Encore Careers. Part 2 – Journaling

In my last blog about creating an Encore career you love, I promised to provide some tips for helping you accomplish it successfully, so here goes:

We want Certainty, with a splash of Uncertaining

Most of us really hope for a life of certainty, where we can predict generally what’s going to happen in a day, such as where our food is coming from, what’s expected of us in our work, and what our relationships will look like. We like a little variety–that’s a concept called Uncertainty. This concept comes from the motivational speaker Tony Robbins. What most of us want is a significant degree of Certainty, with a splash of Uncertainty to keep things interesting.

And when you’re looking at making a change to an encore career, you’re diving into the unknown, so you’re diving into a pretty big dose of Uncertainty. It’s helpful to keep that in mind: we long for certainty, but when we’re making a big change, we’re really letting go of that for a while.

Referring back to my last blog when I talked about William Bridge’s Transition book process, and the neutral zone, here are a few strategies that can be helpful. These strategies can help you get through the neutral zone, and off to your new beginning faster and more successfully.

Timing – 1 month for every year you were involved in your former line of work

Now let’s talk about how long a transition can take. On average, you can expect the time it takes to transition from one type of contribution, to something else, is typically one month for every year that you were involved in your formal line of work, before you start to feel a degree of certainty again. So if you’ve been in the same line of work for, say, 12 years, then it may be a year before you start to feel settled. It’s useful to keep this timeline in mind, so that you’re not worrying, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I not feeling better about this?” It just takes time for things to transition.

Speed it up with “vomiting on paper” – up to 3 times faster!

If you’d like to speed up that timeline, journaling is a very effective technique. I describe it as vomiting on paper, where you take whatever is in your head, and you dump it on paper—preferable longhand because it activates an important part of your brain that processes emotion, versus keyboarding. This process clears what’s in your head for a couple reasons: 1) you can look at it more objectively, like, “Oh, you know, I really will be able to succeed because I’ve succeeded with many other things.” And 2) it makes space for more productive thoughts. You likely have these thoughts swirling about in your mind, such as, “Maybe I want to make a change, but I don’t know what it’s going look like. And what if this happens? And what if I did this?” Journaling gets them out of your head and onto paper, where you can look at them more objectively. This creates space for forward moving, for more productive thoughts.

Journaling has been shown to speed up the process of transition by up to three times. There are multiple studies in different applications, show that the simple act of journaling for 20 minutes a day, can speed up the process of transition by 300%. That’s pretty cool, huh?

I have a few more cool tips to offer you that I’ll cover in my next blog, so please tune in!

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