Riding the highs and low of your career waves
A week back, I had the opportunity to attend a virtual panel with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in India focusing on their career journeys. The moderator quickly cut to the chase, by asking the panel members how they would describe their ‘successful professional journeys’ in a few words. There was an almost univocal response from the panel members as they described it as, ‘Crests and Troughs’!
Professional journeys go through multiple cycles of crests and troughs. ….unlike the scientific waves, the duration of the cycles within our career waves could vary depending on our personal life situations & environment around us.
This got me trying to make sense of the highs and lows in our career cycles…… and how by becoming aware of the direction that we are headed in, could bring better conscious outcomes in our professional journeys …..
The 3 phases of the career waves & what should we take away at each phase:
1.Stability: We all have our own definitions of ‘stability’, but as part of our career waves, stability refers to finding our feet and figuring out how we transcend from the stage of the Learning mindset to the Growth mindset. It is the starting point of the wave traversing upwards towards growth, highs and dynamism….
We all need stability in our lives, so use this phase to celebrate the learning and to prepare for dynamism. Make it a baseline for benchmarking to check if you are slipping into stagnancy and need to take any corrective actions.
2.Dynamism: Each of us join the organization to hone our skills and succeed by meeting our professional goals and achieving the organizational objectives. Dynamism is the feeling of empowerment when we are able to perform at a level which is well above our role’s defined competence — Our aspirational level of functioning, you almost feel like you are riding the wave !
While we aspire to be in this part of the wave, stay cognizant that the cycles are a natural course of our career without which we cannot develop, grow or progress forward….
3.Stagnancy: At times and sometimes without awareness, we start drifting from the growth mindset to the fixed mindset…. We start to feel a lack of excitement or engagement with our work. It frequently occurs when we do not see any positive changes in our career or feel that we may lose our professional edge or we become complacent ! The wave just collapses into a puddle.
Build awareness of situations where you are drifting into stagnancy and use those as learning opportunities to grow and recover quickly in that career cycle.
“My career has been a steady, interesting, weird, frustrating, fun journey at all different times” — Elizabeth Reaser
#FridayMusings #Stability #Dynamism #Stagnancy #Growth #Learning #CareerWave #Professional
Stay safe & Keep growing!
