5 steps to restart your career and chase your dreams!
Do you think it is easy to restart your career after a break?
Women could take a Career break to support child care or elder care reasons or to recover from a health issue.
If the break is short term say 3 to 6 months, it will be not that difficult to join the workforce back as the magnitude of change to cope with will be manageable.
But if the break duration exceeds more than a year or beyond, it gets difficult for them to get back to work due to a variety of reasons including knowledge gaps, changes in technologies, fast-moving trends, obsolescence of skillset, etc.
In some cases, a few women backed by a strong support system around them will get back to work easily but many others have difficulty to “ Restart “
In this blog, let us explore what it takes for women to restart and chase their dreams.
In our conversation(see first comment for the episode #TGV101 link) with Pradnya Punekar, a coach, entrepreneur, an influencer and a role model for many she has shared the following trends that she observed while mentoring and coaching women to get back to work or start their entrepreneurial journey.
- Focus on self & Reflection: One should focus on what they want to do in their career. Deeply focus on What they want to achieve as an individual. Use breaks as reflective times. what worked vs what has not worked in their career. Plan to do any course corrections as appropriate to be able to get back on track and use the break time to hone your skills
- Get inspired: Find a role model, and connect with them to understand their journey. A lot of entrepreneurial journeys have started — around 60% of women started entrepreneurship during their break. Learn what you can do as well
- Keep trying: One will know whether certain things work or not only when you try. Break the assumptions and take action
- Continuous improvement: be extremely curious about your own area or work & be committed to self-improvement
- Optimism: Challenging times should be looked at as opportunities to do better than what they did before the break
- Give back: in a bigger way. One needs to be extremely generous with their wisdom — whatever one has learned in their professional or personal life — start sharing them through blogs, videos, share with people directly, facilitate events or be part of community events, etc.
Also, Pradnya has developed her own “transformation model” for women to restart their careers, and here are the 5 important steps to follow:
1. Have a vision: It is extremely important to have a vision — of what to achieve in the long term. Create an action plan and vision board. A Vision board will be a good reminder and booster to plan about realizing one’s dreams.
2. Fitness: There are chances of losing fitness during a career break. It is extremely important to get fit. Physical fitness not only boosts confidence, it also helps in improving mental fitness. One may start exercising or going on a walk. It is not about how much time you work out but whether or not you are working out consistently. e.g. You need not hit the gym 1 hour a day for a month rather think about hitting the gym twice a week consistently for 3 months and beyond, making fitness part of your daily routine will instill discipline too
3. Re-skilling: Research how organizations are recruiting, and how you can re-skill yourself to meet the market needs. Consult experts and also it is advisable to find a mentor to put yourself back on track
4. Support system: Having a great support system around you is important — first get your family support, then focus on communities, organizations, forums to support each other…leverage the network to get back to work
5. Mindset — Most women are under the misconception that If they start their motherhood journey — they’ll not come back to work. It is just a myth.
Break the assumption by changing your mindset — mindset is the key to getting back to your career, thoughts you see, visuals that you create in your mind, and actions you take are important to succeed. Imagine yourself going to the office and contributing to the organization, also visualize yourself getting rewarded, etc. The Law of attraction also plays a critical role. We can achieve what we imagine or dream of.
Last but not the least, don’t be shy to ask for help — people will be happy to help — just that we need to go out of our comfort zone and seek support.
We are sure, you might have come across many role models who were able to return back to work due to their determination, perseverance, passion, and persistence. Would love to read their stories. Please feel free to share the details in the comments
The Guiding Voice team is committed to supporting women returnship to work and has already helped ~10 women get back to their dream jobs/careers in the last 2 years.
If anyone is looking to “restart” their careers, we are here to support them.
Just email us at theguidingvoice4u@gmail.com and we’ll take it forward from there
Thank you for reading. Please feel free to share the blog with those whom you care!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
