Career Mindfulness is a conscious engagement with our own values, talents, and serious interests, implanting these core elements within our workplace [whether our own business or a workplace] in order to align these strengths within our career – or within the drive of our career path. But how do we put career mindfulness into action? How do we break this down into actionable steps?
We have come through a pandemic, although it is not over as yet – we are still fighting our way out of Covid in our personal work environments. For many, the pandemic has challenged our core values because it has disrupted how humans interact with one another. Some people have discovered to their chagrin and deep unhappiness, that they had not been honouring their core values in their work.
If they did not value their work, and if they lost their job due to Covid, suddenly they were facing an identity crisis simply because of years seemingly wasted performing work they had actually found little or no meaning in doing - no joy. Some came face-to face-with the fact they had been carefully avoiding – and they perhaps did not even recognize themselves after long years of denial. Who had they become while working all those years at something they did not believe in, nor even like? Is this you?
Our values matter – and our talent matters. Our strengths matter. How values manifest in our work; how our personalities and characters positively grow and flourish in environments where we can fully realize our positive impact on the people, projects, and potential outcomes surrounding us – this is what drives true creativity and innovation. Dynamism lives in environments where our core values are firmly aligned with work objectives.
This alignment drives excitement, enthusiasm, high integrity, and generosity of spirit in the workplace. In such an environment, integrity, honesty, and trust are encouraged as positive qualities that open minds and spirits to intensive career growth.
On the other hand, insecure people in the workplace – those who lack curiosity or inquisitiveness – those who do not want to rise to challenge, or who see work as intrinsically negative, tend to be disruptive to positive growth in the workplace. This is because they fear being displaced or left behind – and because they have no vision of what could evolve with ingenuity and creativity – no vision of what a new and better reality might look like, feel like, or function like. It happens in families too – what has been the norm is what is wanted simply because it is familiar. To such minds, change is anathema.
In the workplace, and in business, considerations of needed change is all about career mindfulness: what needs to happen to keep things functioning more smoothly, with better results, greater job satisfaction, better work-life balance, greater energy to drive positive results in all aspects of our lives, including family life. Success at work influences success at home, or it often does.
So how do we proceed on the path to career mindfulness, and to positive change? What can we do right now to correct our career path if we believe we are on the wrong path? There are a few things we can do. And the first thing is to take time to assess our core life values at this moment in time:
Life Values Inventory: https://www.lifevaluesinventory.org/
Doing this test will provide you with a snapshot of how you rank your values right now – it will put you in touch with your inner dominion, your intimate self. The test will tell you also if you are living out those core stated values in your current work, or not. And if you are not, perhaps you need to ask yourself some hard question as to why you are not. If you are depressed, perhaps it is why you are depressed.
The second thing you can do is to seek a career coach to explore ideas to change either your profession [if you are unhappy with your current work/job] or your workplace if indeed it is workplace, or the culture at work that is causing problems and not your profession per se. CareerHD offers career coaching – career counselling. If you are truly suffering job and/or career dissatisfaction, perhaps try career coaching to truly examine where you are now, and where you might choose to be instead, and choose to develop actionable steps to get you there. Life is too short to delay positive career growth.
What can a career counsellor do for you? Quite a lot, actually. Here are some of the topics career counselling entails:
As you can see, this topic grows only more meaningful the more deeply you explore.
This is how Career Mindfulness is engaged and practiced. If you want a new life, progress on that pathway is accomplished by taking a great many mindful small steps. Start by making just one.
