You’ve been laid off or have quit your job. You have no energy or enthusiasm for more of the same. It’s time for something different. But what?
Before you re-do your CV, apply for other jobs, look at random businesses you could set up, or creative ventures you could launch, here’s a process that will help you begin to see the wood from the trees.
Define what you want
As tough as they can be, these choice points don’t come along too often. Rather than panic, and miss the opportunity that’s staring you in the face, take a deep breath and ask yourself, “What do I want now?” “What must work deliver for me now?”
Go ahead and write a list of these things. Take your time. Mull it over. Say it as it is, without any qualifying or hedging. To give you an idea of what I mean, here are the eight things work currently needs to deliver for me:
- Work for myself
- Work with people I respect and enjoy
- Keep learning and developing
- Do what I enjoy and am really good at
- Use my knowledge
- Work flexibly to allow time for family and other interests (sport, travel..)
- Earn a six-figure income
- Work independent of location
This list becomes your picture of what good looks like. Whatever your next job is, it needs to deliver as many of these needs as possible. And so these statements you’ve just written are your measures of success.
Brainstorm the kind of work you think you could, should, or would like to do
We’re nowhere near “the answer” yet, so don’t worry about having lots of wildly differing ideas. Equally, don’t be afraid to consider things that might seem whacky at this stage. Whacky is good. What I’m teaching you here is not traditional career consulting, so don’t imagine that you need to make your ideas “acceptable” for me.
Short of ideas? Here’s a few questions to help:
- What did you dream of doing when you were, say, 5 or 6 years old?
- Have you ever said, “If I wasn’t a [insert your old career], I’d be a [insert your fantasy job]?
- Or, have you ever thought, “One of these days I’ll [insert your unfulfilled dream]?
- What captures your interest these days either inside or outside of your current career?
- What sort of things hold your attention when you see them on TV or in newspapers?
Research and flesh out your ideas
So you’ve got some ideas that you don’t know that much about. Rather than let them float off, grab them by the short and curlies and figure out what’s actually involved in making money that way. Use your on- and off-line networks to dentify people that can tell you more. Ask lots of questions and get a real sense of whether your idea is something that’s got legs or not. Even the whacky ones. In fact, especially the whacky ones!
A recent client, who’s keen to quit the banking industry, enjoys doing radical things with property and began to wonder whether she could turn this into a full-time business. I encouraged her to get to grips with how much money she both needed and wanted to make each year, and then to start quantifying the type of investments she’d need to make in order to see these returns, factoring in all the architectural, material and project management costs involved.
Think you might want to start a blog or something online? Go across to WordPress and create a low-risk blog. Play with it.
Do some of your ideas require additional training or education? What does that look like? Where could you do it? When? At what cost?
Rate how well each work option delivers each of your success measures
Time now to bring some logic and quantification into the mix. Create a table. Paper, Excel, Numbers… Whatever works for you. Down the lefthand vertical axis write your success measures. Along the top horizontal axis list out your work options. Now, out of a possible score of 10, rate each of your options against each of your success measures. How well does one deliver the other?
When you’ve scored all of the options against each of the success measures, add up all the scores.
Identify the work options with the highest scores
The point of the process at this stage is to start to sift in those ideas you’ll take forward because they are obviously ticking some of your boxes, and select out those ideas that just don’t meet your needs.
The chances are that there’ll be at least 2 ideas that stand out from the rest. Look at the scores. How close are they? What do the top scoring ideas have in common? How are they different?
What about the ideas that scored more lowly – can you see what it is about them that brings their scores down? What do you make of that?
Identify where your highest ranking options score poorly
This is where creativity and ingenuity start to come into their own, so listen up. The point of this step is not to choose the “top one” and run with it, but to create a super idea, one that’s a synthesis of the best of your best ideas.
Highlight where your top ideas have scored poorly. Ask yourself why that’s the case.
Take each one and see if there’s anything you could do or change about it that would enable you to rate it more highly. Or whether, if you combine the highest scoring aspects of two or three ideas, you come up with a way of working you hadn’t perhaps yet thought of.
Get creative about potential ways forward
As you work with building on these ideas, what you’re starting to do is to develop something that’s more uniquely you. You’re starting to identify ways in which you could move forward. Ways which may well defy traditional ways of working, or conventional job titles. All of which is perfectly okay.
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