Three tips for reinventing your career

Reinvention is a recurring topic for many people. While for some it's their body or relationships, others are also looking to reinvent their career.

Changing a career is hard because it's essentially an identity change. People work hard and obsess over their jobs; in the process we tend to confound what we do with who we are.

So career reinvention needs to begin with a psychological exercise: amputating ourselves from our current or most recent professional titles, and making a truly fresh assessment of how we should be spending 50 hours of each week for the rest of our lives.

The question isn't just, "What other kind of job do I have the right skill set for?" The real question is, as conference speaker Andy Hoffman phrased it, "When you're dead, where will your obituary be written, and what will it say?"
That's an intense question to start with, so here are three tactics to get you in the right state of mind for your own career reinvention.

Turn your biggest weaknesses into your biggest strength
In our careers, we begin shaping our sense of what our professional strengths and weaknesses are as early as the job interview, when we're hit with the standard question, "What's your biggest weakness?"
We mould our response around the opportunity, but then, unwittingly, tend to carry it into the position and into our own self-awareness.

I'm an editor, so it's natural and acceptable that I'm bad at maths, right? By always telling myself this, I've ingrained it into my identity and limited the number of opportunities I would consider - despite the fact that I engineered this weakness in the first place (back in high school, I was killing it in calculus).

Wiping the strengths and weaknesses slate clean can reveal new career paths.

Open your mind to contradictory ideas
Opening your mind to ideas that you would normally resist has the same effect as setting aside your weaknesses: it reveals new options. But it also puts you into a contemporary career perspective.

The job market today is not designed for long-term commitment. Leaping from your current profession to a wildly different, or even contradictory one ... well, that isn't such a leap anymore.

Figure out how you're going to matter, not how you're going to be successful
At the Ford conference, marketing expert Seth Godin dismissed the idea of a mass market. Modern consumers, he argued, are splintered into thousands of niches. The job of the modern marketer is to speak directly and persuasively to one of them, not to try to catch the attention of all of them. Because success is no longer about pleasing everyone.
"You need to have the guts to say to someone, 'This is not for you ... You shouldn't try to please everyone in marketing, and nor should you in a career reinvention," Godin said.

Recently on AskMen, Nadiv Rahman wrote about making the distinction between a "good" job - one which fulfilled status criteria like pay and prestige - and the job that simply makes you happy. Nadiv's article was for new graduates, but its message is perhaps of more value to experienced professionals, who are more vulnerable to career status signifiers after having been immersed in them.

Don't distort your vision of your new career by stretching it to impress the mass audience of your family and peers. Focus instead on identifying the position in which you can have an impact, in which you can matter, and then start mattering.

Source: www.news.com.au