Everyone finds themselves lost in a moment of total doubt and confusion at some point or another during their career. Even those friends of yours that seem to have it all on Instagram. It doesn’t matter if you’re just leaving college with a middle-of-the-range degree or you’ve been doing the same job for a decade, everyone needs to manage the feeling of being at a complete loss in their career.
That’s when you need to be inspired most of all. You need to find that something-something that will motivate you. You need to obtain some idea about what you want and a clearer idea of what you want to do.
The big question is: where can you find this kind of inspiration?
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Look In The Mirror
The first place to go to for inspiration is you. We know this sounds horrendously cliche, but the more you can understand you the less chance there is of you falling into another job by accident. All you need to do is think about what you are good at, what you enjoy doing, what interests and intrigues you and whether you have certain values you want to uphold. If you don’t know the answer to these, try asking your friends and family for their observations.
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Psychometric Tests
If you want to keep things to a tight budget, then there are plenty of free tests online. But the one we would absolutely recommend is the Myers-Briggs test for one simple reason: it suggests careers based on the outcome and results. It does this through the questions it asks, all of which are designed to help you think about how you work and what influences your decisions. Of course, there is one flaw: we change with time. So what is right for you now might not be down the line.
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Other’s Success Stories
Nothing is going to inspire you to keep going more than hearing other people have made their dreams possible. Watch a TED Talk on finding success or a video on accounting success stories. Read autobiographies on how people you admire and worship got to where they are now and discover the importance of never giving in. Take computer programmer, Brian Acton, for example. In 2009, Brian applied for a job at Facebook. He got rejected. Less than five years later, Brian sold his company to Facebook for $22 billion. It was WhatsApp. That sort of thing has got to put the fire back in your belly.
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Online Job Boards
The internet is thick with these websites and portals. They’re everywhere. But did you know they offer some of the best sources of inspiration and motivation out there? By reading job adverts for just ten minutes a day, you will get a better understanding of what attributes employers love, what skills they rank highly, what sort of experience they are after and what qualifications they want. It could be the motivating factor that takes your career up a notch or three.
It’s could be as simple as that. It really could.