You can plan your upcoming job search to the nth degree and think you have all the bases covered, only to get hit by a challenge you never imagined. What do you do when that happens?

Personal Challenges in Your Job Search

It isn’t only professional/work challenges you could encounter in your job search. (I’ve talked about some of those before.) What can and should you do when a major personal challenge threatens to derail a critical job search?

Some of the possible challenges might include:
 

1. Disaster affecting your home (maybe even your neighborhood or town).
2. Injury, illness or death of a family member.
3. A health problem of your own.
4. Loss or possible loss of a beloved family pet (if you’re not an animal lover, this one probably won’t seem like much of a challenge, but if you are, you’ll understand).

As I write this, I’m trying to come to grips with #4 myself, and focusing on this post is both difficult and beneficial, because it reminds me that other people have challenges and must find ways to cope with them.

If changing jobs or getting a job is critical to you, you will need to evaluate how to go forward and yet cope with essential aspects of the challenge you’re facing in your personal life. Some delay or revision of your job search plan will very likely be necessary. You will want to identify the key pieces of your plan and slot them in somehow, while letting others slide for a while.

Professional Challenges in Your Job Search

Without going over the same ground I’ve covered in the past, I want to encourage you to view a professional challenge as an opportunity to think creatively and push through boundaries (limitations) with new approaches whenever you can. You might, for instance, decide to take an alternative route to your career goal or even revise the goal itself.

Reevaluating and regrouping aren’t necessarily bad. If you need to reconsider the professional options open to you, it could enable you to spot opportunities you had previously overlooked.

Courage to Meet Challenges Head-On

Meeting these kinds of challenges requires courage–maybe not so much the kind of courage that a soldier needs when going into battle, but courage to persevere in the face of sometimes daunting difficulties in order to achieve something important to you.

Also, how you act in a personal crisis situation can tell people a lot about how you’ll probably handle the professional challenges you encounter in your job search. It might even teach you a few things you didn’t know about yourself and your own strengths. That could be something worth knowing!