What One Thing Can You Do Today To Move Toward Your Green Career?
Any time you commit to making a career change you are faced with a seemingly endless list of tasks to handle
. There are so many additional tasks to include in your daily life, you may feel a bit overwhelmed with how to get it all done.A number of years ago, I made the decision to leave my corporate job and build my own business. At the time I had a full time job that had a way of extending into my personal time on a regular basis. I traveled for work at least once a month, if not more. And, on top of all that, I was recovering from a health challenge that had me very fatigued. Needless to say, it was a lot to handle.
With a vision of what I wanted, I became highly motivated to create my new work and life. Sixteen months after I created my goal, I walked out of my corporate job with everything I needed to start my business in place.
The first few months after I made the decision, I struggled with how to balance my current corporate job and my quest to create my new business. Finally, after some trial and error and frustration, I developed several strategies that allowed me to accomplish my goals bit by bit.
Strategies You Can Use to Manage Your Transition into a Green Career
Take a look at how you can implement these strategies in your own life.
- Build an overall plan of what you need to accomplish to reach your green career goal. By clarifying the steps you need to take, you can focus on one or two steps at a time rather than thinking you need to get everything done at once.
There are several benefits to having a step by step plan spelled out: - You know what to do now and what you need to do next. - You keep a focus that allows you to track your progress. - You can better manage your time.
As soon as you lay out your steps, your next task is to estimate how much time you are going to need to accomplish each step, given what's going on in your work and personal life. I found it was helpful to assign a step to a particular month. For example, you might say that for the month of November you are going to focus identifying your green niche. Then in December you can focus on exploring and researching each of your target industries. If your schedule and responsibilities allow it, you may be able to assign a step to a one or two week time period rather than a month.
Extra Benefit: When an opportunity comes up - a networking meeting, a potential course you could take, or people you could talk to - you can discern whether that task helps you accomplish your planned goal or is a time-consuming distraction. By making this decision consciously you are staying true to your ultimate goal, rather than being lured from one potentially exciting opportunity to the next without any rhyme or reason to your actions.
- Create or watch for free time that's truly yours to design. Finding time in a busy schedule is a challenge. The busier you are with responsibilities for children, care taking, or your job, the harder it is. Look at your typical week (I know, even that can be a challenge... what's typical?), but bear with me. Think of your week days - early morning, morning, midday, lunch, afternoon, early evening, late evening - and your weekends. Where in your schedule could you carve out some time for YOU? Is it before the kids wake up in the morning or after you put them to bed at night? Is it during your lunch hour at work? Or a block of time on the weekends?
Think of each potential block as a time oasis - a quiet time in the midst of your busy schedule where you can decide for yourself how you want to use your time. To actually make this happen, you may need to come up with a new way to set boundaries at work (actually taking a lunch hour out of the office) or with your family (having your kids understand that you have homework too.) Although you may not be able to live by this schedule 100 percent of the time, seeing windows of time will help you find ways to utilize them to your best advantage.
- Each morning when you wake up, ask yourself, "What one thing can I do today to take me closer to my goal?" Although this question seems obvious and simplistic, creating a focus/intention/goal for your day will enable you to get results when it comes to reaching your green career goal.
Rather than wasting precious time trying to figure out what you should do next each time you have an open block of time, use your plan to show you exactly what to focus on.
- If you don't know your green niche, your first step is to identify your green focus. Pinpointing the areas of the green economy that interest you most is THE most effective ways to use your time wisely and get results. To identify your green niche, you can focus on the following tasks.
Start a list of green topics you know you are passionate about. Surf the web or scan a green magazine to identify topics that intrigue you and add those to your list. Think back to earlier times in your life to identify green themes in your reading choices, volunteer activities, or classes you took.
- If you've narrowed down your green niche to 2-3 possible target industries, turn your attention toward the following tasks.
Identify a professional association that matches your interests. Find a local networking meeting to attend to learn more about your target industry. Search LinkedIn for contacts who share your interests. Locate a short course you could take to confirm your interests. Research to find out what training is required to enter each of your target industries.
These bullets are just examples of the kinds of tasks you can accomplish in a day or a couple of days. The clearer you are in creating these doable tasks for yourself, the more efficient you'll be in making progress.
If you have a collection of possible tasks listed, you can scan the list to find a task that is appropriate for the time you have available and where you are when you have the time. For example, if you are stuck in a doctor's office waiting for an appointment, you might be able to do some brainstorming but you might not be able to do an Internet search. If you've had a long week, you might not be interested in a heavy duty research project, but you could do some quick searches online. Match your tasks to your energy, the time you have available, and the resources that are available to you at the moment.
With your step by step plan laid out and tied to your calendar, you can quickly identify individual tasks that will help you make progress toward the current step you are working on.
The plan may feel too structured at first, but you'll soon see you are able to make far more progress when you know where you are going and what tasks it takes to get there.
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