When you're proactive about organizational change, you regain a sense of control and can get the passion back into your work life.

Regain a sense of control

By defining your new role in the change process, you gain a real say in what you do at work. Taking initiative helps you feel more in control and decisive action helps you regain some control in your working life.

Get the passion back

If your work life has lost its sense of fun and excitement, you can get the passion back by proactively capitalizing on organizational change. To do this, explore the activities that bring you stimulation, inspiration, and pleasure. Notice what you enjoy doing now. Then actively use the new opportunities to steer your career toward these activities.

Reinventing yourself

Reinventing yourself means expanding your ideas of who you are and redefining what you're capable of achieving. If you don't reinvent yourself, you're likely to stagnate at a lower level of responsibility than you're capable of. If you have a narrow definition of what you can do, others buy into it. Open yourself to change, growth, and opportunity, and you show others you're ready for a new challenge.

You need to disengage from your old professional identity and from your routines and established ways of doing things. Disengagement is about letting go of your old organizational role and self-definitions at work and focusing on your new role. However, it's not simply about setting everything aside indiscriminately. Rather, you need to assess yourself, review your past experiences, and consciously decide what aspects of your role and identity you want to keep and what to discard. You can then integrate old and new qualities to function better in your new context.

To reinvent yourself, ask yourself

• What aspects of my professional identity, ways of doing things, and routines should I disengage from when my role changes?
• What new possibilities inspire me?
• What new capabilities will help me succeed and how can I develop them?
• How do I integrate old and new definitions of myself and my capabilities?

Realigning career goals

Clear goals, objectives, and strategies are essential to changing dreams into reality. Your former job may have been very well aligned with your strengths, values, and priorities. But the post-change reality may no longer be such a comfortable fit. If this is the case, organizational change may force you to revise your career.

When your career changes, your daily activities change, which is disruptive. Your priorities, values, and sources of fulfillment at work could be thrown into question. Each of these may need to be redefined, modified, or reassessed. If your career isn't integrated with the changes you experience, you may feel out of control and unhappy.

To integrate and express your personal priorities, values, and sources of fulfillment, you need to examine them and ask yourself how – and if – you would like to amend them. Proactively investigate whether new positions have been created or old ones modified in ways that are compatible with your goals and passions.

Creating career plans

Once you've identified your career goals, you need to create a flexible career plan that you can review and redraft, as necessary. A career plan allows you to explore your professional ambitions, your strategies to achieve them, and what actions you need to take.

As your role in your organization changes, your career plan helps you to contextualize the transition in terms of your career goals. This places a more positive spin on your transition experience. Although each career plan is unique, the structure should always include

1. an ideal work description – Think about what your ideal job would be like. When you have a description of your ideal work or job, you can use it as a benchmark for your career plans.
2. long and short term goal statements – Making statements about your goals helps to make your vision of your career more concrete. Your goals should be specific, feasible, structured, and focused on getting results. Long-term goals are goals you want to achieve in the next three to five years. They give you something to strive toward. Short-term goals can be projected over the next year to year and a half. They clarify what you're working toward and how you should proceed.
3. personal needs and circumstances – Your personal needs and circumstances affect the feasibility of your career goals. Additionally, without the balance of your personal life, you and your career are at risk. This section of your career plan should include the personal resources you need to draw on to be successful. It should also include realistic limits that your personal commitments and resources place on what you can achieve.
4. an action plan –You use your action plan to set schedules and procedures around short-term goals. Your action plan should be pragmatic and contain realistic milestones. This keeps you on track and gives you a way of monitoring your progress. Set evaluation dates in your action plan so you can assess your progress. Don't give yourself a plan that's too demanding. If circumstances change, be ready to modify it accordingly.

Proactively capitalizing on organizational change enables you to regain a sense of control and to become more passionate about your work.

To do this, you need to reinvent yourself and disengage from unnecessary aspects of your former role.

You should also determine how you can realign your career goals to meet the new circumstances. A flexible career plan enables you to target opportunities and advance your career when your organization changes.