I have two words to help break out of this situation: passion and time.

PASSION: I’ve seen a great many people who are able to make changes that they make a primary focus. Perhaps it starts out as a side area of interest, a hobby. As you gain expertise, you might have a spark of inspiration about even making it a future career.

It’s this passion which helps you to overcome the natural challenges and obstacles that you’ll encounter. Perhaps you’ll need to go back to school, something that can be challenging when you’re holding down a full-time job. I have a relative who is establishing her new life in the medical field, and have been impressed at her dedication and focus while working and raising a family. It’s because she’s staying focused on that new objective, despite all the struggles she’s had in her life.

You can do things to build and maintain your own passion – I’d say that the INTERNAL factors are actually the most important. Don’t wait for others to notice and nurture your energy. Build a vision. Keep that vision in front of you every day.

TIME: Although it might seem that time is working against you, we tend to over-estimate that. OK, it might take five or ten years to get where you’d like to be.

Where are you going to be in five or ten years if you don’t get started now?

Think of skill- and position-building like interest that you’d make on your savings:

• Day by day, the interest is imperceptible.
• Over time, the gains grow quite large and substantial.
• If you don’t make the investments in the first place, you’ll never reap ANY rewards.

Once you have a direction you’re headed, that vision, then make daily progress toward it. It doesn’t matter how much, just keep moving. Over time, you’ll start seeing substantial return from your investment.

An important resource

Sometimes I struggle with all the e-mail newsletter subscriptions I try to follow. That constant flood of daily information can obscure the more important tasks that I should be working on.

I’ve found a couple of tools which help manage this:

E-mail folders: I “park” newsletters into other folders that I’ll read when I have time, like when watching TV. Since they’re rarely time-critical, it’s quite OK to set them aside for reading later. I’ve actually created six folders where I put various topics, using rules in Outlook to automatically put messages aside.

RSS feeds: A great many newsletters and blogs have an RSS feed, which is useful for monitoring the new information when I’m able to get around to it. Like the e-mail folders, they’re out of my view until I want to spend the time reading them. There’s many great free RSS readers out there – they’ll save you time and energy.

The primary thing to remember about newsletters and blogs is that they’re optional. If you can’t get to them, don’t feel guilty about deleting them when you get behind. And periodically review your subscriptions and unsubscribe from those which are now less relevant.

If you are interested in individual career coaching, group coaching, or other resources which might help you with difficult choices, please contact Carl at carl@dierschow.com.

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© 2010 Possibilities Partnership LLC