We all hear a lot about “following our bliss” and pursuing our dream job in today’s world of upbeat songs and Instagram inspirational photos.
This is, of course, a good thing. Everyone wants to do something that they enjoy and find meaningful, with their lives, and it’s definitely better to put yourself out there and to try your best at a worthwhile goal than to leave it alone and forever wonder if you could have made it up.
But what does it take to really pursue your dream job, anyway? If you wanted to know how to become an air ambulance paramedic, or a successful author, what would you need to know? And how would you go about turning those dreams into reality?
Here are a few traits you’ll need to pursue your dream job and have a good chance of achieving it, too.
Awareness and Insight
The first thing you need in order to achieve your dream job is awareness and insight.
You need to spend a good deal of time thinking about what exactly you want to achieve with your life, and how you want to spend your time. This has to be something that is deeply personal to you.
If you think you may kind of want to be a millionaire, because you know that millionaires can buy a lot of nice stuff, then you’re not approaching this exercise with the right mindset.
Once you’ve identified your dream job, analyze yourself. What character traits will you need in order to achieve this dream? And which negative habits and traits will you need to let go of in order to make it work?
Courage and Commitment
Pursuing something big, ambitious, and statistically unlikely to succeed, is a daunting task. In order to keep your spirits up, and to drive on through and win against the odds, you’ll need courage and commitment.
You’ll need to remind yourself on a regular basis why you want to achieve this goal, and you’ll need to visualize and feel it, deeply.
You’ll also need to have enough grit to push on through when the days are grinding, and when progress seems slow or nonexistent.
In other words, you’ll need the courage the venture out into the unknown, day after day, and the commitment to keep moving towards your goal when the road proves bumpier than you expected.
Related Post: Do You have What it Takes to Land Your Dream Job?
Humility and Patience
Various life coaches, productivity gurus, and self-help figures will use the term “beginner’s mind” to refer the kind of mindset you should adopt to have the greatest possible chance of success in your undertakings.
The idea here is that you’re humble enough to assume you don’t know everything, and to be open to learning, both from other people, and from your experiences themselves.
This kind of humility is essential in pursuing and winning your dream job, because you will always be journeying from a place of less competence to a place of more competence, and leaving behind some of your preconceptions en route.
You will also need the patience to absorb the learning experiences presented by mishaps and unexpected events.
