Do your habits support the change you want to make?

I see you. I hear you. I feel you. Undergoing a career transition can cause anxiety. Uncertainty can invite opportunity, surprise, and excitement, but it can also cause worries about your future. Fear and uncertainty can leave you feeling stressed, anxious, and powerless over your direction of travel in your career. It can drain you emotionally and can become your cage, leading you to endlessly play in your mind the what-if and worst-case scenarios. You are a human being and just like me you also crave security. You want to feel safe and have a sense of control over your life and your well-being. You want to feel anchored but it's hard to anchor yourself when you're floating in the ocean of change.

One of the common themes in my coaching conversations is the chaos and confusion the person experiences because all of a sudden "something" has significantly changed in their lives to the extent that they feel no longer "themselves". The person they once were seems to be slipping away. The structure they once were used to is no longer there, often causing them to feel paralysed. They seem to have lost their own typical way of spending their days. The writer Annie Dillard in her book The Writing Life writes " How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labour with both hands at sections of time".

Sometimes a routine can help you create an anchor. But before you can create a routine that works for you, you need to start by examining your habits. Both habits and routines are regular and repeated actions, but habits happen with little or no conscious thought, whereas routines require a higher degree of intention and effort.

Habits form over time by repeating certain thoughts, feelings or behaviours until they become your second nature. Very often you are not aware of them. Habits run without your awareness. A habit makes a brain map, and every time you repeat it, the map and connections get strengthened and elaborated. When you are in the middle of a career transition where the reality both inside and outside of you does not look the same, often you keep running your older program which might hold you back from moving forward. Your habitual thoughts, feelings and behaviours might not serve you any longer but your brain does not judge which habits are good or bad. Your brain works on data based on your experience and will do and think what is familiar already. As a human being, you are hard-wired to follow the path of least resistance.  

So, how do you start scrutinising your current habits? Look at the picture below:

The trigger, the action (behaviour) and the reward are the three steps that form the habit loop. The more you run a loop, the more your brain gets used to doing it, and the stronger the neural pathways become.

What do you habitually do? What do you habitually think? How do you habitually talk to yourself? What habits do not serve you any longer? What habits do you want to keep because they will help you navigate your transition and enter a new career chapter? By asking yourself these questions, you will start raising your awareness which is key to move from autopilot to conscious control. Habits serve a critical purpose in making your behaviour more efficient from your brain's perspective but in order to help you fulfil your needs and new plans the brain has to be able to use and switch between two different strategies: one based on habits and one based on goals.  The challenge in your daily life is being able to shift between habitual and goal-directed strategies. To walk towards this balance and be in a stronger position in your transition, you can manipulate one of the three steps in the habit loop.

You can't manipulate the reward step as it's too late in the cycle. This is when your brain released dopamine - the cycle is complete. You have achieved what you wanted - you now feel good. You have strengthened the neural patterns.

You can't manipulate the action/behaviour step. Change is challenging on its own. But with habits it's even more challenging because the patterns are decided in your subconscious. Resisting the urge to act on the habitual behaviour requires a never-ending supply of willpower.

What you can control is your trigger. Identifying the trigger offers you the neurological window into your habit loop and helps you distance yourself from the habit system so that you can replace those behaviours that no longer serve you. What happens just before you engage in your habit?

Behaviour Scientist B. J. Fogg claims in Tiny Habits that if you want to build a new habit, you need to take a behaviour you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth. If you want to create long-term change, it’s best to start small.

Make the change too small to fail. Take a baby step. Let's say you want to do some research about some career options that might be interesting for you. A small step could be checking the LinkedIn profile of some people who are in your target job and contact only one person. Do more of this a few times and you will realise you have opened a channel for your career change.

Use existing habits to build new ones. Think about a habit you do daily, then use that existing behaviour as the trigger for the habit you want to create. The principle is called "habit stacking" - you are simply "stacking" the habit you want onto one that already exists. Using the example above about LinkedIn, let's say one of your current habits is to open LinkedIn. The new habit could be searching for some companies and recruiters in industry sectors that you might be keen to explore and create a list that you will use at a further stage.

The key reminder for yourself is to be consistent. You need to reinforce new behaviours to turn them into habits. If you fall off the track, don't beat yourself up. Your brain will need some time to create a new neural connection.

Habits are not only physical. You also need to take care of yourself in times of change and uncertainty. A routine is different for everyone, and in difficult times, it is important to find what works for you. You might need to keep yourself busy during this time, be it out of financial necessity, or for a sense of control when everything feels uncontrollable. You might need to let go, rest and reset. You might need to free the child inside of you and reconnect with what for so long you have repressed. You might need to go out of yourself and focus on the people around you. You might need to use this time to acknowledge and feel certain emotions and work on what you have ignored. You might just need to embrace chaos and make yourself happen.

Transitions can be both exciting and complicated. As my coach says, tell your brain what to do before it tells you.

#transitions #careertransitions #change #uncertainty #habits #selfdevelopment