After spending 10 years looking for the secret sauce to what makes great career choices, I found out that there are 6 main reasons why people get stuck in jobs and careers they genuinely don’t like.
1. You’re practically still a kid when making career choices.
It all starts at a young age. Let’s take you back in time to when you’re supposed to choose your career path. 17 or 18 years old when choosing a college degree? And 20 something when choosing a career path. What could possibly go wrong?
At that age, you’re not only going through the most transformational period in your life - from a child to an adult, trying to figure out what it truly means, but also, you’re about to make one of the most important decisions in your life. It’s really not that difficult to get it wrong.
Sadly, most people when making a bad career choice, continue down the wrong path for years, until it’s too late.
2. There is no proper guidance.
We have never been taught how to choose careers properly. How much guidance is there, really? The career centers at colleges provide basic information. And going back to when I was in college, it was all superficial and boring. Even now, some of the career counselors have no idea that 80% of resumes never see the eyes of a recruiter thanks to advancements in tech, such as the ATS system. Perhaps that’s the reason why less than 30% of students use those services.
How about career counselors? They seem only to address certain elements of the career selection process, ignoring the work-readiness aspect. You can pick a great career, but if you’re not work-ready, you will struggle at work, thinking you're not made for it.
Your immediate family and friends are a great support structure, trying to steer you in the right direction, but they can only teach you what they know, and you don’t know what you don’t know. And Google, social media, and the overwhelming amount of information will only take you so far.
So, if you can’t depend on the “System” to help you, then where precisely this guidance is supposed to come from?
3. The notion that education means success.
Let’s stay in that 20-year old’s headspace for another minute. At this stage, most ‘work’ experience has been purely educational.
To help you visualize how this works, let me ask a question.
Can you become an athlete by reading a book?
The answer is you can’t.
You can’t learn what it takes to succeed in the workplace from memorizing books. Only work can prepare you for work. And according to 80% of employers, college grads aren’t work-ready for that simple reason.
So what does college do for you? College is a great institution, but it doesn’t mean success. It’s your golden ticket to get through that door. But every step from that doorway down to the end of your career is all about your psychology, skills, knowledge, habits, talents, mindset, etc.
4. People don’t know what makes a successful person or career.
What’s required to achieve success? Success has its own rules. Successful people do things very differently from people who get stuck in dead-end jobs. Greatness isn’t born; it’s built.
Successful people have a different set of habits and a different mindset, a growth mindset. They continue to upgrade their knowledge, skills, and talents throughout their careers. They recognize, in line with neuroplasticity, that their brain is very malleable, and they can learn and grow with enough repetition.
There is another realization that most people just seem to be unaware of that there are different levels of success, and each of them will demand different things from you.
Just like in a video game, to play with the players at Level 100, you’ll need a certain level of skill, mindset, time, experience, etc. then when you just got started. The things that got you to Level 5 won’t by themselves get you to Level 100. And to be successful at Level 100, you need to do what other successful people at level 100 do and some more.
5. Lack of Self-awareness
I find it hard to believe that we have a manual for almost everything in life, but we have virtually nothing that is practical about how to get to know ourselves. In reality, we tend to know more about other people than we know about ourselves.
In the end, it is ultimately what we’ve been practicing for years. At school, the whole focus is on the external world, while the inner world rarely gets mentioned. The same goes for work until there is a ‘pathology,’ a crisis, where you’re forced to do some soul-searching to get yourself out of it.
If I was to ask you, what’s your identity, your purpose, your personality, your strengths, your talents, your values, your habits? What would your answer be? Would you need to take a minute to think about it?
Now, if I was to ask you what Donald Trump tweeted about Barack Obama's birth certificate, would you find it easier to come up with an answer?
Data shows that out of 80% of people who claim to be self-aware only just over 10% truly are. Yet self-awareness is key to Emotional Intelligence, the # 1 success factor at work.
Poor self-awareness leads us to choices that conflict with our values, purpose, personality, identity, etc. , choosing the wrong careers, the wrong companies, and the wrong bosses.
Lack of self-awareness may result in denial. The lengths that people go to stay in jobs that destroy them, purely living in denial, are to say the least surprising.
How about your personal growth? - your ability to face your fears, your level of confidence and self-esteem, etc.. Personal growth decides what’s available to you in your life and your career. To give you an example, if you have chosen your dream career path but feel that you’re unworthy, are you going to enjoy it?
6. Some people get stuck because they just don’t want to work.
Finally, there are people in this world who get stuck because they just don’t want to work, and that’s fine too. In the end, everybody has a choice to make. Not everybody realizes, however, that there are consequences to those choices. Regardless of what you do, you’ll be great at something in life, great at being lazy or great at pushing yourself and following your dreams. But you won’t be great at both. The choice is yours.
Thank you for your time.
Kate
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