Miserable at Work? Time for a Rebirth!

I love this time of year! The spring brings us wildflowers, gorgeous weather and more sunlight. There’s something hopeful about it all. It’s a rebirth. This is a great time of year to evaluate where you are in your career. Have you been thinking negative thoughts? Is the day-to-day becoming more and more isolating? Freedom is closer than you think.

People come to me when their job isn’t quite working and they can list many things that are dragging them down, but many people don’t know what they want. It’s time to peel back that thinking. I do an exercise with my clients that seeks to break them out of the funk. Forget for a moment what other people will think. Forget the amount of money you need to live. Forget your degree, or lack thereof, and just forget all of the societal pressures that we put on ourselves. Instead, imagine yourself in front of a white board and write out your skills. No skill is too small to consider. Make a mean brownie? Awesome, capture that. Are you handy? Yep, that counts. Do you give great advice? Write it down. Next, write out 20-50 job things that you could do. They could be anything from project management to mowing lawns. The sky’s the limit. I’m not saying that you have to do any of these things necessarily, rather we’re just listing all of the possibilities. Watch out for constraints creeping in (they sound like “yeah, but…”) and keep them at bay for now. Then, in another column, write out the things you like to do such as helping people, working within a team, speaking in small groups, making tangible things, and so on. Just be creative. Now step back find out where the Venn is in the diagram. That’s just a fancy way of seeing where the similarities are in the 3 columns. That’s where you should start to focus your efforts.

Liberating truth -- there’s no one perfect job. Searching for the job unicorn can make you unhappy and perpetually unfulfilled, but there are things you can do to achieve work happiness. Knowing the intersection of what you like, where you have some skill, and what people might pay you money to do can be hugely freeing.

This is truly a “choose your own adventure” life. Been thinking about going out on your own but are scared to make the leap? Starting your own thing may be a risk worth taking. It’s time to stop the binary thinking – the thinking that you either have to choose to have money and work yourself to death or be happy and be poor. You can have both income and happiness. You can craft the life you want for you and earn a living at the same time. Message me and let me show you how!