It’s easy to get overwhelmed thinking about your career, wondering what will the first job feel like, or what direction of work should you choose in the first place. What if you make the wrong choice? What if you’re stuck in the wrong job? What if you can’t figure out what you want to do while you’re still in school? We understand that all of this can be stressful and send some long days your way.
We want to share with you these four tips that can help you not only with deciding a career path, but in every other aspect of life.
As you have heard everyone say, as you were growing up, failure is required to make you a stronger and better professional. Not only does it teach you techniques and methods to be better at your job, it also trains you to have a keener eye when proofing your work. It makes you more diligent and motivates you to put in more effort.
Just like it happens in school with your teachers, your mentor, or boss, will know that you shall fail at some point and has definitely taken it into account when hiring you. This of course, does not mean that failure will keep you out of trouble. The best thing to do is take it in your stride, apologize, LEARN and fix the mess.
The most important thing here is to reflect on what exactly went wrong, and figure out steps to avoid this in the future. This is applicable to those math problems, that first job, that relationship, and every other phase of life.
No matter how smart you are, it isn’t possible for you to know everything, and nobody at your workplace expects to either. You must trust that people higher up or who have been there longer know the process and are there to support you. This is the same as how it works in school too; when you don’t understand something, you ask a senior or a teacher. Simple, isn’t it?
This also helps to build relationships in the office, which is always of good use. The better your relationships with various stakeholders in your work life are, the smoother and happier your journey will be. Go out of your way to help people, and they will do the same for you.
Most of us have a vague idea of where we see ourselves in five years. It’s a good thing to plan. Obviously, this does not have to be sacrosanct, and you will have to keep alter this plan as you go. Don’t forget to think of personal goals and integrate them into this plan.
Make sure, when you do have a five-year plan, it is broken down into smaller one-year plans. These plans include actionable steps of what and how you will achieve these goals. The more broken down these plans are, the more achievable they will be.
In an ideal sense, backward planning works best. You have a vague five-year plan; detail it for the next one-year, by creating a timeline monthly. As the months approach, create goals per month.
The most important thing while planning is monitoring your plan. Check if things are going as planned, if not you need to revisit your goal, see if its achievable and realistic, then revisit your approach, what can you do to make things more efficient?
Now apply this to your short-term plan of scoring good marks in your Board exams, and see how it works?
No matter where you reach, how successful you may be, there will never be a time where all days in the year are brilliant, productive and exciting days. Ups and downs are a part of life and work.
Even in your dream job, two days out of five maybe bad, boring, monotonous and sometimes you may not want to get out of bed.
The important thing to see is that the other days are still putting a smile on your face, challenging you to push yourself and making your brain tick. Use this to motivate you to go back to work the next day, clean slate ready to take on the world!
