Have you heard of the concept of “Somebody Else’s Problem?”. Douglas Adams wrote about it beautifully as part of his classic series The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:
An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot.
Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything
So if something is Somebody Else’s Problem, we are putting it out of sight and out of mind, right? This is something a lot of us do when making career decisions. I do a lot of work in higher education, and see final year students who suddenly panic about what to do when they graduate. Up to that point, career planning was an SEP for them.
The trouble is, if something remains an SEP for a long time (such as career planning), and then you suddenly have to deal with it, then it becomes a big issue. Too much to handle. Overwhelming. This is where OOMPAH can be useful:
Ownership Of My Priorities Avoids Headaches.
In short, the best way to avoid stress is to prioritise. This can be difficult to do when you have a lot to deal with, but a huge amount of the work I do involves listening to a client, helping them to break things down, prioritise what they need to do, and in what order. Some people call it an action plan, I prefer to think of it as “things to do next”.
For example, I recently spoke to Helen (not her real name). She knows that she wants to do work that has some social good, but she doesn’t know what jobs to look for, and therefore isn’t quite sure where to look. We had a good chat and broke this down into three steps:
- Think about what things she wants from her work: Helen could consider not just job type, but things like company size, working environment and organisational values.
- Research what is out there: the internet is a big place, so I suggested a few websites that enabled her to look at types of job and information about the sectors that she said interested her e.g. charities, not-for-profit, and international organisations.
- Take tangible actions: basically, once Helen has done the above, she might find herself applying for jobs.
I have simplified this a bit, but you will see that the order is really important – Helen is much more likely to be successful if she does things in this order, as it enables her to narrow down the types of opportunities that are right for her, and then put in a killer application as she will know how to satisfy the requirements of the job.
Let’s put it another way; Helen admitted that she needed to seek help with this process, as otherwise she would have continued with a scattergun approach to finding jobs, which would have involved a lot of effort but less chance of success.
If you want help with finding your OOMPAH, then do get in touch – it’s one of the reasons why good careers advice is worth it.
Karuna CV 