In this day and age, deciding to change your career path is made simpler than ever. Recognizing the fact that many people choose their future careers while they are still young and inexperienced, brought about the need for an opportunity to change their minds later down the line. That’s why, nowadays, there are numerous options for people looking to requalify and explore numerous worlds of alternate career paths.
However, there are still those that consider taking these steps to be too big of an engagement, especially considering how busy modern lifestyles are getting. With longer working hours and seemingly ever-growing daily tasks, many people feel like they simply don’t have enough time in a day to fully commit to a career change and still maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle.
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Online courses
To no one’s surprise, thanks to modern technology, individuals who are looking to switch up their career paths can easily find reliable and reputable courses that will allow them to do so online. For instance, courses like ABSN programs online enable interested candidates to requalify and change their careers in only 14 months. Realistically speaking, spending this amount of time on changing your calling is neither impossible, nor does it require too big of a sacrifice.
Of course, achieving the goal of successfully finishing the course will require you to make some changes in your current lifestyle and daily habits, but there are many ways this can be achieved without sacrificing too much of your free time or putting too many additional things on your plate.
Prioritising
The first step towards achieving a balanced lifestyle is learning how to prioritise. No matter if we’re talking about your current business obligations, daily tasks and chores, your new learning obligations or simply your free time, learning how to approach everything and organise everything for maximum efficiency is the key.
Ideally, you should always prioritise the biggest tasks and the ones that have the shortest deadline. But that doesn’t mean you can procrastinate with the tasks you can be a bit more lenient with. Instead, see how you can fulfil all of them within – or even before the end of – the given timeframe. However, be careful not to put too much pressure on yourself, to avoid unnecessary stress, feeling overwhelmed and even experiencing burnout.
Improved organisation
In order to be able to successfully juggle your new obligations with the existing ones, you will need to work on improving your organisational skills. Going hand-in-hand with prioritising, learning how to organise your life so that you don’t end up overworking and sacrificing your free time and the time you spend with your family and friends, but also not failing to meet your goals is key to a happy, healthy and fulfilled lifestyle.
Since you will now have a new daily obligation added to your current schedule, you will, of course, need to recoup and reorganise. Start off by creating a detailed list of all of your responsibilities, see how long fulfilling each of them will take and then organise them all according to their priority. You may end up needing to shorten your leisure time or the time you spend with your kids – if you have any – but then try to make the time you are left with actually count.
For instance, if you’re feeling tired, instead of spending hours lounging in front of the TV going in and out of sleep, take a rejuvenating power nap. This will re-energise your body and mind, allowing you to spend the rest of your free time in a more efficient manner.
Delegating responsibilities
Finally, it’s important to emphasise that none of the things discussed previously won’t be so easily attainable if you don’t have the right support system you can rely on. For the majority of us, this support system is usually made of your friends and family members, but it can also be your colleagues and even neighbours.
Let’s say you have a dog you usually take for a couple of hour-long walks. Prior to deciding to change your career you had enough time to instil this habit in your four-legged friend. However, now that your responsibilities and obligations changed, you no longer can simply afford to spend so much time on walks. And without wanting to sacrifice the comfort and happiness of your pet, you may feel like you’ve gotten yourself in a real pickle.
But what you can do is rely on your village and see if any member of it would like to take over this job for you. That way, you’ll have more time to dedicate to your new responsibilities, without having to make big or uncomfortable sacrifices.
Even though there are many ways one can achieve a healthy work-life balance, this can often be easier said than done. But if you set yourself clear goals and make a detailed plan on how and when you intend on reaching them, there will be no milestone that is too big to overcome.