How To Change Career When You're Totally Confused- 4 Tips To Successful Career Change (part 1), Career Near Me

By Natasha Stanley.
No idea what to do next in your career change? Feeling trapped, frustrated and unable to make progress? There's a group of people who have made 'not-knowing and doing amazing things anyway' an art form. Natasha explains who they are, and how you can use their techniques to get your career change moving, too.
"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings." – Wendell Berry
Here's an uncomfortable thought: when it comes to your career change, there's a good chance you have no idea what you're doing.
I can be pretty sure of that, because I had no idea what I was doing when I made my own career change.
In fact, pretty much everyone looking for fulfilling work is stumbling around in the dark.

You have no idea what you're doing.

You have no idea if you're making the right choices. You have no idea what would really light you up to wake up for every morning. You have no idea if you're just being wilfully, narcissistically greedy for wanting a career you love. You have no idea, once you figure out what you want to do, what you're going to do about that knowledge.
And you hate the not-knowing. You hate it, and you try to fight it, and you try to hide it.
It feels like walking on an icy pavement at rush hour in the city. All you want to do is get to the end of the road without falling head over heels, and you're trying so, so hard to make it there with your dignity intact.
You're slipping and sliding and all the muscles in your legs are working overtime to keep your balance, and all you want to do is throw your arms out to the sides and grab onto someone or something for support… and yet you don't want to look like a prize idiot, so you're exhausted and frustrated.
You want to know what you're doing. You want to have clarity and security and stride to the end of this slippery career change road confidently – and you don't want people to know how lost and off-balance you really are, because it's embarrassing.
It's lonely and embarrassing to feel so lost in such an important area of your life, especially when in almost every other area, you're a total pro.
And yet, here's the ridiculous part.

Nobody knows what they're doing.
Everyone is slipping and sliding their way through life. Everyone you see on the street is on that icy pavement with you. Nobody knows what in the world they're doing.
Think about it. How much of life can anyone be absolutely certain of?
Beyond the sun rising in the mornings, beyond your house still standing when you come home from work, how much are you 100% sure of?
Do you know exactly how your day is going to go? Are you sure of what mood your friend will be in when you walk into the café to meet them? When you open your e-mail inbox, are you confident of what messages you'll find, and from who?

Day-to-day life is a practice in improvisation.
We spend our lives, moment to moment, responding to what we're presented with and making it up on the spot. Of course, what we choose to do in each moment is often based on what we've experienced in the past, but in much of our lives, we're improvising. It's what keeps us moving forward. Without it, we'd be trapped.
"Improvisation basically is simply motion. It precedes musical knowledge or understanding about anything. It's simply the act – the courageous act of opening up your mouth or putting your fingers on a keyboard or whatever – of opening your mouth and simply singing something and following it. It's simply motion, just the courage to keep moving just to keep going, you know. What gets in the way is: Am I qualified to do this? Do I know enough to do this? Do I sound well enough to do this? – or whatever, you know. There are all kinds of excuses for you not to do it. Improvisation, I think, is so essential to having a well-rounded life." – Bobby McFerrin
And yet, when it comes to career change, we hate the idea of not being utterly clear about what's going to happen and how. We want to know exactly how things are going to go. We don't want to make a move unless we know how it's going to turn out. We wait for clarity, wait for the answers, wait for everything to be just so… and we find ourselves waiting forever.
And it's that hatred of the not-knowing that holds us back the most.

Fighting against not knowing what you're doing is a waste of energy.
It's our rejection of improvisation that makes our progress on that slippery road so painful and slow. You spend all of your time focusing on the problem, because you don't know what the solution is. You beat yourself up constantly and come out feeling even less motivated, less inspired, less well equipped.

So the question is: how do you get really good at not knowing what you're doing?
How do you make progress as a result of being at a loss, rather than despite it?
In art, music, and theatre, improvisation isn't just something you do when you've forgotten your lines. It's considered a fundamental skill.
And if career change were an art (and for us at Careershifters, it is), the same applies.
The willingness and ability to improvise is what distinguishes successful career changers from those who stay stuck.
The ability to flow, freely and unfettered by plans and expectations (there's a reason Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi named his state of being 'flow').
The ability to take yourself just a touch less seriously, and allow yourself to play awhile.
The recognition of the fact that the best-laid plans are always a mess by the end of the game – the celebration, in fact, of not having all the answers.
There's a special magic to improvisation theatre, because audiences love to watch other human beings simply being, unfettered by expectation. We sit there and marvel: look how free they are! Look how responsive, how playful, how imaginative, how creative.
They're always balancing on the edge of screwing up, and they're happy there.

What would it feel like to be OK with having no idea what you're doing?
To give yourself permission to be completely without answers?
How would life change if you were to celebrate your state of not-knowing; to revel in it; to use it to your advantage?
"Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, wilful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world." – Tom Robbins
There are a number of fundamental rules to dramatic improvisation; different versions of these are scattered across the internet, in books and in classrooms around the world.

to be continued.