by Lisa Cybaniak
Are you happy in your career or are you like many people who are asking themselves if there is more to life than this? On that note, are you clear on what you want more of AND what you want less of in your life?
For those of us in our 40s and beyond, it’s quite typical to drone on with life, spending so long chasing “the dream” that the next thing you know, you realise you’re working a job that no longer satisfies you. Maybe it never did. Or perhaps, like many, it started as your dream job, or the ticket to lead to it, but somehow, you’re now realising that your day is overwhelmed with tasks that you just don’t enjoy.
It’s time for a change. But, towards what?
Today we’re talking about the secret to successfully changing your career, whether that’s a full-blown change, or just pointing yourself in a slightly different direction.
Lucia Knight is a career satisfaction designer, the owner of Midlife Unstuck, and author who helps individuals in their 40s, 50s and 60s to design their work in a way that maximises their satisfaction and fulfilment, because life is too short to do work that doesn’t make us happy!
Meet Lucia Knight
Lucia knows exactly what it’s like to look in the mirror, unsatisfied and unfulfilled, wondering what she must do to be happy again in her career. She spent 20 years in her first career as a corporate head-hunter in Australia before realising that she needed to make a change. At the same time, she witnessed the ever-growing trend of ageism in the corporate selection processes and felt compelled to make a wider difference.
Lucia returned to University to gain her master’s in psychology. Next was to combine elements of her first career, her leadership experience, her new psychology insights and coaching expertise to help other midlifers redesign their work in a way that fits better and matters to them.
She didn’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, she took the time to understand the skills that she had, and enjoyed doing, and incorporated them into to her list of what she wanted more, and less, of out of life. For her, it meant a complete career change. But for others, it may not mean you need to pack in your current career.
Are you excited to learn Lucia’s secrets to successfully changing your career, especially as a midlifer? Her tips are amazing and are worth paying close attention to.
So, let’s dive right!
Find your superpowers to find your next career
Lucia says your superpowers are your uber-specific strengths; skills you’re activating when you’re helping people; the bits of the project you love doing; skills you’ve been using all your life that you don’t even realise are skills.
Understanding and embracing your superpowers is the foundation of doing work in a career that is deeply satisfying. In fact, Lucia states that not using your superpowers at least 50% of the time in your career, causes feelings of deep dissatisfaction.
So how do you hone your superpowers? Lucia has an exercise she uses regularly. She recommends you take a piece of A4 paper and fold it into four quadrants, which you will use to in this exercise.
The quadrants
For the first quadrant, create a list of what you’re doing when others compliment you. In the second quadrant, write down what you cannot stop doing in and out of work. These are things that you really enjoy doing, so you tend to do them in many areas of your life.
Make a list of activities you’ve enjoyed doing at any point in your career. Write down every single one of them in the third quadrant. Finally, in the fourth quadrant, create a list of what activities you really enjoy helping others do.
Now that you have your four quadrants filled in, it’s time to gain more clarity.
Understanding yourself
Next, Lucia recommends you make three lists: One of what it is you want more of; a second list for what you’re great at; and the third list for what you don’t want.
In her experience, Lucia rarely finds people have trouble identifying what they don’t want, but what they do want is another story!
Experimental Mindshift
Once you have your superpowers identified AND truly understand what makes you tick, it’s time to experiment.
Lucia suggests that instead of planning the perfect plan B, experiment with something new and release it to see the response. Use your superpowers in your experiments and then look for whether people like it, need it, and want it.
Once you have those answers, it’s time to refine it so you can make it commercial – because we all need, and deserve, to make money!
An example
Lucia and I both experimented in similar ways before leaving our careers that no longer satisfied us – we started experimenting with blogging. We each crafted a message and put it out into the world to see if people liked it, wanted it and needed it.
When each of us realised they did, then we figured out how to commercialise it by turning it into our businesses. For me, I know that so many opportunities have come my way that I never thought of or expected when I first decided to start blogging.
My business has turned into what it is today because I took the time to understand my market – the clients that want and need my services – and experimented with what I could offer to help them. And I first did this while keeping my day job – you know, the one that I wasn’t fulfilled and satisfied with? Yep, that one!
I didn’t quit my job to try my hand at a new career. Instead, I experimented with blogging to see if people were even interested in what I had to say AND if I really enjoyed expressing myself in this way.
In fact, before I left my job to take on this new career, I experimented with other aspects of my now thriving business: I started a 3-month coaching program for survivors of abuse and trauma. By the time I left my job, I was at the point that I couldn’t sustain both careers – one had to give. That was the moment I knew I was using my superpowers and my experiments had been a great success. It was now time to officially make my change of career.
More from this episode
So, how deeply do you understand yourself? Do you know your superpowers? Lucia is so right here, isn’t she? Learn what it is you want, what you’re great at, and what you don’t want. This will help unveil your superpowers, which you can then use to run some little experiments!
So, how about you? Do you need a complete career overhaul, or just to look in a different direction? Are there experiments you can do to test out some options?
Lucia and I talk about this in so much more detail in this podcast episode. She shares stories from her book of others who have changed their careers, the difference between our parent’s career and ours, ageism in the corporate world, and more.
Press play on the episode above – you don’t want to miss this!
Follow Lucia on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. You can also get more information about her book and her “Discover your Superpowers” programme on her website.
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Voice over credit: Shari Vandermolen. Shari is offering a free download of one of her songs to the fans of the Life Like You Mean It podcast! Just visit www.GiftFromShari.com and tell her where to send it. Shari’s debut album is available for streaming on all the major platforms including Spotify and iTunes.
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