“I can barely see to the end of today, let alone 10 years’ time”
Busting some myths about new year goal setting + the power of thinking long
Hi! I'm Juliette from Your Next Chapter, where I write about making a midlife career change. If you are new here, add your email below so that you always get the latest posts. And to celebrate the new year in style, I'm temporarily offering 10% off an annual subscription to join the paid community and benefit from coaching exercises, Q&A with me in chat, and access to the full archive of articles:
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year
and underestimate what they can do in a decade.”
-Bill Gates
Hello! These days I’m a big believer in the power of thinking long (term). I didn’t used to be. I was always in a hurry and wanted life to happen quickly and follow a plan. Preferably my plan.
And it wasn’t just me. We live in a society which always seems to be in a race against the clock. We’re told that life is short. We must seize the day. We get FOMO and are never quite sure if the thing we’re doing now is the best choice, or if perhaps we should be doing something else that we’ve heard someone else talk about, or post about on social media.
However living at such a fast pace can get overwhelming and de-motivating. We try and cram so many things into a day, or a week, or a year, that we struggle to complete our endless TO DO lists and then can end up losing heart and feeling like a failure. It can also be exhausting, constantly chasing the next thing, and this then sows the seeds for burnout which is currently seeing a significant increase amongst working women compared to men1.
I know these feelings all too well. At age 35 I had my ‘life plan’ of things I wanted to achieve in the next couple of years:
1) Have a baby, 2) Make a career change, and 3) Move to the coast.
By age 40 I had finally achieved all of those things but not necessarily in that order and certainly not without some tough lessons learned along the way about time, patience and adaptability. I had to learn to keep my bigger goals in mind and enjoy the unexpected twists and turns of the journey, which in turn sowed the seeds for this book that you’re reading now…
The power of thinking long
When it comes to careers, it’s very easy to get bogged down in the business of every day, hoping that a wonderful career opportunity will come along if you just keep your head down and work diligently. However by taking this approach, you’re not taking control of your future. It’s left entirely to chance.
Yes opportunities might eventually be offered to you, but will they be the opportunities that you actually want? Or are you risking being overlooked or having exciting chances pass you by simply because you’re not very clear about your longer term goals or direction? If you don’t know where you want to eventually get to, no one else will know either, so they won’t be able to help you along the way.
When I first speak to my coaching clients about their career history, I often hear about two very common mistakes and ones which I certainly made when I was still searching for my dream career:
Relying solely on job ads
‘Boomerang-ing’ from job to job
Mistake #1
The first mistake looks a bit like this. You decide that you can’t stand your current job/boss/office/commute anymore and sign up to multiple email job alerts. You start trawling the online vacancies boards in your lunch hour and after work, praying for your dream job to magically appear, but you soon grow frustrated and despondent. Nothing changes and you either declare there’s “nothing out there”, or half-heartedly apply for something that isn’t quite right but you’ll do anything to get away from what you’re currently doing.
This career change approach is often done in the spur of the moment and without a broader plan in focus. Your search is based on what you currently do and what you already know. If you haven’t got a clear idea of what your dream job actually is, what work environment might suit you better or what your unique skills and strengths are, then it’s incredibly hard to spot that mythical ‘unicorn’ job in amongst the deluge of emails and job ads, and you can wind up feeling downhearted and hopeless.
Mistake #2
The second one looks more like this. You move jobs. A lot. At first it feels great to have made a fresh start and left all the angst from your last workplace behind, but soon the novelty of the new role wears off and you find yourself facing the exact same issues present in your previous job, just now in a different setting.
The problem with moving from job to job without really getting to the bottom of what makes you truly happy at work is that you end up repeating the same patterns over and over again without even realising it. And it is a huge waste of your time, energy and talents.
Therefore at the very beginning of your career change journey I would like to suggest that you first take two vital steps:
Step 1 is to pause and reflect on where you actually want to end up long term and what success looks like for you (it’s ok to be a bit vague for now, there’s time to firm up the details as we go along.
And Step 2 is to re-evaluate your relationship with time.
Step 1: What does success look like to you?
It’s really important to be clear about what your own version of success looks like in your life and in your career. This is so that you can more easily make decisions about where you spend your precious time and effort, and make sure that it’s all leading towards something you actually want.
Too often we can end up relying on external measures of success like job title, salary, what car you drive or how big your house is. And sometimes without realising it, we end up chasing after someone else’s definition of success. Maybe it’s your parents’? Or your boss’s? Or just what wider society thinks it should be.
In Shawn Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage, he argues that it’s not success which brings happiness but the other way around:
“You’ll find most individuals follow a formula that has been subtly or not so subtly taught to them by their schools, their company, their parents or society. That is: If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you will be happy…. The formula Is broken because it is backward. More than a decade of ground breaking research in the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience has proven that in no uncertain terms that the relationship between success and happiness works the other way around.”
If this is the case, then we need to ditch our old thinking about success and instead start to reflect on what will make us truly happy, both now and in the future. Which is not always an easy question to answer, and so I want to introduce you to some of the basic principles of positive psychology and show you how it can help you become more successful.
A quick introduction to the ‘science of happiness’
This new field of psychology was founded in 1998 by Professor Martin Seligman and his colleague Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. During their studies, they had discovered that there was a huge imbalance in the focus of the current psychology research. For every 100 research papers on the topics of sadness and depression, there was only one research paper about happiness and joy.
Positive Psychology was born out of wanting to even out the scale and start paying attention to how things can go well as well as how they can go wrong:
“Psychology is not just the study of disease, weakness, and damage; it also is the study of strength and virtue. Treatment is not just fixing what is wrong; it also is building what is right.”
- Martin Seligman (1998)
So how can we measure our current levels of happiness and see more clearly which areas we need to work on? Well Martin Seligman came up with the PERMA model which shows us the five essential elements we need to feel truly fulfilled. If you can tick off each of these five, then you will be flourishing in your life and in your work:
How do you think you’re doing in each of these areas? Don’t worry if you feel like one or more of these is being neglected. I’ll keep coming back to this topic and introduce you to some simple strategies which you can try out to boost your feelings of happiness and success.
To start with, I’m going to focus on the segment called ‘positive emotions’. Below are some examples of emotions which you may have experienced in the past, present or future. See if you can recognise any that you have experienced recently:
Past emotions: Satisfaction / Contentment / Fulfilment / Pride / Serenity / Gratitude
Present emotions: Joy / Calm / Zest / Bliss / Pleasure / Ecstasy / Curiosity / Inspiration / Elation / Love
Future emotions: Excitement / Hope / Optimism / Faith / Trust
Experiencing positive emotions can help us thrive, flourish and benefit us in a variety of ways:
They help us be more creative, more productive and more flexible
They help us build resilience and optimism and reduce stress (think about laughter)
They help us develop our intellectual resources like problem solving and learning new things
So what’s an easy way to develop our positive emotions? It turns out to be an increasingly popular approach that you have probably already come across called ‘Practising Gratitude’. Having the ‘attitude of gratitude’ is all about helping us notice what’s right, rather than what’s wrong, and allows us to overcome our brain’s natural negativity bias.
It’s associated with increased life satisfaction, happiness and positive emotions, and reduces feelings of depression, anxiety, envy and loneliness. So it has to be worth a go right?
In today’s #careerinspocorner I’ve rounded up some useful careers resources which might help you or someone you know:
#CareerInspo Corner ☕ 📚 🎧
Have you heard of ‘love languages’? Well it turns out they can help at work too, to help you get along with and communicate better with colleagues ❤️
According to research by LinkedIn US, 76% of hiring managers think it would be useful to see a video of a potential candidate. But what is a video CV and how do you make one? Here are some tips 🎥
If you’re considering a career change this year, here’s an inspiring story about a lawyer turned ballet teacher 🩰
Really enjoyed this Netflix doco recently by actor Jonah Hill about his therapist Phil Stutz. Unlike many therapists whose primary approach is to sit back and listen, Stutz prefers to take a more active role in the process. He gives his patients practical tools for improving their lives and mental health from day 1. You can read about them here. 🧠
Hope you’ve enjoyed this first newsletter of 2024, and as always do let me know in the comments if there’s anything particular you’re enjoying or if there are any careers questions you’d like answering.
Speak soon!
Juliette xx
Are Women Shouldering More of the Burnout Burden? We Surveyed 784 British Employees to Find Out (360learning.com)