered. Others, myself included in the past, might be experiencing a bit of denial. All those shoulds can be so compelling and persuasive we can push down how we’re really feeling about the job or cleverly convince ourselves that we’d like it. But if we got really honest with ourselves we’d fess up that it’s a big no, we don’t really want to do the job. There’s also the camp of people who say, “Well, maybe I’d like it, I’m not sure, I’d have to see, I’ve never done it before and you can’t know until you try.” There are certainly instances where this can be true; but maybe, like above, those are more rationalizations to cover up what you already know. Just watch out for that and be really honest with yourself. And remember, no judgment here, I’ve been there too and see it in people I speak with often.

So, that’s how you can tell if it’s a no. But, how do you tell if it’s a yes, that you’d enjoy the job? In my experience, yes is a juicy feeling of “Yeah! This would be so great!” and a genuine excitement. Author and teacher, Kiran Trace, writes about finding your true yes in her book Tools for Sanity. She uses the word “delicious” to describe this kind of yes - where there’s an authentic inner movement of energy that gets you all jazzed up. You can feel in your body and on a gut level. So, when considering a potential job offer, tune in to see if you can find that.

Success through placing greater importance on your happiness

It’s a shame that our happiness and enjoyment of the work isn’t always at the forefront of our minds when making career decisions. Many of us have been taught that success leads to happiness and that success requires sacrifice and deferring our joy until it’s achieved. Whether we enjoy the work at hand seems to come as an afterthought in the quest for success. But, if we think it through, this line of reasoning implies we will be successful in working at something that we don’t enjoy doing, that’s not a good fit for us, and that we will find success by working against ourselves. I don’t think this makes any sense, do you?

Instead, if we make our enjoyment of our work and happiness a greater priority, the success we’re after is likely to come - and faster and with a lot more ease. And by then, we may even care about it less - we’re already happy and spending our days doing something we enjoy.

New Career, New You: How To Navigate A Career Change

For many of us, work takes up a large portion of our life. Therefore, it’s natural that we tend to adopt our work as part of who we are. We say things like, “I am a lawyer” or use the term “we” when referring to the company we work for. But, what happens if you’re not passionate about what you do? When you’re not happy with how you spend your days? When you realize that maybe you don’t want to be, do, or work for X?

When this happens, things can get tricky. We’re not quite sure of who or where we’d be without our job title.

I know this from personal experience as well as from working with clients going through career transitions.

Here are 3 ways we resist making a change at work - and what we can do about it:

1. You’re not your job

We often wonder: who will I be and what will my life be like if I make a change in my career? Who will I be if I quit my work as a lawyer and follow my passion to become a makeup artist?

When we build a mental narrative of who we are, our job or career can play a large role. Change in our careers will likely mean change to that narrative, which can be stressful. It can be helpful to remind ourselves that what we are going through is completely normal and until we’ve found our groove in what we do next, there’s a period of uncertainty and adjustment that’s just part of trying something new. Life coach expert, and a teacher/mentor of mine, Martha Beck, outlines a cycle of change that everyone goes through when big things in our life are shifting. There are 4 stages, the first stage being when we first lose part of our identity. She recommends trying to relax, trust the process, and stay focused in the present instead of stressing about our hopes and fears for the future.

2. Validate yourself

This happens when we start to think we are important or worthy because of our work achievements, job title or the reputation of the company we work for. We might get a boost of confidence and self-worth from our careers. To contemplate any change could potentially mean losing that validation. And so it’s natural to feel resistance.

To fix this, it’s important to realize that no job title, company, or professional achievement will determine your worth. We often receive messages, from many sources, that our worth is determined by external factors. But it’s critical to realize that’s not true. Remind yourself of your other achievements: you’re a daughter, sister, friend, wife, chess player. Whatever. If you can remind yourself of all the other ways you contribute to the world besides your work, you’ll feel a lot stronger and more ready to follow your heart to whatever job or career it’s calling for.

 3. Stop judging yourself

Worrying about the judgments of others and what they might think could be enough to make us pause. We may feel that our job or career influences how others perceive us. And if you make a change, will your friends, family, or peer group judge your decisions, and in turn judge you? You may fear that you could lose esteem in their eyes.

While we all can get caught up in caring about what others think, when our fear of judgment is holding us hostage in a job or career we don’t like, we’ve taken it too far. Your desires and happiness should come first, ahead of your fears. Life is just too short.

Remember that most of the time others are not thinking of us. And if they are, then we need to find new people who will support us in pursuing our dreams. In her book, Braving the Wilderness, Brené Brown talks about having a circle of people (such as anyone you admire) that you feel would support you. To start, they only have to exist in our mind (for me Brené is one of those people). As you continue in your journey, real-life people will begin to emerge and you’ll find your tribe.

Ultimately what I learned from these job/career transition experiences were life lessons - learning to let go of the need for certainty, relying less on external validation, letting go of the judgments of others and following my own path. Although big life changes are often stressful or challenging, they can call attention to potential areas for personal inner growth.