5 Ways To Get Out Of A Career Slump

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5 Ways To Get Out Of A Career Slump

Sooner or later, most of us experience the dreaded “career slump. It’s where you’ve lost your normal drive and you begin to do work that isn’t quite up to what others have come to expect from you. Whatever the cause, if you ever find yourself in a slump at work, here are four ways to get out of it:

Take it seriously
You might be tempted to say, “What can a few weeks hurt?” The truth is any slip in our quality of work will hurt us—and those who count on us. Would you want your auto mechanic to be thinking, “I’ll do my best work on the next car, no need to worry about this one.” In the same way, you don’t want your boss or co-workers to doubt your commitment or your ability to do great work—every time.

Identify the cause
Is something in your personal life affecting your work? Have you recently been wondering if your boss values the work you’re doing? Are you getting less sleep than normal? Are you letting an unresolved conflict with a co-worker affect your work? Have you suffered a big setback or even failure and it’s caused you to doubt yourself?

Identify the solution (s)
If you’re in a slump because you’ve burned yourself out, you can’t work harder to get out of your slump. That will likely only make matters worse. You have to figure out a way to do your work without burning yourself out.

Have you asked for the resources or additional help you need? Or are you burned out because you’re trying to make yourself be passionate about something when you really need to re-evaluate and perhaps reinvent yourself and your career? If what you’ve been doing to get out of your slump isn’t working, that’s a clue you haven’t found the right solution--keep looking.

Challenge yourself
You might not be bored at work but that doesn’t mean you’re challenging yourself. The interesting thing about doing great work is we have to keep raising the bar, we have to step out of our comfort zone and we have to take risks.

Otherwise we end up doing our job in the same old ways and we lose our enthusiasm for what we do. However, sometimes we need to challenge ourselves with new responsibilities and new work. What would you love to do, even if it’s not a part of your job description. Having a vision that's outside your job description will breathe new life into you and your work--even the work that fits within your job description.

Take pride in what you do
If you’re in a slump it’s likely you’ve quit respecting and valuing what you do. However, there are no unimportant jobs. There are only jobs we have labeled as “menial” or “dull” and that attitude is a reliable predictor of a slump coming on. I recently did a training for a company and the division president participated all day with the commitment of a new hire.

When I pointed that out to him during a break he said, “I started here at the bottom. But on the first day of orientation a senior manager of the company told us, “There are no unimportant jobs here—everyone is important and everything is important." I have to admit I didn’t pay much attention what he said that morning. However, when I saw him cleaning off the tables after our lunch and emptying the waste cans I promised myself to never say any job was small or unimportant.