How You Can Take Charge and Improve Your Work-Life Balance
If you’re wondering how to personally benefit from this time of great worker revolt and improve your work-life balance, these 3 steps can have you capitalizing consciously on the strongest candidate-driven market since the last century.
You can now be at the cause of your career path. (Rather than being at the effect of it.)
If location, location, location is the secret to successful real estate, know that you are right now in the perfect place to command the work and life balance you desire.
3 Steps to Take Action in Your Career
Step 1: Begin Your Own “Great Reevaluation”
Step 2: Stand in Your Conscious Power and Play the Field
Step 3: Negotiate and Engage in Your Playful and Purposeful “Practice”
The Time is Now to Design Work-Life Balance
- You as an employee are in a unique seat of power to design and negotiate your own terms for work-life balance.
- You can make choices that revolve around your personal sense of passion and purpose.
- In addition, you can connect to your sense of play when it comes to work-life balance.
“The Great Resignation” is a term discussed a lot these days. Another popular and trending term is “The Great Reshuffle.” These terms are being applied to the musical chairs that many career-opportunists are playing during these unique times. People are garnering higher pay, asking for sexier perks, and taking on bigger roles by making a career jump. But jumping only because of shiny objects for the moment won’t necessarily create the deeper and longer-term career satisfaction you desire.
Measured and conscious capitalizing upon sustainable career expansion opportunities that may be right on your doorstep, rather, is a wiser course to take.
It won’t stay this way forever.
With nearly 35 years in the careers field, I’ve seen the seat of power switch back and forth between employers and employees many times. And, with that same 35 years also invested in consciousness and personal development, I’ve determined that the time to take action on insights is always now, now, and now. So, as they say, let’s make your hay while the sun is shining!
Step 1: Begin Your Own “Great Reevaluation”
Times like these are rare: when workers versus management wield the ultimate power to determine how they’ll spend their days earning a paycheck. But power without consciousness, as we’ve seen exemplified in so many ways, doesn’t necessarily move the world forward.
To move your own world forward, get clear about what’s true for you underneath all the “have tos” of the past. People who’ve felt caged sometimes become paralyzed when given the keys to freedom because they’re so used to accommodating rather than having their own say.
Two years of caged existence during the worst pandemic in a century, however, has empowered individuals with time and space in which to rethink and reevaluate what’s most important in their lives.
If you haven’t taken that personal introspection time yet, it’s never too late. And, just like you’ll always fare better in a college class when you’ve reviewed the syllabus before launching into the semester, you’ll benefit most from this period of career power when you’ve rethought your goals and set new sights after conscious and deliberate consideration.
- What were the driving forces that have you doing what you’re doing now?
- In what directions are your interests or “school of life” skills-development pointing you now? (You know: we develop skills outside of our education and training just by living life!)
- Where’s your new “sweet spot”? Beyond money, stuff and prestige, what actual sense of purpose is calling your name?
Deeper-than-a-quick-buck questions like those can help you become more efficient in attracting your share of the conscious career goodies ahead of you.
Two of my books – Finding the Sweet Spot, and my newest Amazon best-seller, The Back Forty – can serve as tools to facilitate your own great reevaluation.
Step 2: Stand in Your Conscious Power and Play the Field
- True power doesn’t have to boast or sell itself. It simply needs to know its own value and put that value on display.
- If there was ever a time to learn to deftly and coyly “date” the job market and simply be on the receiving end of many suitors, this is it.
- Throwing one’s resume out onto the impersonal heap of a thousand others doesn’t present a unique nor a fit-to-be-chased image. It just shows you as any other Tom, Dick or Harriet pounding the gold-rush pavement.
What does work, however, is a personally-branded and “backdoor” approach. This is where you’re distinct and set apart from the “frontdoor” crowds. Operating this way creates an appearance of prime-cut, top-tier talent.
In addition to personalizing your outreach, a research-based approach allows you to connect with and be known by any thought-leader in any field of your passionate interest. Doing this puts you in a position to not only gain all the possible knowledge you’d ever need to choose a conscious (and purposeful) career direction but also personal contacts biting at the bit to woo you into their camp.
This method is way more fun and befitting of the royalty role you’re now in a position to play than a cheap resume flung out into the amorphous and carnivorous search for warm bodies in today’s employment market. My Amazon best-selling book, Never Apply for a Job Again, provides a complete roadmap for such a fun, dignified and collegial backdoor approach.
Step 3: Negotiate and Engage in Your Playful and Purposeful “Practice”
One critical aspect of a true “dream job” is the ability to engage in activities, fields, or functions that light you up.
There’s no better time, when good talent is at a premium and calling the shots, to negotiate and even design your own next role.
In employer-driven markets, when there are more good candidates than jobs available and management is in the catbird seat, you take what you can get. . . especially if you’re pursuing a front-door approach and competing with others through the traditional application and resume process.
In this candidate-driven market, however, in which there’s less emphasis on hitting all the job-description checklist buttons and employers simply want good people and are willing to train, you get to call more shots than ever before. You can ask for the work-life balance you need, the combination of home-based and office-based work hours to fit your lifestyle, and even the amount of travel you desire.
Best of all, in using a backdoor approach in a market like this, there doesn’t even have to be a position open or available for you to seduce your way into a dream role. Through the process of research alone – not in any way needing anything from anybody – you, in effect, simply fly your flag in front of quality talent seekers such that they come chasing you with new roles of your own design without you needing to chase anything yourself.
Lastly, because the pursuit of purpose can be a weighty and serious prospect, you may be able to play in and “practice” pursuing purpose in ways you may never have had before or will again. It all depends on how long this resignation/reset economy lasts.
3 Easy Steps. Ready, Set, REAP YOUR CONSCIOUS CAREER BOUNTY!
Put These Ideas into Action!
It’s easy to talk about engaging in your own personal re-evaluation, doing career exploration and research, and practicing the pursuit of purpose, but the most important thing you can do is to do it!
Do your own work.
These three easy steps to reaping your conscious career bounty require you to make a commitment to yourself and to take action in order to grow your career in these times of opportunity. Don’t let the window close with you still stuck inside!
One way to do the work is through the deep and insightful inquiries included in The Back Forty: 7 Essential Embraces to Launch Life’s Radical Second Half. It’s been hailed by Midwest Book Review as “a perfectly timed tool for the reevaluation brought on by ‘The Great Resignation” occurring in today’s world economy.”
Chief Empowerment Optimystic (CEO) Darrell W. Gurney is an executive, business and career advisor; speaker; workshop facilitator; author and licensed spiritual counselor. Founder of CareerGuy.com and TheBackForty.com, Gurney coaches individuals to achieve their highest self-expression and presents to professional, trade and community groups as well as MBA programs and university alumni organizations nationwide. He is known for his commitment to supporting individuals in creating and living their best life now.