Keep Growing When Your Career Feels Stalled

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Short-term issues can require us to temporarily change course: If you’ve lost your job, you urgently need income. If in-person schooling isn’t available, someone has to stay home and supervise virtual learning. If you’re the primary caregiver to a family member, you need to secure flexibility for responsibilities at home. Prioritizing these short-term concerns over long-term goals, while painful, may be necessary right now. But a temporary detour from your professional path doesn’t mean you have to put aside your ambitions. You can regain control over your career arc with these strategies:

  1. Reframe the situation. Even if you’re not advancing toward your professional aspirations right now, you’re still making a difference and providing value in other areas of your life.
  2. Push back against standard options. The WFH boom has led many organizations to provide more flexible work arrangements. Express what you want; most offers can be negotiated.
  3. Allocate small amounts of time toward your goals. It may not seem significant to spend three minutes sending a networking email or reading a few articles on a topic you’re interested in. But these little investments add up.

Get the Feedback You Need from Your Customers

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Your business can’t improve operations without honest and substantive feedback from your customers. But customers can often be reluctant to provide it. Here are three ways to get the input you need.

  • Reframe customer feedback requests. When following up with customers after they’ve interacted with your company, make it clear that the organization is seeking to improve—not to be told it’s doing well. Instead of asking “How did I do?” ask “What’s one thing I could do to have served you better today?” Ask good second and third questions to encourage customers to generate ideas.
  • Focus on customer actions, not their words. Instead of tracking “sentiment,” which can be misleading, track and observe customer behavior. How often are customers repeating purchases? How frequently do they come to your store or site? What do they do when they’re there?
  • Make it habitual, not occasional. Switch up that bi-annual or quarterly survey in favor of mechanisms that are continual and can be integrated into your culture. Whenever you make a change to your operations—even if it’s small—observe how customers respond and seek honest input. Feedback from customers is not only a gift but an imperative.

Boost Morale with a Thank You

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As your organization faces the twin challenges of strained budgets and burned-out workforces, what can you do to keep your employees engaged? While it may not be as impactful as a promotion or a raise, don’t underestimate the power of symbolic awards, such as private thank-you notes or public displays of recognition. These simple interventions can significantly improve employee motivation, according to research.

To maximize their effect, it’s essential to customize these rewards to each unique context. Specifically, ask yourself: Are you the best messenger, or would this expression of gratitude be more impactful coming from someone else? When is the best time to offer the message? And should it be communicated privately or publicly? Whatever you decide, your message can be short and sweet — as long as it’s thoughtful. When employees feel that it’s sincere, a symbolic gesture of recognition can go a long way.

Stop Overthinking Big Decisions

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Thoughtful deliberation is an essential leadership quality that can help you make better decisions and produce better outcomes. However, it can also devolve into overthinking, which can be paralyzing. Here are three ways to avoid a thought spiral that can slow you down:

  1. Curb your perfectionism. Perfectionism is one of the biggest blockers to swift decision-making because it operates on faulty all-or-nothing thinking. To curb this tendency, ask yourself questions like: What’s one thing I could do today to bring me closer to my goal? Or what’s the next step based on the information I have right now?
  2. Pay attention to your intuition. When it comes to difficult decisions, your gut reaction is often a critical data point, particularly when time is short or you don’t have all the information you need. Research shows that pairing intuition with analytical thinking helps you make better, faster, and more accurate decisions and gives you more confidence in your choices than relying on intellect alone.
  3. Construct creative constraints. Determine a date or time by which you’ll make a choice. Put it in your calendar, set a reminder on your phone, or even contact the person who’s waiting for your decision and let them know when they can expect to hear from you.

Inspiration from Mr. Jha

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Mr. Jha is a cancer patient who lives in our locality. And while I have seen in movies these kinds of inspirations it’s the first time I have seen it so close to me.

When I first met Mr. Jha in our community badminton court, he was the most jolly person I have met. With his round eyes, big round cheeks, bald head with white hair in patches, and always-ready smile, the most prominent of all was to make everyone around him laugh. Although his age would have been the late 50s you would get an impression of a younger person because of his energetic exuberance.

When I met him after the cancer treatment and while he was recovering, it was a shock, the man was looking like a stripped-down version of himself, with hollow cheeks, a bald head, and a half-grown stubble around the face, still, the smile remained, and what remained is his jolly nature with the power to still make others laugh.

Yes, the treatment deteriorated his body but still, the man and his soul remained unperturbed. He is a real inspiration to all of us who are saddened even in small matters. We feel let down even if a small thing doesn’t go as planned and a quick blame to throw at everyone around us.

The biggest lesson for me is to live a happy life with smaller things and if things are changing consider it to be changing for good around you. And if there are things not in your control, be happy, accept it, and move forward.

Two Ways to Leave Work Stress Behind

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After a long day, it can be a struggle to leave work behind you. Too often, we take out job-related stress on our friends, children, or partners. Here are two ways to make sure your work troubles stay at the office:

  • Have an end-of-work habit. Signal to your brain that it’s time to go home with a ritual that helps you unwind. Take a more scenic route home, listen to music on the bus, or go to the gym. Make time for this habit so you can switch gears before you get home, not as you’re walking in the door.
  • Create a third space. It’s easy to just shuttle back and forth — physically and emotionally — between work and home. But having a third space besides these two locations will help you decompress. It might be anything from a quiet café to a book club to a poker night. It should be a place where you explore your interests, relax, and ideally find fulfillment.

Are you running blind…

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Do you know what you want in the next 6 months of life? Probably Yes.

How about what you want in the next 2 years? 3 years? 5 years?

Whether it’s an individual or a company if there is no long-term vision i.e. we don’t even know what we want it’s impossible to get it.

It’s like running blind for the next 10 meters after which we don’t know whether we will hit a wall or go down a pit.

Hence try to think about the years ahead, it’s difficult but with practice, you can start envisaging the future.

And as they say, if you can dream what you want, it will mostly come true.

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