Get WEIRD to Plan Your Career: Ideate and Implement (Part 3 of 5)

This is part three in a five-part series about authentic career planning. Catch up on part one and part two if you’d like!

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This is the midpoint in a five-step process called the WEIRD process that we’re applying toward gaining career clarity and determining what’s next. As a career coach, I love helping people discover next steps that energize them. Figuring this out can be a challenging task, especially if you haven’t followed a cookie-cutter career path.

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Last time, in part two, we discussed how to map our energy toward finding extra resources to sustain us as we move in the direction of change.

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This time, we’re actually going to start moving! Are you excited? Or anxious? Did you know those feelings are close enough that you can trick your brain to turn anxiety into excitement?

Don’t worry, we’re not going to take on too much at once. The key is building up momentum and being consistent.

Thorough reflection leads to directed action

Before we break down how to make meaningful progress using Ideate and Implement, take a moment to reflect on a couple of questions. You can think about them or journal using whichever method is most effective for you.

First, think about one of the most enjoyable and energizing days you ever had while working. Any form of work is okay to include in this. If you’ve done any work toward finding your career throughline already, you can refer back to your comprehensive work history.

Once you’ve come up with at least one best day at work, reflect on what made it such a great day, especially compared to the average workday in your career or in that same role? Were the elements that made it more energizing things you got to experience often, or did you enjoy them because of the novelty?

Are there any jobs you’ve held that fit best with your life and lifestyle at the time? What about jobs that were a terrible fit for your lifestyle? In each case, why?

Try on something new using energy alignment

Last time, you found spare energy within your schedule and community toward implementing change. This is important because trying to change comes with a lot of resistance, and takes a lot of energy. Additionally, you may have also researched some possible career next steps.

Years ago, I listened to a talk by coach Lauren Mackler about how to find “the work you’re born to do” in which she recommended envisioning every detail of your ideal day toward discovering little details that were different from your day-to-day work life. These details would provide clues about what might be dissatisfying in your current work and what you might enjoy more.

I invite you to take a few minutes of quiet time to sit, close your eyes, and daydream about a day in your changed life. Maybe it’s a workday, maybe it’s not - that’s up to you. If you haven’t kept up your daydreaming muscle from childhood, you can journal about it instead as if it’s happening right now. Get as detailed as you’d like and stop when it feels right.

If you’re contemplating multiple possible futures, try to complete this visioning process for each one in order to prioritize which option to test first.

Once you have a clear vision of your future day(s), reflect on these questions in your head or in your journal:

• How have your self-care routines changed?
• How has your relationship to work and working changed?
• What details immediately stand out to you? Which senses are you experiencing the strongest?
• Which parts of this day feel the most attainable, and which don’t?
• Are you still experiencing any worries, problems or challenges in this dream life? What are they?

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If you imagined multiple different scenarios:

• Which elements of your life were the same within these options, and which were different?
• Are there parts of any of these lives where you are making a research-backed guess as to what they’ll be like, or more of an intuitive guess? Do you need more information?
• Ultimately, which one do you feel most excited by?

Once you feel comfortable with the process of taking small actions toward one of these futures, you can slowly add in one or two others, as long as you take small, consistent steps.

How to move forward? The answer is clear - James Clear, that is

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James Clear, “Continuous Improvement: How It Works and How to Master It”

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One of the techniques James Clear uses in Atomic Habits to illustrate how effective consistent small wins can be is the concept of “continuous improvement.” Math tells us that if we get 1% better at a habit each day, or 1.01 to the power of 365, we’d be over 37 times better at the end of the year. If we get 1% worse, .99 to the power of 365, we end up with 0.03, so we lose almost everything we started with.

If we can move just 1% toward the dream life that most energizes us this week, we are that much closer to living it in reality.

For example, if you’re a designer now, but you’d like to become an engineer in the future. This week, your 1% could be joining an engineering forum. Next week, it could be introducing yourself there. The following week, it could be setting up a coffee chat with someone. If this feels too slow, you can increase the pace to something that, again, aligns with your energy, but you can also do consistently without putting it down. Even if it’s something you want, change is hard and your very being will fight against it. This is why consistency is so important. As James Clear says, “One of the best ways to make big gains is to avoid tiny losses.”

As you challenge yourself this week, be playful and curious and continue to spontaneously capture your thoughts. We’ll reconvene next time for part four. Until then, have fun daydreaming and exploring your bright future!

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