A step back serves your career interest

“One step back does not mean defeated. It just means that you will take the same step forward again but wiser." -- Jossie Estrella

Are you moving in top gear in your career? Or are you in neutral gear? Are there occasions when you feel that your efforts are not paying? Do you see barricades in front of you and feel helpless in dislodging them?

You learn the best lessons in life from an ant. If it cannot cross a hurdle, it retraces its steps. Rather than trying in vain to thrust yourself frontward and in the process suffering disappointment, a step back will help – to perhaps a point where everything is understandable to you.

A step back will not imply in any way your collapse, but on the contrary signify a requirement to re-evaluate a condition.  So how do you do that?

The first step:  The maiden step in taking a step back is deciding to do so. Unless you make your mind up on what you seek in your career, you can never get close to it even. All judgments and resolutions have a prevailing effect and impel you to move in a specific course. Sans them, you would proceed in an aimless manner. You need to decide to take a step back because somewhere deep within yourself, you have a feeling that it is inescapable. Your efforts are perhaps not paying off and you feel that it is time for a breather. Taking a break will boost your ingenuity and place you in an advantageous position, better poised to attain your goals. 

Being versus doing:  Most of us believe in doing things as actions offer satisfaction.  However, sometimes, actions make you so engrossed that the very reason why you undertook them is forgotten. While actions may be good at first sight, but if they happen to relegate your very being, then they are not. If you can afford some time to yourself and your being, you will stay concentrated. Excessive exertion, if you indulge in it, will tend to get legalized over a period of time and you will go down with it. The objectives that you set for yourself will keep you highly preoccupied; regrettably, you will fail to remember why in the first place you set them. But if you choose being over doing, you will find answers to all your doubts.

Afford yourself time to ponder:   Everybody avoids contemplation as it is an exercise by itself. Moreover, if you think a bit more, there is great likelihood of negative thoughts crossing your mind. But yet, thinking is important because it affords your brain a vent to function. Since your thoughts are yours alone, any effort by you to pay heed to them leads you to your next step, your next action. Therefore, if you afford yourself time to reflect on, the actual you will come to the fore – a you that perhaps may not be fully known to you so far and somebody that you may desire to get familiar with.

Select your objectives all over again:   The process of attainment of objectives tends to become slow as the final hour comes closer. Enthusiasm in the initial stages leads to hard work; it is nothing but natural that if hard work does not pay dividends, disappointment follows. And disappointment means that it is high time you take stock of the situation to determine what is significant for you. You need to know why you selected your objectives at the outset. If it was because you felt enthused, then you must relive the same feelings again. You will emerge more energized to weigh up if the choice exercised by you was correct or not. If it becomes necessary to go through selecting objectives all over again, you should not hesitate to do so. 

Taking a step back will help you discern what is important to you – something that you can co-exist with and also what you cannot do without.