Are you struggling with your career change plans? Do you know you need a fresh start, but you just can't work out how to approach the whole business? Is there just too much to think about and you don't know where or how to begin?
Well, you are not alone. Many career changers get stuck because they are not sure what information is relevant and how to use it to make the right career change decisions.
Two approaches to career decision making
Fundamentally there are really just two broad approaches to career choice and career change decision making.
1. The logical, let's reason it all out approach - follow your head.
2. The intuitive, let's go with my instincts approach - follow your heart.
Much of the general advice on career change that you will find in books and on the internet falls into the first category. Advisers suggest that you should collect information about your skills, interests, experience and achievements and then match that against factual information you have collected about careers. Your new career then emerges from a review of what you have already done.
The alternative approach encourages you to think much more laterally. The idea is to break free from your employment and education history and allow yourself to think 'outside the box'. You are encouraged to reflect on your values, on what is important to you and what meaning you are seeking for your life in the longer term. The idea is that if you can truly engage with something that you feel deeply about, then you will find ways of making it happen.
Which one should I use?
You may have found that you automatically favoured one or the other of these two approaches. That is not surprising, because your inborn personality will lead you to prefer either a more logical style of decision making or a more intuitive one.
So my first suggestion is to go with what feels right to you. If you start by using a strategy that you feel comfortable with, you will be more likely to stick with it and make some useful progress.
However, if you only use your preferred approach, you are likely to overlook on a whole bunch of possibilities - a bit like only looking one way up the street and not the other.
Get a different perspective
To make a truly balanced decision about your career change, you need to use both strategies.
You may find using your less preferred approach hard work. Following your heart may seem a bit airy fairy if you are a rational type and collecting facts and figures may seem dull and pedantic if you are more intuitive.
So if you are struggling, enlist the help of a friend who you know operates differently from you. Ask them to help you think through the issues affecting your career change plans and they will help you make sure that you see things from every angle.
Variety is best. We all have at least some capacity to be both practical and intuitive and the best life decisions are made by tapping into both.
Head and Heart
So when planning a career change, use your head. Ask what am I good at, what experience have I had, what training will I need, how much will it cost, how long will it take, how can I get my CV or resume just right?
But also use your heart. Ask what would I love to do if there were no limitations, what kind of work inspires and excites me, what do I want to look back on with pride when I retire, when I am at my best what are the skills and strengths that I am using, what is the biggest, wildest dream I can imagine and how can I make that happen?
With the answers to both these sets of questions, the route to your new career will be a whole lot clearer.
And if you'd like more career change tools and strategies that use both the rational and the intuitive approaches, I invite you to browse around the How To Change Careers website http://www.how-to-change-careers.com and while you are there, I suggest that you download my free Career Change Blueprint which explains the 5 essential steps to career change success.
So what are you waiting for? Get your head and your heart into gear and start taking action now!
From Cherry Douglas, Your Career Change Guide
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