Career decisions – books – knowing – and finally!

In a previous post I mentioned that I’ve been deliberating the next phase in my career. To help me in this process I’ve been reading two books ‘How to get a job you’ll love’ by John Lees and ‘ The Career Itch’ by Grace Owen. Lees’ book was recommended by a friend. And it really is a good book. It is packed full of creative exercises to explore career ideas and practical tips on the regular stuff like interview technique. Highly recommended.

I also chose to read Grace Owen’s book because we both do some work for the same consultancy and though I haven’t worked with her, I know she has a good reputation. She has self-published her book – the quality of the finished product is still high. I would say it is a much lighter read with more anecdotes than Lees’ book. I skimmed through it in a couple of hours. I’d recommend this as a starting point to get you thinking and Lees’ book as the one to really make you work on your career. With only £4 difference in cover price, Lees’ book is better value but it depends on what you’re after.

So, committing myself to the various creative exercises I came to my decision. Having gone round and round in circles I came to terms with the fact that what I want to do is freelance research and writing. I’ve known this for a long time but hid away from it for a variety of reasons (not least ‘But is that really a proper job?’). Everything else I looked at just seemed to be a smoke-screen. So, I have developed my action plan and I will be repositioning my business website. Now it is down to me to make this work. In the meantime I’ll still be doing a bit of training and today I just found out I’m going to be an Associate Tutor with the OU, which I’m really looking forward to.

An interesting experience in this process was thinking about the question my coach asked me last year ‘How do you make a decision?’ I realised, when I came to my career decision, that there is a big degree of intuition for me. When I really knew what I wanted to do, I had a strong sense of certainty, a solid and grounded feeling around my middle. I’ve had it before and I know that means I’ve decided. How I got to that is rather less clear but I suspect that somewhere in my subconscious there’s a lot of sifting of the output of my research and analysis. This isn’t always easy to explain to others who want to hear about logic – I just know.

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