From Setbacks to Success: Harnessing Grit in Career Transitions with Carol Bowser, JD
In this episode, we unravel the secrets to successfully navigating career changes, whether you're a corporate professional or an aspiring entrepreneur.
Join us as we explore the art of developing unwavering grit to overcome setbacks and embrace transformation in your professional journey. Gain invaluable insights on harnessing the power of grit during career transitions, enabling you to conquer challenges and seize new opportunities in your evolving career.
After this Episode, You Will Be Able to:
Navigate through career transition
Overcome setbacks
Seize new career opportunities
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About the guest:
Carol Bowser, J.D is a workplace conflict expert. After practicing Employment Law for several years, Carol founded Conflict Management Strategies when she realized a lawsuit can’t deliver the level of resolution and satisfaction that is gained when people are actively involved in creating solutions to their workplace conflict. Carol’s clients come with a wide range of employers because conflict is universal across all industries and types of organizations. Where there are people, there is conflict. The key is to help people recognize and address conflict before it damages working relationships and creates organizational drag. In her over 20 years of experience, she has discovered some universal themes about workplace conflict and loves to share how people at all levels can strengthen their conflict resolution muscles.
Website: https://conflictmanagementstrategies.com/
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Are you experiencing change? Perhaps you work for an organization and that organization is going through restructuring or downsizing. Maybe you've recently been laid off or maybe you're thinking about a promotion, a new job, or maybe starting your own business.
How to develop the grit to overcome setbacks and seize new opportunities
If you don't fall, you're not trying, but I remember that law school was particularly difficult. I remember different employment situations weren't what I thought it was going to be.
I think where I’m particularly good at is listening to people and trying to help them find their voice and litigation, and the law is nothing about the individuals finding their voice, and that was hard because it was a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money to be able to do that.
What am I doing here? I mean, shouldn't I be able to do this? why isn't this working? I think being an entrepreneur, if you're not having a crisis of confidence every once in a while, what am I doing? How am I doing it? Is this the right client? What the hell am I doing?
Daily Connections
Having that lifeline of somebody that you can go to and talk through when you're experiencing that self-doubt. I would say uncertainty of where the direction you want your business to go. We use Voxer and we talk with each other every single day.
We start our morning with these little messages and it's extremely helpful because the entrepreneurial journey is that it is a journey of successes, failures and learning lessons along the way.
Just like if you were to work for a corporation, I recently had a conversation. As an individual who was just starting their career.
The Myth of Forever Employment
There are certain careers that are perhaps sunsetting. I don't think there are any forever employers anymore. There are certainly no forever positions. There's no forever technology and, it's hard sometimes we want it to go back to the way it was where we felt more secure and more productive and more successful.
And if you go back to some of the work of Maslow where he talks about the hierarchy of needs and they talk about safety and basic needs.
One of the main ones that I've seen is safety and employment, like feeling secure in your employment. And I do think that we've kind of grown up with this myth that there's going to be security in employment or that's the ideal.
But you look at the vast majority of people how they're changing careers and that there are layoffs. And different things like that. I think that if we take the mindset that's a little bit of a fairy tale it could look different.
And even when you are secure in employment, like maybe you're with a very secure employer that's not going to get bought, maybe you're high up in a collective bargaining agreement where you've got seniority.
But that doesn't mean the job's not going to change. It doesn't mean that technology's not going to change. It doesn't mean that it's the same employer that you interviewed with when you started your career. And I think some of the entrepreneurs that I work with those that have kind of more sustaining businesses. They recognize that stuff is going to change, and it does get worse, and you're just trying to look.
You're not trying to be paranoid, however, you are trying to figure out that there are high tides, low tides, slack tides, and that's just sort of the nature of business.
You're trying to leverage the high stuff and try to mitigate the low stuff, and that's just kind of part of the game.
How can we prepare for uncertainty?
If you are a business owner, just kinda even recognize there are cycles in business that's just kind of part of the nature and getting to kind of recognize some of the cycles that your clients have.
And then the other thing is if it's in the personal life-the good stuff and the bad stuff, these two shall pass.
For my work with conflict resolution, I always look at people and say, are your expectations being met or do you have some unmet expectations?
And I think getting prepared for kind of bouncing back is looking at my expectations really kind of more aspirational than realistic.
I think that being able to articulate what your expectations were and being able to make requests of people who may have some influence is helpful. Sometimes I find in my work with conflict resolution people might assume that a boss or a supervisor or an owner maybe has a lot less power and influence than they actually think it does. So we're kind of expecting someone to exercise their power, which I think can maybe make us feel less powerful, less influential.
You don't start with the big heavy stuff. You start with the smaller stuff.
The smaller, easier conversations, the smaller reflective things, and the more people are clear on what they want, and can express it in a way that actually facilitates change, and facilitates a sense of curiosity that people wanna engage with you.
Did You Speak Up For What You Want?
Are you raising your hand and saying, “Hey, I want to pursue this particular position? What are some of the skill sets that I'm doing really well? What are the skill sets you'd like to see me develop for that particular role?”
And then, work on the muscle and develop those skill sets continuously in order to get what you want.
The job market changes and there are a lot of concerns right now about engaging and retaining people and being able to say, this is something I have an interest in. This is something I want to do. And I also want to put like a little highlight that it might be that you may have an interest in it, and you wanna develop it.
But it may not be instantaneous when people have an opening for you.
And it may be that you have been noodling on it, processing it, feeling a sense of dissatisfaction or impediment or a sense of curiosity. And if that has been developing for you for a long time and you're just now being able to articulate it, other people may need time to process it and sense it, and then look for openings particularly in an organization, then they're gonna need to advocate for you to other people. So there may be a bit more of a drag in the timeline, like that introspective work that you were talking about.
It's usually those conversations that we put off.
Continuous Growth of an Entrepreneur
We live so close to it that we don't recognize it in ourselves. And I'm always balancing because the other side of the coin is you may think you're great, but everybody else is comparing you to everybody else who does that particular type of work.
So you may not be as great as you think you are. So then how, as part of the grit and being an entrepreneur, you should be getting it better at your professional practice every single year.
And if you've been doing it like those speakers have been for 10 years, they've gotta have their speech writing skills, their platform skills, their marketing skills, how they run the business cause it's not the same business it was 10 years ago for a whole plethora of reasons that you gotta be getting better at.
