Welcome to my first blog post of 2022… its late as first blog posts of the year go. By the standards of many I should already be on my second if not more and I admit I have started this year carefully. Quietly. But, I hope, with purpose and as I mean to go on. I thought hard about what I wanted to draw your attention to first and it could have been a myriad of vacancies we have at CY Partners (there’s a lot going on), questions I want to help answer; from topics like discussing the importance of a covering letter or how LinkedIn can help in your job search. But then I thought, why not start with what I actually spent the beginning of the year doing myself.

That is thinking about my own life and career and where I want to place my attention this year. I reflected on my own experience of 2021. I then established the goals I want to work towards and what actions I need to take to get there. Both professional and personal. Perhaps I am not the only one who does this? Let me know!

I had the most interesting conversation with Lorna Young back in November of last year that I remembered whilst doing this.

Lorna has a BSc, MRes and PhD from Newcastle University in the fields of Microbiology and Immunology. She then worked in the US for 5 years at Dartmouth College on post-doctoral research before returning to the the UK and is currently finishing a post-doc at the University of Liverpool. In addition to this Lorna has also trained as a Personal Trainer and more recently a OneOfMany certified Coach. She set up her own business called LifeWithLorna as a Life Coach specifically to serve female scientists with the aim to ‘create fulfilled and confident female scientists’.

The last two years certainly have had an impact on the conditions and challenges scientists face, I asked Lorna what advice she would give to anyone who is not feeling fulfilled in their career at the moment? She gave me these 2 ideas to start with:

Observe and Assess

Step back and see the patterns you have, particularly with your mental health, when you are happy and when you are not. When are you anxious, when are you confident, write it all down and what do you see?

Gratitude

“This really worked for me” said Lorna, “I would write down 3 things on an evening that I was grateful for, and what I was excited for about tomorrow. Eventually through consistently doing this I noticed a change in my outlook.”

Once you have an accurate assessment of where you are and an appreciation of what you have as opposed to coming from a place of lack, you can then make aligned goals and take action in 2022, it may be something substantial like a new role, or it could be tweaks to habits and behaviours that then improve your year.

Either way starting gently can still mean starting strong, so Happy New Year all.