When it comes to your career, it’s important to choose wisely and find something that is a good fit. After all, we spend such a large portion of our lives, years, and daily hours at work – so it’s important that it’s fulfilling. This is why choosing a career you love is always going to be important. But there are occasions when we might find ourselves on the wrong path or unhappy with our initial choice, realizing it may not be the best fit for us.
In this blog post, we’re going to take a look at what you can do if you ever fall out of love with your career (or, if you were never all that in love with it in the first place) and how to make positive change for the better. Let’s get into it.
The Importance of Choosing the Right Career
It’s easy to think that other areas of your life – such as love or finance or how you spend your free time – matter the most. And yes, in some ways, they do. But your career satisfaction can largely impact them all. Choosing the right career can set the tone for every other area of your life – adding or taking away from it. When you are fulfilled in how you spend around 10 hours of your life every day, it can influence the amount of stress or happiness you experience overall in life.
What Happens if You Find Yourself on the Wrong Path?
If you do find yourself on the wrong path, the most important thing you can do is acknowledge it. Staying in a career that you don’t enjoy can lead to more harm than making a change will. You could end up feeling deeply unhappy in your life, dealing with stress, or finding that you’re not fulfilled in general. But the good news is, that looking to make a change here can be empowering. The first step to doing that is understanding how this may have occurred.
Why Might This Happen?
So next, we’re going to take a look at why this might happen. You may find that there are a range of reasons that could put you in the position of not enjoying your career. Here are some ideas for you to ponder.
1. Societal Pressure and Life on the Conveyor Belt
First up, we have the idea of societal pressure. This is something that most of us will have experienced from time to time. We follow the path that is expected of us, design our lives around the standard in our community, and even follow the school or career plans our parents expect of us. If none of the choices are actually aligned with what you want, this can cause unease in the future.
2. Falling Out of Love or Losing Interest
But sometimes, you find yourself on the right path to begin with. Then, as you move forward, you can lose interest over time or find that you just don’t love it as much as you once did. That can happen as we grow and change in life – or even due to company changes or industry developments.
3. Life Circumstances
Then we have the different life circumstances that happen. You may experience something life-changing that impacts how you want to work or changes your perception of things. It might even be the case that you have a child and your priorities change – meaning you want to shake up your career to match!
4. Growth, Evolution, and Becoming
The final thing to know and acknowledge here is that it might just happen because you’ve evolved, grown, and changed as a person. This is entirely normal. It’s not likely that you’ll always stay the same or be the same person you were decades before. It’s natural and normal to find that you develop and become a new version of yourself. Sometimes this means you’ll outgrow previous life choices or no longer feel aligned to them.
What to do When You Realize it’s Not Right
So what happens when you start to realize that you’re not happy in your career? It can be scary at first – but it’s also empowering to think that you can take matters into your own hands and drive things in the right direction. What you’ll need to do here is take action. Rather than letting the situation cause you stress, you’ll want to see it as an exciting opportunity to make a change that improves your life for the better!
5 Options to Consider Next
When you’ve been able to identify that you’re not on the right track and nothing you do seems to be changing things, you’re going to want to make sure that you take action. However, it can feel really overwhelming and you may even feel shameful (although you have absolutely no reason to – again, this is a very normal situation to be in). So here are some options to consider next:
1. Create a Detailed Career Plan
The first thing you need to look at doing here is creating a career plan. Now, this can be hard to do when you’re not entirely sure what you want to do with your career. So start out by brainstorming ideas and considering what you want to do with your time and what will feel fulfilling to you. You can then create a detailed career plan that gives you steps to follow and that will allow you to feel excited about your career again.
2. Go Back to School
To help you populate that career plan, you need to know what steps you should take. One of them could be going back to school. Now, this can work in a few different ways. It might be that you want to go to grad school or look at something like mbs online to study in your own time. This might allow you to enjoy your studies but also progress in your career. Or, it could be getting qualifications or certification in a completely different field. There are many options open to you.
3. Move Company or Industry
Sometimes you might actually find that you still love the type of work that you do or the role you have, but you’re no longer in love with the company you work for. When this is the case, it might be as simple as applying for roles at a different company. Finding someone you feel more aligned too could work better here. The same goes for your industry – if you’re in a role like finance or marketing, moving into a new field could be more suitable for you.
4. Do Your Own Thing
You could also look at going out on your own or launching your own company. Becoming an entrepreneur is not a decision you should look to make on a whim. But if this is something you’ve considered before or you’re interested in starting off with a side hustle, it could allow you to find the fulfillment you’re looking for and create the lifestyle you want.
5. Consider a Complete Change Altogether
Lastly, it might be that you fancy a complete change altogether. This is often where things get exciting. On your career plan, you can look at going back to school, retraining, and moving into a field that feels more suitable and fulfilling to you now. This can often be the beginning of an exciting new chapter in your life!
Creating the Career You Love for Long-Term Happiness
As you can see, it’s essential for you to be able to choose a career that feels right for you. Not only is this because you deserve to spend your time doing something that you enjoy, but because it should contribute to your life fulfillment as a whole. It’s okay if you do find yourself on the wrong career path or your interest fades over time – but the important thing here is that you do something about it.
With options like making a change, creating a more suitable career plan, or going back to school, you’ll be able to find something that works best for you. Then you’ll be able to create the fulfilling career you know you deserve.
