Over the course of your career, it’s completely normal to feel burnt out. Mental exhaustion, a lack of motivation, and a general feeling of being beyond caring are all clear indicators that you may have lost the passion you once held for your job. In a study of over 10,000 knowledge-based workers, over 7,000 reported feeling burnt out in the last year alone, going to show the importance of finding ways to revitalize your career.
While you may not be jumping out of bed at eight in the morning psyched to go into your job due to how early it is, you should still always feel a sense of satisfaction from the work you perform.
Why Is It Important to Rejuvenate Your Career?
Living with burn out isn’t just an inconvenience. It can have long-term consequences on both your mental and physical health if you are not careful. These can include:
- Higher likelihood of developing a sleeping disorder
- Increase alcohol consumption
- Depression
- Sedentarism
- Obesity
- Musculoskeletal pain
While feeling burnt out may not result in any of the above for you personally, it is still an extremely unhealthy mental effect of being in a career that doesn’t challenge you anymore or one that isn’t the right fit.
5 Ways to Spice Up Your Career
To avoid some of the common symptoms associated with burn out, learning how to regain interest in your career choice, or a new career oath, should always be a top priority. Use the following five tips to transform your perspective of work:
Focus on upskilling
For anybody unfamiliar with the term, upskilling is simply the addition of new skills to your mental toolbox. One leading cause of burn out is the repetition of tasks on a day-to-day basis with no variety in the skills needed to complete those tasks.
Seek out upskilling at your organization in the form of training programs or developmental opportunities that your organization may offer.
By placing an emphasis on developing new skills, you can reduce the likelihood that the skills you use on a day-to-day basis will feel repetitive.
Take on a side hustle
Even if you love your career path, it’s possible that doing the same thing day in and day out may get old after a while. If this applies to you, there’s no shame in taking up a side hustle as a hobby.
For example, if you have always been interested in the big-state real estate market, then looking for a California real estate school could provide you with the path needed for obtaining a real estate license. Most states offer programs for a variety of alternative career paths that can be completed in addition to your primary job.
Find a mentor for yourself
The mentor-mentee relationship is extremely unique in that a mentee gains access to a professional who is years into their career and has likely already gone through many of the same struggles a younger employee faces, including burn out.
This mentor can share their perspective and victories with a younger employee to help them through the challenging time. Additionally, a mentor can introduce you to new paths stemming from a career that you may never have found otherwise.
Challenge yourself with unique goals
For some, burnout stems from a feeling of no longer being challenged by the work they perform. To avoid this feeling, aim to set new goals for yourself at work that push your comfort zone. For example, where you may have delegated a task to someone else, consider tackling the task yourself to push your skills.
Identify why you’re feeling the way you do
Burn out is difficult to overcome if you don’t know what’s causing it. If a career choice is flat out wrong for you, then adding new goals within that path likely won’t solve the burnout. In this case, entirely switching careers would be the best way to solve the issue. To effectively rejuvenate your career, you need to determine why you are no longer satisfied with your work.
Revitalize your career
Whether you’ve been doing your job for far too long or your career wasn’t a good match in the first place, burn out can affect anybody. By using just a few of the above outlined steps, a person can begin to transform their experience at work to one that is mentally challenging in all the best ways. Avoid settling for burn out by reinvigorating the parts of your career choice that you love most.