Get Unstuck from your Current Career Transcript
WVIT- NBC (Hartford-New Haven, USA)
Stop searching. Instead, create a job you’ll love.
February 2, 2010
Announcer: From Connecticut’s news leader, this is NBC Connecticut Today at 11:00.
Brad: We have some news you can use this morning if you’re job hunting. Stop searching. Instead, create a job you will love. Here to tell us how to do that is communication expert David Cunningham. David, good to see you.
David Cunningham: Good morning, Brad.
Brad: So, there’s a lot of people – there’s an ebb and flow in your work life, right? There’s a lot of people at various times in their lives are feeling they’re in a rut. So you have some tools where you can really create a job, a work environment that is fulfilling to you. Talk about some of the steps that you need to take.
David Cunningham: Well, the first thing to do, Brad, is to take time out and really paint a clear picture of what you really want. People always say that they got the job they have because they just followed somebody’s footsteps or it was the one available. But what really works first is to stop, take some time out and think about what you really want for your life.
I say think like a 2nd grader. You know if the teacher asked us in the second grade, ‘What do you want for your life?’ None of us would have said we want to grow up and have a job where we’re kind of bored. So –
Brad: That’s true.
David Cunningham: So think like a 2nd grader. Take some time, think like a 2nd grader and think about what you really want. Takes about 45 minutes is all. Write it down. Put it in a file. Painting a clear picture of what you want really makes a difference.
Brad: Would you recommend, you know, bouncing things off – something like that off a spouse, off a close friend in terms of that, or is it really kind of an internal thing?
David Cunningham: No, I definitely would include others, and in fact, that’s the second thing. We call it borrowing other people’s minds. You know, other people have ideas we don’t have. They have leads and contacts we don’t have.
Sometimes when we think about what we really want, we’re a little bit hesitant to tell people. We’re embarrassed, we think they might judge it or they might give us input we don’t want, but to really include other people. I had a friend that just two years ago, he said – he was a second-generation plumber and he told me what he really wanted was to be a strategy consultant around the world.
Well, he just showed me his passport last week and he’s got 50 extra pages in it because he’s traveling around the world doing exactly what he wants. Because I knew somebody he didn’t know, put him in touch and he now has the job, exactly the one he wants.
Brad: And you think it starts with basically just admitting to yourself that what you’re doing now is just kind of marking time and it’s not the thing that you thought it might be 10, 20 years ago?
David Cunningham: Exactly. We just get caught up in it and we just go, day after day and we hardly even notice, ‘Wait a minute, I’m doing something – maybe I liked it five years ago, but it’s not fulfilling now. Maybe it was something that I thought I wanted, but it’s not, now.’ Just stop, reflect, and see. Is it really what you want?
Brad: What do you say to people who say, ‘Okay, I’ve built this life based upon what I’m doing now and it’s reasonably comfortable, even if it’s not the most fulfilling in the work environment.’ If somebody’s afraid of taking that kind of risk, what kind of advice do you take – give them?
David Cunningham: It’s really important to try some new ways of being. People get stuck. I lead seminars all the time for people, and they’re always telling me that they think there’s just a way they do things. Some people say like, ‘I am timid,’ or ‘I’m shy,’ or ‘I’m quiet.’ And they don’t think they can break out of that.
There’s good news and there’s better news. The good news is, there’s no way that we are. Even if we’ve been being timid or quiet for 20 years, that doesn’t mean that’s the way we are, it’s just the way we’ve been being.
And here’s really good news, is if you practice a new way of being, like you just practice being outgoing, or practice being social, we find that if you practice something five times a day for five days, you’ll find that you’re not stuck at all in any rut or any way that you thought you had to be. So you can really paint a clear picture of what you want, borrow other people’s brains and then practice new ways of being, and you’re not stuck with anything.
Brad: David Cunningham thanks so much for coming in. It’s great advice. Hopefully you’ve inspired some people to do just that.
David Cunningham: Thanks, Brad.
Brad: All right.