Job Searching Tips for 2023

For the past two years, I have written articles with job searching tips to help people in their quest for meaningful work. This year, I decided to take a different approach.

An alternative title for this article could also be "Career Exploration Tips for 2023" as it will focus more on career shifts and transitions, rather than simply looking for a job. A career is different than a job, which means it requires a different set of tools and approaches when we decide to embark on a new path. If you want to change career tracks in 2023, I would like to present three strategies for you to consider.

Dive into limiting beliefs

Self-limiting beliefs are negative stories that we tell ourselves, or thoughts and opinions that restricts our ability to achieve our full potential. These beliefs can stem from our families, upbringing, culture(s), and trauma that we have experienced throughout our lives, but especially from our childhoods.

These beliefs often lie just below the surface of our consciousness, only to wreck havoc when we are most vulnerable. This is why it is important to examine our unique sets of limiting beliefs about who we are, and how we show up at work.

Examining our self-limiting beliefs is a lifelong process, but it is especially important if you are starting to think about a change in careers this year. Career coaches, therapists, and other professionals can help with this process, but there are also many ways to do it on your own, such as through using embodied approaches.

Try embodied approaches

As a career coach, I often encounter clients who often take an exclusively intellectual and logical approach to thinking about their careers. I, too, often default to a logical process when thinking about my next career move. We quantify the salary lift, consider the position title, and negotiate the benefits; all of this is important, but these should not be the only metrics to consider. However, people like us would especially benefit from using embodied approaches when exploring career options and career transition decisions.

An embodied approach can be loosely defined as any method that encourage us to pause our logical brain and tap into the insights within the rest of our bodies. This process might sound a bit woo-woo to many of us, but another way of thinking about it is to consider the vast amounts of information we discard when we only tap into our logical processing centre (aka. the brain). We hold gigajoules of valuable data within our bodies, especially since our bodies keep the score.

There are many types of embodied approaches, varying from formal practices such as meditation to simpler methods, like mindfully asking ourselves certain questions:

• What types of work make us happy? What does this happiness feel like?
• Which tasks give us physical energy and which drains us?
• What do we enjoy working with? Is it people, things, animals, objects?
• How does "a good day at work" feel in our chest, hands, feet, back, mouth?

Identify your relationship to work

Similar to our limiting beliefs, our relationship to work is often also shaped by our parents/caregivers and their relationship to work. But, if we choose to, we can make a conscious decision to craft a different relationship to work. Consider the following questions as you identify your relationship to work:

• How was success defined in your family?
• What counted as "work" when you were growing up?
• Did your caregivers model taking time away from work?
• Were you frequently in competition with and/or compared to others?
• What kinds of professions and jobs did your primary caregivers have when you were growing up? How does this impact what you define as a "good" job/career?

Our relationship to work is also shaped by our society, workplaces, organizational culture, and capitalism. There are a lot of books and research on this topic by people with way more expertise than I. However, I would like to recommend a book I recently read that presented an inspiring and hopeful future for our collective relationships with work: "The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism" by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan, and Andrea Vetter.

I hope these three strategies are useful for those of you considering a career pivot (or a radical shift!) this year. I would encourage you to seek out a career coach to support you in this process, as they can provide more concrete tools and insights. Wishing you all an insightful year ahead!

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Please leave a comment below if you have found these strategies useful, if you have other strategies for navigating a career change, and if you have any questions!