Rebound from a wrong career path

If you look around you, you will see many people who are fenced in a job or career that is not meant for them. There will be doctors who ought to have been engineers, scientists who should have been HR managers, police officers who would have excelled as professors or lawyers who would have been better off as fashion designers or journalists who have been happier had they been in the army. The spectrum of square pegs in round holes will be endless.

There are several reasons why people get onto and more significantly, continue to trudge wrong career paths. Importantly, money as a criterion is one of the least consequential factors; this is largely because unless you are actually at the survival plane, it is more often a justification to veil profound matters. There are are principally four reasons why people embark upon wrong career paths:

·  Premonitions of the heart: People tend to not place reliance on their gut feelings that convey several messages in varied ways. Gut feelings are the sixth sense that caution you about something likely to go astray or prompt you to go on a particular route. Occasionally, they may also tell you in no uncertain terms to turn your back on an issue and stay put wherever you are. They are something like a traffic signal – red ordering you to stop, amber prompting you to get ready and green charging you to move on. You may let your logical brainpower holler down your prudent instinct, but the fact is that the latter is a highly developed forewarning structure. You should not ignore the premonitions of your heart because they manifest true good judgment and astuteness.They will invariably show you the way to please yourself and remain pleased.

·  Advice of others: You should catalogue things that you love to do and derive pleasure from – things that should not be a great effort to compile but any struggle involved in achieving them serves as a source of pleasure. It is alright to be not unnecessarily swayed by extraneous influences; and make and live the dreams of others your own. But the point is that you cannot afford to ignore the advice of others either because following it signifies approval; and when it comes from people who you hold in admiration and esteem for their sagacity, you simply cannot allow yourself to turn your back on them. However, the suggestions and counseling that you may receive could eventually prove wrong and even imprecise; and lead you to a perplexing situation where you get stuck in a career path that is swampy.

·  Failure to own up erring actions: In a large number of instances, the factual difficulties which prompt people to keep move moving on an incorrect career path are engendered by them alone. If at you have erred somewhere, you need to take a holistic look at the circumstances and take corrective actions, rather than bashing on regardless. At an appropriate juncture, you could seek directions so that you preclude the possibility of going totally off-course, utterly off-target and completely off-beam. Do not carry the load of your mistakes on you, sooner or later you will crushed by their very weight. It is always better to place them under your feet and use them as stepping stones to surmount them. Remember that your mistakes should serve to inspire you and not be alibis. If you erred in taking a wrong career decision, let not pride or arrogance in any form hold you back from admitting to the fact and taking a counteractive action.

·  Experience & qualifications going waste: There are many people who were passionate about their respective careers to start with but over a period of time have spaced out from them. If that be so, it is understandably difficult to bid adios to the chosen careers. The career path will seem to be one that cannot be altered because of the time and toil that you would have put in; you may not like to let your experience and qualifications go waste, more so when you stand reconciled with otherwise unhappy circumstances. You cannot afford to live life like this; you know that you have erred but have failed to draw any lessons. After all, life is all about learning. Remember that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forward. Let not any apprehensions have the better of you.

You could be on a wrong career path, but you can always rebound from it. You have to be alert to the traffic signals and various signposts on your career highway. Since life is always a balancing act, you need to keep your head up and feet on the ground.