by Dorie Clark
For almost every professional, there are times when your career path deviates from what you might have hoped. For instance, you might face a layoff, a reassignment, a relocation, or the need to take time off for health issues or caregiving.
In the short term, the situation is clear: If you or another member of your household has lost a job, someone needs to make up for the lost income. If your kids cannot attend school in person, then someone has to stay home with them and supervise their virtual learning. And if you’re the primary caregiver to children or other family members, you need to ensure you have the flexibility at work to handle any situation that comes your way at home.
Unfortunately, meeting those urgent needs sometimes means that longer-range goals get set aside. Many people find themselves turning down coveted promotions to maintain flexible hours. Or they accept positions in fields they actually want to leave or say yes to jobs they’re overqualified for or unexcited about, because they simply need the money.
Those decisions—while painful—may be necessary in the short term. But a temporary departure from your professional goals doesn’t mean that all is lost. It’s essential—and possible, even with a busy day job—to stay focused on your long-term career trajectory so that you can rebound quickly and get back on a path that feels right for you.
In conducting research for my book The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World, I discovered a variety of ways that professionals faced with these trade-offs can begin to take back control over their career arc. Here are four strategies you can employ.
Reframe the situation
No one enjoys feeling as if they’re stalled or moving backward professionally. Indeed, research by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile shows that one of the most powerful indicators of employees’ mood and satisfaction is the feeling that they’re making progress toward a meaningful goal. If you view your career decisions as part of a regression, you’re almost certainly going to feel frustrated, angry, or ashamed. Instead, broaden your view: Your job isn’t the only element of your life, and even if you’re temporarily making less progress on the career front, you’re advancing other goals that you’ve previously identified as equally or even more important. For example, you are providing for your family economically or spending more time with them.
Dig to identify learning opportunities
If your current job isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, it’s easy to write it off as something you’re doing just for the money. But even suboptimal situations can become powerful opportunities to develop your skills if you recognize them and leverage them as a chance to learn. For instance, one leader I know is hesitant to leave her job amid economic uncertainty. She is leaning into her strained relationship with a querulous colleague and consciously attempting to get better at dealing with difficult people. Similarly, you might uncover hidden opportunities to develop new aspects of the job that align better with your interests (for instance, research into new technology) or that enable you to build your network.
Push back against standard options
The choice may seem stark: Pursue your dreams, or succumb to necessity. But if we get creative, we often see many more possibilities than we might have imagined (and certainly more than we’re initially presented with). For instance, one client I work with is a nascent entrepreneur whose new business was hit hard by the pandemic. Faced with pressing financial needs—and a friend who wanted to hire him—he debated giving up his business and accepting a corporate job similar to the one he’d left a year earlier. After our discussion, he realized that those weren’t the only two options. He’s now in talks with his friend about the possibility of converting the job offer into a consulting contract, which would give him the security he needs while building his new business, thereby allowing him to pursue his entrepreneurial vision. Remember, there are almost always more than two choices, and most offers can be negotiated.
Finally, harness small amounts of time toward your goals
As you make your way through life and your career, it’s likely you’ll go through a period where you’re feeling burned out and overextended. Under those circumstances, it may feel like a pipe dream to carve out time for long-term professional development. But even small increments of time can be valuable if we harness them properly.
For instance, if you listen to a professional development podcast or an audiobook instead of music while you’re exercising or running errands, you will have “read” dozens more books over a year. And one technique that notoriously productive Wharton professor Adam Grant employs is to use the handful of minutes between meetings—which often get lost to chitchat or social media—to make progress on microgoals he’s working on. Your leveraging a spare three minutes to send a networking email or to download a few articles on a topic you’re researching may seem insignificant, but as Amabile’s aforementioned research on progress and employee satisfaction shows, even these tiny steps forward can create a feeling of momentum—which is essential to staying positive during a tour of duty in a job one doesn’t love.
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It’s easy to become self-critical when things don’t go according to plan. But by following these four strategies—and coupling them with a dose of grace and self-compassion—you can accomplish what needs to happen now and prepare yourself for the future you’ve envisioned.
Adapted from “A Career Detour Doesn’t Have to Compromise Your Long-Term Goals,” on hbr.org, March 29, 2021.