Finding Your Career Mojo

Do you find yourself questioning your career sensibilities lately? Doubting how well you can respond to change or if you lack a certain something to get ahead? If you believe you’ve lost your “career mojo” don’t feel bad because we all have periods of self-doubt. Your natural response may be to beat yourself up if you’ve lost your job, about to lose your job or wondering why it’s taking you forever to find a job. Finding a safe space between your fear and your freedom is not as hard as you may believe. It’s easy to get caught up in the persecution complex especially when you are a high-achiever but now find yourself doubting everything in your career path. If you believe you have strayed too far from where you thought you were headed, it’s not too late to turn it around. Getting your career mojo back may take time, but it’s certainly not as impossible as you may now think.

We all go through periods where we doubt our choices even when it comes to deciding what pair of shoes to where or whether to go with the non-fat or soy latte on your ride into work in the morning. When you feel it can’t get any worse, you get to work to find your assistant in a frenzy trying to organize your calendar, your morning meeting was just pushed back an hour causing a conflict, and one of your super-star employees is having an “impromptu” meeting with your boss and you were not invited. Just when you think it can’t get any worse, you get a call that your mother was rushed to the hospital, the plumbing just backed up in your house and your mortgage check got lost in the mail. Okay, maybe I’m painting an overly grim picture but you get the point. When life gets in the way, an appropriate response would be to get out of the way – but you can’t. You feel like no matter how great you can multi-task, you seem to only be capable of making the right decision at the wrong time.

If you did not have self-doubt in the past you certainly have cause to embrace the fear now. Losing your mojo no matter the situation is something that we all experience one or more times in our life and for some of us, one or more times in a day. The problem is that we have to realize that we are “over-taxed” and that we need to step back before we step in it again. Knowing when to get out of your own way when the going gets tough is a great skill you will undoubtedly need many times in your career. It’s okay to be overwhelmed, and feel like you may not have the leadership chops you once did. You are no less of a person. Losing your career mojo is a nice way of life telling you it’s time to hit the “reset” button before too much more goes spiraling out of control. Your only job is to recognize that and not try to over-compensate by reacting in a defensive and self-defeating way.

Finding your career mojo again after you’ve been beaten down might take some time but you can and will prevail – it’s not a matter of if, but of when. Feeling like you are yesterday’s news is not going to make the path to regaining your mojo any smoother. Giving yourself the time to regroup and reflect will help you understand that getting back your mojo is at your finger tips anytime you are ready to release your fear and your doubt. It’s not enough to kick back and react every time something goes a little off kilter. We all have a tendency to want to rush to fix things sometimes before we are entirely sure they are even broken. Over-reacting to any situation has the ability to make a seemingly non-issue turn into a raging war where you are fighting against an unseen enemy (usually yourself),

It’s okay to know when to take up the fight but it’s brilliant to know when you need to just take flight. Your career mojo has no internal conscious or morality barometer. Getting back in the groove takes only one ingredient, confidence. And when you believe that is the only ingredient you can’t find at your local career counter, make something up. Do something that makes you feel better or better yet, do something that makes someone else feel better no matter how small. You will find that your career mojo meter move to the positive side. You will benefit most when you take yourself out of the immediate problem and find an entirely different situation to fix. It might take the form of making a donation, buying someone a cup of coffee or simply paying someone an unexpected compliment. Taking yourself out of you is the fastest way to cure the career mojo blues. Next time your office is exploding all around you, and you feel like you can’t get beaten down any more, go out and do something nice for yourself or for someone else. You’ll likely find that the office is still exploding, but your ability to deal with the madness just got a little easier.

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