Stuck in a rut? Don’t let your latent talent go to waste
For many in well trodden career paths, reaching a position that you have aspired to for years can feel engaging, rewarding and satisfying.
However, reaching that summit and remaining on top of it can present difficult challenges along the way. In particular, dealing with the feeling of being stuck in a rut – perhaps not quite knowing how to develop your career, or starting to dislike a career that you once really enjoyed.
If those feelings aren’t well-managed, you could miss out on achieving your true potential. But more alarmingly, if ignored, feeling stuck in a rut with seemingly nowhere to turn, can lead to burn out, complete loss of confidence and withdrawal from the world.
Why do people get stuck in a rut?
There are many reasons why you might get stuck in a rut with your career. These include:
- unfairly comparing yourself to others, rather than focussing on your own natural rate of career development
- being the victim of bullying
- unconsciously putting the unrealistic expectations of others on your shoulders
- the lack of any real ongoing regular mentoring and teaching
- failing to take enough responsibility for your own self-development and learning
- having unrealistic expectations about your career or having no long term coherent plans
- not engaging in enough critical and creative thinking with others
- failing to voice your own concerns with others in a safe environment
- feeling that your voice and ideas don’t matter
- a lack of awareness and perspective of where you actually are in the context of your career and life
- focussing on hitting targets, rather than working out how to develop and work more effectively with others
- engaging more with computers and smart phones than via human interaction
- life outside of work becoming too overwhelming
- never really switching off from work.
Feeling a little bit stuck in a career can be part and parcel of any job, but if you allow any of the reasons above to persist for too long, that feeling can become exacerbated. And once it takes its grip on you, you may start feeling like you dislike or even loathe your career and in turn, feel that you aren’t good enough for it.
Of course, the complete opposite is usually true, but realising that requires self-awareness so that you can take positive action to address things before they get out of hand.
The move to the workplace
For a moment, go back to your early childhood and think about how you first learnt at school.
Early learning is typically fun, creative and playful, because you’re constantly learning new things and allowing your likes, dislikes, talents and passions to unfold naturally. You can also try out new things, make mistakes and learn from them.
One of the key problems with starting a career after school and university is that we suddenly go from a student environment, to a place where the daily norm of ‘earning a wage’ and ‘getting the job done’ takes precedent. That can feel like a pretty drastic change after years of study.
Furthermore, within the pressures of a workplace environment, there may be a temptation to place secondary importance on continued learning and developing a career at a natural pace, instead placing greater emphasis on things like targets, bonuses and performance reviews. But is that really a sustainable approach to career longevity?
Thinking more critically
If doing work and reaching targets take primary importance over learning, we start to learn less and potentially lose one of our most important learning skills. The ability to practice constructive critical thinking.
When we start placing unreasonable expectations on our own shoulders or become unfairly self-critical, we can get get stuck in our careers. We need both awareness and critical thinking to understand whether an expectation or a view of ourselves is a reasonable one – and if it isn’t, a mechanism through which that can be addressed.
Getting tied up in unrealistic expectations or unfair criticism is highly dangerous, because not only can it kill your creativity and enthusiasm for your work, if left unchecked, you may start sending yourself subconscious messages that you’re not much good for anything else. Those types of thoughts need to be quickly nipped in the bud, because we all have a store of latent talents. However, regardless of any profession, they can only be developed by continuously learning, trying and doing new things at a natural rate. Constantly running on adrenaline to meet unrealistic expectations might work temporarily, but ultimately it will affect your health and wellbeing and risks shortening your career.
Ultimately, it is important to recognise that it is constructive critical thinking that fuels more efficient ways of working and better performance which in turn foster sensible working practices and targets. And starting to think critically again may require you to take the foot off the gas, take a breather, focus on your own wellbeing and recalibrate things in a way that function best for you.
Do something less boring instead
Being stuck in a career rut can make work feel unenjoyable and boring. But if work seems a bore, conversely, it might not be quite as boring as you think. You might just not realise it because you can’t see out of your rut!
In the 1980’s, the BBC TV series ‘Why Don’t You’ was aimed at young children who were bored in the school holidays and glued to the television. It gave them new ideas and encouraged them to ‘go and do something less boring instead.’ Suddenly, school holidays became more interesting again and re-energised children for the start of the next term.
So, if you’re feeling a little stuck in your career, try doing something that feels a little less boring outside of work too. Start a new hobby or re-kindle an old one, join a group or help a local charity for a few hours a month. What you might find is that the rut that you thought you were stuck in starts to disappear, because you get back into the habit of learning new things at a pace which suits you, which in turn allows you to see the world of work and self-development from a much more realistic place.
Moreover, starting to learn again might also bring your latent talents to surface in ways that you never imagined were possible. What will you do with yours?
