Is it good to be focused in life?

Is it good to be focused in life?

By the time you reach higher secondary years of education many of you start making your career choices. It rarely being exclusively your choice, mostly depends upon the aspirations of your parents or relatives, success story of an acquaintance, peer group influence or the latest market trends. You are taught that a career is decided according to what are the best things to do and you should lay your focus on achieving it. As focus is the key to success and if you want happiness in life you should never lose your focus.

Isn’t it good to be focused in life then? Yes, why not? But the question here is what are we focusing on? Are we focusing on achieving something that forms our parent’s aspiration? Are we focusing on trying to live someone else’s life because he/she has been able to achieve a lot and is very happy? Or are we focusing on achieving something that one of our friend’s has suggested is flourishing in the market. While interacting with many of my clients who already had a career and wanted a career change, I could figure out that most of them were not satisfied because they had followed someone else’s dream. One became an engineer because his father couldn’t be and one of his uncles’ was very successful as an engineer.

Don’t you think your focus needs to shift a bit from the point of being a part of the rat race to figuring out what is it that you want to do? Isn’t it worth focusing on living a life of your choice by doing what you are meant to do rather than what others think you should do? It is good to be focused, but not at achieving someone else’s career aspiration. Your focus should be on exploring various career options that can make your life more fulfilling. This may lead you to an indecisive state of what to do then.

Sometimes it is good to be indecisive because that’s the time when you start exploring so many other options that are available to you. It may not be necessary that if a particular person is happy being a doctor you would also feel the same. Your priorities in life may be different, you may not get satisfaction from earning money, but in helping others. Therefore, success is also subjective and hence any person’s success should not be a deciding factor for your career choices.

Before laying your focus on any of the career option you think is a right choice devote sometime to yourself and follow these steps:

Explore yourself: Take some time out to find what kind of a person you are and what are the things that interest you. This will help you explore your own skills and talents that can help you list down various career options available in those fields. Here you can also take professional help in finding out your innate capabilities through some good career counselling.

Be futuristic: It is also important to align your capabilities with the career choices that will see a boom in a few years and not focus on the ones that are thriving presently. Any technology or skill that may be required today may become outdated tomorrow. Hence, predict market trends and find out possible career options that will rise once you become employable.

Find out your priorities: Some people lay emphasis on earning a lot of money in life, whereas some want to render help to society irrespective of the amount of wealth they are able to gather from their work. Your priorities should be clear.

Check what kind of a life you want: It is important to understand what kind of a life you ought to be leading after choosing a particular career. A person in one of the military forces cannot be sure of having a very comfortable and an easy-going life. Hence, it is important to know what kind of a life you want to have for yourself in the years to come.

Gap between your current qualification and the one required: Figure out what are the additional requirements you need to fulfill to meet eligibility criteria for your career choice. Find out if you actually need to build something extra in you, be it a skill or a qualification, to become a more prospective candidate.

Your interest in education required for the career: It is imperative to understand how much the subjects, that you will have to study or the training you might have to go through for a particular career, will interest you. The preparation should keep you motivated towards achieving your career goals. Even if it is more strenuous than you expected it should be interesting.

Explore the career choice: Once you have decided to take up a career path try to get associated with some organization or a person who can actually expose you to the ground level functioning of that field, through internship or by just volunteering. This will give you hand-on experience and will also give you an idea of the actual work situations. For instance, many of the famous actors now had worked earlier with some eminent directors as assistants and gained experience of the industry before stepping into it full-time.

Exploring your career options is one of the profound decisions you make in life and hence it should be done very keenly keeping in mind all the above factors that we have discussed. While you are working your way through, keep asking yourself if this is where you want to head. In case, your career plan is not working change it, explore something new, but never lose your focus on creating a life that you want, because as rightly said by Abraham Lincoln, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.”