Ceiling On Your Career? Three Tips to Greater Fulfilment and Advancement
Have you reached a ceiling in your career? Do you feel held back and like there is nowhere else to go? Are you stagnating?
Feeling limited in your career can be discouraging and frustrating. It can lead to low motivation, low energy and leave you feeling empty and unfulfilled.
But it is possible to turn a constraining situation into one of opportunity and possibility.
Here are three tips to help get you moving again.
Tip 1 – Think beyond your current career box
When work demands keep you so busy that you can’t think further than the next meeting, there’s not much left to put toward advancing your career.
But as an old proverb says, ‘people without a vision perish.’
Just as organisations have a vision to grow, creating a vision for your life will put you back in the driving seat and restore hope.
Tip 2 – Know (uncover) your strengths
Just like fish don’t know they are great swimmers, our strengths are so innate that we don’t know we have them.
Getting to know the things you do brilliantly and effortlessly will help you identify more of what you want beyond your current situation and rebuild self-esteem.
Finding opportunities to exercise these skills is a sure way of setting yourself up for success beyond the current box you find yourself in.
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Tip 3 – Leverage your current situation
Once you understand where you are going long-term, you can look at your situation today to see how you can use it to accelerate the journey.
Start finding people around you to help you get where you want to go. Seek potential mentors and interview people in the new roles you are considering.
Build on the skills you need next as much as you can now. If your current place offers training or coaching, take advantage of it to develop yourself.
How Alex moved from victim to victor
Alex is a 40-year-old clinical psychologist with three degrees. When she came to me, she had worked for 13 years, but because of some time overseas, she was in a junior role, doing more for less, with ‘nowhere to go’. Alex felt under-fulfiled, under-utilised, and her confidence took a real knock as a result.
Through coaching, Alex realised she is passionate about challenging the status quo and is gifted in assimilating large amounts of information and grasping what needs to happen in a given situation.
Combining these new revelations with a life vision, Alex was able to lift her head and begin to see possibilities instead of limitations. As she brought her strengths into her work more, her confidence rose. She started to see that she didn’t have to be limited to the walls of her current employer.
Within a few months, a role came up that was more suited to her level of expertise and with newfound self-assurance, she was quickly able to convince this new department of the value she could bring.
Alex says, ‘I now know what I want, and I feel I’m more confident in movement, keeping going, growing and developing. I no longer feel a victim of my circumstances, and hope is returning in all areas of my life.’
Turn that feeling of stagnation into movement
In summary, by taking these simple steps of thinking beyond your current career box, identifying your strengths, and leveraging your current situation to get you ready, then you could turn that feeling of stagnation into movement, direction, and hope.
The staircase to the next floor up is out there. You just need to open some doors to find it. Start looking around.
Take a moment to consider the following questions:
How aware are you of what you want for your life?
If there wasn’t a ceiling, where would you want to go in your career?
How can you use your current situation to prepare you for what you really want to do?
I love helping people who want to find real fulfilment in their work by breaking down the journey into bite-sized, manageable steps. If that is something you could do with right now, drop me a line, and we can arrange an exploratory chat.