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Career
Trapeze
by Dr. Lynne
Curry
You expect to
feel bad when fired from a job at which you feel successful and
secure. You expect to feel angry or betrayed when laid off from a
company at which you’d planned to retire. You don’t, however,
expect to feel rotten one week after you leave a secure, boring
job for a job that excites you – except sometimes you do.
The problem?
Sudden job change ends your sense of knowing who’s who and what’s
what before you have the chance to develop a new sense of knowing
how to do things well. For the job changer, the experience
resembles the danger that looms in front of a circus performer who
lets go of one trapeze before catching the second. No matter how
confident, most job changers wonder at least briefly, "Will I
be the one out of one hundred who doesn’t catch the second
trapeze and crashes embarrassingly below?"
If you recently
changed jobs and feel a slight "what have I done – am I up
to this?" panic, try these five strategies to help you gain a
firm grip on the new job’s "trapeze".
First, avoid
comparing your present job to your old one. When you compare, you
divide your focus between the old and new during a time when you
need a concentrated focus on the new to accelerate your learning.
Second, keep your
eye on the new ball game. A surprising number of job changers,
particularly those who step from technical or employee into
supervisory roles or receive promotions within their current
companies, seek out the comfort of their former job duties when
the going gets rough in their new positions. Those who slide
backwards into former duties steal the hours they need to succeed
in their new job. If backsliding beckons you, fast-forward in your
mind to a time six months from now. Which will help you more –
spending hours doing the duties you already know or learning the
challenging new duties you’ve selected.
Similarly, learn
as quickly as you can the rules of the work team you’ve joined.
Most of us bring our old methods with us our new positions. For
example, those of us who like to talk things through find it
irritating that our new bosses and co-workers prefer to email
instructions. By expecting our new supervisor and co-workers to
conform to our former ways of doing things, we make ourselves into
a square object hoping to find happiness in a round location. We
need to realize we either choose to be the very best player in a
game no longer played or we can learn the rules of the new team
and game.
Fourth, avoid
self-sabotage. When things don’t work out easily, some employees
let self-doubting self-talk take over. "I’ll never be able
to figure this out" they tell themselves. "The person
who hired me is probably, right now, cursing the moment they hired
me." If you let self-criticism flood your brainwaves, you
dilute your confidence at a time when you need it most.
Fifth, if you
want to succeed in a new challenge, commit yourself to working
harder than you have before. When you plunge into a new job you
start close to the bottom of a new learning curve and learning
takes time. If you expect instant success, you play a loser’s
game because losers expect success to come easily. Winners roll up
their sleeves, tell themselves they can succeed, commit to
learning the new game and thus grab the second trapeze.
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