Host Sheila Boysen-Rotelli explores the evolving world in the wake of the COVID-19 restrictions. She evaluates the necessity of deliberately focusing on our daily regimen. Listeners will receive insight on the changes necessary to cultivate a healthy mindset and a game plan for advancing their careers.

Episode Highlights:

• Host Sheila Boysen-Rotelli encourages listeners to view the occurring pandemic as an opportunity to shift mindset:
• • While it may have caught many off-guard, this can be a chance to reinvent business and career tactics
• The pandemic has increased the general levels of psychological, financial uncertainty, but this can prompt us with the challenge of taking steps out of our comfort zones.
• Over the past two decades,I have seen certain steps that are crucial to reinvent our careers:
• • Pursue a diverse portfolio of options, and become a well-rounded professional, derived from passions and grounded in our own experiences.
  • Embrace liminality: being comfortable with having set our pasts behind us and an uncertain future ahead. It is a necessary stage of transitioning forward, and allows us to collect our thoughts and self-reflect
  • Get started on working on something new, outside of the norm.
  • Begin connecting with dormant ties in your network.
• While weaker ties can be a fresh set of eyes, they can be slightly less motivated to provide assistance
• Dormant ties are those that we’ve been close to, but have lost touch with, and they can provide the balance between familiarity and the novelty of ideas
• It can be difficult to advance careers in this time of social-distancing, to do so:
• • Ensure that your job is still headed in the correct direction -- be sure that you are working in the job that you want to do long term. Look for ways to achieve autonomy, mastery, and purpose in your work.
  • Cultivate future-forward skills -- skills that will be useful not just now, but those in the future. Seek out skills you identify with, research them, practice deliberately, reflect on that practice.
  • Get better at being strategic -- avoid falling into traps like recency bias, and look to apply the tools that you learn on a daily basis
  • Master time-management in a time where it can be difficult to set concrete boundaries.
  • Manage your mind -- taking time to incorporate intentionality and mindfulness can help to foster a healthy mindset

3 Key Points:

1. Although the pandemic has shifted the literal manner in which people are working, socializing, and connecting, the foundational structure of the way people can advance their careers has not changed.
2. Focusing on connecting with older, “dormant” ties can be a source of both comradery and freshness of ideas.
3. While person-to-person interaction may be limited currently, this can be an opportune time to look inward and develop lasting changes toward a healthier mindset.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Even in happier times, career change is never a perfectly-linear process.” – Sheila Boysen-Rotelli
• “What is it that you do outside your day-to-day that is helping you to expand your options?" – Sheila Boysen-Rotelli
• “Down time is really crucial… for sustaining the cognitive process to fully develop our thoughts and our goals." – Sheila Boysen-Rotelli
• “The most common path to career reinvention includes learning something new.” – Sheila Boysen-Rotelli
• “Find an opportunity every single day to practice the new skills that you’ve learned.” – Sheila Boysen-Rotelli

Resources Mentioned:

• Contact Sheila at sheila@professionalsuccesscoaching.com
• Fast Track Your Job Search: fasttrackyourjobsearch.com