In a time where you should be grateful for all that you have in your life, you can find yourself getting caught in the hail storm of worry, doubt and fear. When you know you should focus on the good things in your life, you can’t help but get dragged into the concerns, challenges and dread that has become your seemingly endless quest for the perfect job, or for some, just any job. When you look at your career, do you consider yourself blessed or just a mess?

It’s okay if you answered the latter. Feeling uncertain about which direction you are heading has become somehow natural and familiar. Not that you probably ever intended for that to be the case. Your career was something you may have either fell into after school, inherited from your family, received advanced degrees or spent years of training and experience. Yet, here you are, staring down the same road as everyone else, regardless of how you got here. This does not imply you are lame, misguided or even a little crazy. What it does mean is that you are traveling down the path that was intended for you and only you. That does not make this a right or wrong choice either, it just makes it your choice.

You are where you are whether you love it or hate it because it’s part of the process of your journey towards success. Your career choices are a reflection of that journey. You can change course anytime you like. You are in complete control of your career no matter how messy or treacherous that journey may seem. Blaming yourself for not taking that promotion when it was offered to you or going back to school to get an advanced degree, or taking that extra job because it would help you pay the bills, is not going to help you feel blessed in your career choices.

Wondering what could have, would have or should have been part of your career journey is a wasted exercise meant for people sitting on a beach in a lounge chair with a banana daiquri in one hand and scratching their sun burnt head under their tattered straw hat with the other. Wasting time and remembering how you might have played out that promotion or corner office better is not going to help you move forward on the career that is waiting for you to show up and grab it.

We tend to forget all of the good things that happened along the career journey in favor of recalling past memories that could have been played out differently if we just did that one thing differently. Wasting precious time and energy focusing on the negative and burdensome thoughts we hold particularly when we are in a bad place because of the lack of interviews, job offers or job leads is not going to help you. Remembering what made you get up in the morning to get to work early, the excitement of the new deal you closed, the boss you loved to work with, the co-workers you loved to interact with, all play a part in defining the moments of your career you should choose to focus on. So the next time you feel like your career is a mess, recall the times you felt truly blessed and maybe you’ll recreate the feeling over again.

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