Finding Your Career Path: Part 5

Rethink Your Self-image. It’s funny how the self-talk chattering in our minds will wreak havoc in our lives. You’ll notice it get louder when you start to dream up a new career idea, suddenly you find yourself thinking just how ridiculous and unrealistic it is.

Once you know the biological purpose of these internal messages, you won’t be so fast to trust them anymore. Metaphorically, the human brain is like very sophisticated survival machine with both hardware and software. Your internal “play it safe” alerts come from the brain hardware designed by Mother Nature to help you survive. The best part, you have custom programmed your hardware to send a warning signal every time a perceived danger (versus a real one) is present.

Animals also have this mechanism, they use it to avoid physical harm. Our self-protect messages are more complex. We’re largely worried about defending our self-image and social standing. When you hear yourself say, “I can’t do what I love, it won’t bring enough money, status and lifestyle I want,” you can bet that you are being bamboozled by your inner caveman survival machinery. 

What they don’t teach you in college: You can customize your own mental software—your life story is something you probably made up a long time ago. Since you wrote the original self-image code, you can also rewrite your code to give you more courage, or whatever, to help you take more chances and open up new doors.

The first step in getting out of a rut is to listen to what you are telling yourself, and if these messages are full of reasons why you can’t change or do what you really want, then it’s time to do some debugging. Your self-concept is flexible and you’re the only one who can change it.

In the words of Henry Ford, “Think you can, think you can’t; either way, you’ll be right.” ♦

To learn more about finding your career path, contact Anthony Spadafore, coauthor of the Now What? career choice book for young professionals.