How to identify work you will find fulfilling

As Julianne highlighted last week, when we think about returning to work we can focus too much on family-friendly work rather than work that will be fulfilling. In our effort to find work that will fit with the rest of our lives and commitments, we can miss this fantastic opportunity to identify what we will find sustaining and will give us a sense of purpose for the years ahead. It can be very easy, as a career break mum, to fill the days with voluntary roles, hobbies, seeing friends and caring for others.  I know - I've done it! These activities can make you feel useful and valued and busy but will they sustain you in the longer term?

The hidden bonus of being on a career break is that it allows the time and opportunity to do some thinking about what gives you meaning and what is really important to you. This is great preparation for your return to work, when you are ready, as it helps you to get a clearer idea on the direction you want to take. If you're not sure of your future path, and would like to investigate the type of work you find fulfilling and purposeful, this is a process you can follow:

1. Take yourself away to a quiet place where you will not be distracted by tasks or people and are able to think for an hour or so.
2. Think back over your working life and focus on one or two times when you felt a sense of personal fulfillment. Make a note of what you were doing, who else was around you, your location, your emotions and any other details you remember.
3. Think about what it was that gave you a sense of fulfillment. This is about more than simply feeling successful, although that might be a component.  To get to what's underneath feeling successful, ask yourself what you felt successful in and what this meant to you. For example, were you solving an impossible problem, helping others & making a difference, being recognised as an expert, ...? 
4. Think about what you were doing and what was going on around you in these times of fulfillment. For example, were you:
1. Working alone or part of a team
2. Part of a large organisation or striking out on your own
3. Working with data, working with things/products or dealing with people (or a mixture of these) 
4. Thinking through ideas and theories or carrying out practical actions with concrete results
5. Developing/influencing others and/or developing yourself?

You might find it useful to talk this through with a trusted friend to help you to reflect on what was most important to you in these situations. Through asking yourself these questions, you will gain more clarity about what success at work means to you and the nature of the work and the surroundings you need in order to feel most fulfilled. In this way, you will start to form a clearer sense of your own purpose which can guide your search for a new worthwhile role.  What better way to spend an hour or so this Summer?

Posted by Katerina

Find your way back to work through Strategic Volunteering

Volunteering is a common activity among former professionals who are on a career break, whether or not they wish to return to work at some point. Charities, PTAs and local campaigns are always in need of additional support and committed people: for women on a career break they can provide the companionship and sense of purpose that they previously found in their career, as well as essential flexibility.

It is very easy to fill your time with voluntary roles, especially once your children are in school and you can quickly feel very busy, productive and valued.  If you are thinking of returning to work at some stage, though, it is worth thinking about volunteering that can help you with your return either through developing your existing skills or acquiring new ones and, additionally, building your network. This is what we mean by strategic volunteering - work that does more than just make you feel that you are giving something back.

We have worked with many women for whom strategic volunteering was their launch-pad back to work. In some cases this was a deliberate approach and in others, there was a more organic development with the woman discovering a new interest or uncovering a previously hidden talent. You will find more details about some of these examples in our success stories. 

These returners planned their volunteering deliberately as a route back to work: 

Sue* was a volunteer Games Maker Selection interviewer, with me, for the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. She'd previously had a career in HR and used the opportunity of our weekly shift to connect with the London 2012 HR team to find out about other permanent roles in the organisation. Three months into our volunteering she was employed there.

Amy* a former City lawyer volunteered in the legal department of a national charity, advising on contractual matters which was her expertise. After some months she negotiated a move to the trusts and legacy team where she built the knowledge and expertise that enabled her to apply for employment in her target area of private client practice.

In our success stories you can read about Caroline Boyd who joined the Parent Gym as a volunteer trainer/facilitator following a 4 year break from a career in marketing. She loved this new type of work so much that after a year she successfully applied for a permanent training role with the Mind Gym, the commercial arm.

Lynda* a former radio producer used a series of volunteer roles as stepping stones to a new career, starting from the school PTA where she ran a portfolio of increasingly successful fundraising and social events for a number of years. Having regained her professional confidence she volunteered as the campaign manager for a London mayoral candidate, using her journalistic instincts to develop an effective PR campaign from a standing start. Armed with this experience and many new contacts, Lynda was employed by a new political party to manage its PR activity.

If you have a strategic volunteering success story to share, we'd love to hear it!

*names have been changed

Posted by Katerina

Prone to Procrastination? Tips to help you move forward

If you’re experiencing ambivalence about returning to work, one of the effects might be procrastination.  ‘I don’t have to call my old colleague today’, ‘I’ll sort out my CV after I’ve taken the dog for a walk’ are the kinds of thoughts we can have.  The problem with these thoughts is that without some sort of focus or sense of purpose, we somehow never get around to calling that old colleague or working on our CV.

Sense of purpose

So how do we gain a sense of purpose?  For most of us this comes from having some clarity about what we want to do next and why.  In the absence of this clarity, none of the things we could possibly do (make a call, write our CV, do research, work out how to tell our story) seem urgent or even relevant.  If you are feeling unclear about your next role and you are perhaps struggling with too few choices or too many, taking a look at our previous posts could help.  If you are not yet ready to return or embark on a search for a role, you can start to gain a sense of purpose by thinking about the question of what you might like to do next.

Feeling Overwhelmed

Sometimes we procrastinate when we feel overwhelmed by the scale of the task ahead and this prevents us from taking a first step.  So, even when you’ve decided that you want to go back to work and have some clarity about the kind of role you want, you can still be daunted and make little progress. Professor Richard Wiseman's research into the psychology of change has found that simply knowing our end objective, and imagining how great life will be if we reach it, does not motivate us - we need to clearly plan the steps we will take to achieve the goal. So the solution lies in subdividing your end goal into individual smaller stages.  Each time you are able to complete an action you will be moving towards your overall goal and you will gradually build momentum and confidence.  Wiseman suggests that you can further increase your motivation by 1) telling other people about your goals 2) recording your progress (in a journal or on a chart) and 3) rewarding yourself for each sub-goal you achieve.

Permission

Finally, procrastination can result from the way we order our priorities.  When there are a myriad of tasks to do and demands on our time, we can find it easy to relegate the tasks that will move us forward in our career thinking to the end of the list.  It is almost as if we need permission to put ourselves higher up the priority list, particularly if we have spent recent years in a caring role.  Who is going to give us permission to focus on ourselves and not feel selfish? 

If you've been able to answer that, what is the first thing you will do with your new sense of purpose?  We would love to hear from you.

Posted by Katerina