Are You Unhappy At Work?

Don’t just settle for a paycheck – Design the career of your dreams

Over the years, most people are disengaged or highly disengaged at their work. Often times that disengagement can be due to boredom, misery – or even worse!

For companies, the cost is massive! Billions of dollars are lost in productivity. Most of us spend more than half of our hours awake working or doing some sort of work-related activities. If you are disengaged, there is nothing less fulfilling in living a life in mediocrity and cheating yourself out of the best possible life!

You might think this is a horror story, however, there is hope! You can employ a simple strategy and framework so you can get out of the rut and into the career you’ve always wanted.

Strategy

Many factors can feed into unhappiness at your workplace, however, the most critical is a not having an effective strategic approach to your career design.

Most think that careers are “something we are just doing” or “something to get by with” while we are doing something else. We may be going to school. We try to study something that interests us. Possibly we intern at a place or two. Then, it’s time to get a ‘real’ job. We begin to scan the want ads and hopefully we ask ourselves what can we do with the knowledge and experience we have accumulated. We lock into a solution, and we begin to start work.

A few years pass, we develop more skills and experiences in life, and then we ask again what is next? We again look at the want ads and repeat this cycle. However, the problem is with this strategy, we continue to compound bad decisions upon bad decisions.

However, in our book, we feel a much more effective strategy is to how do you plant your flag. This requires a perspective. How does one get perspective, well you may have to take a few steps back to see the entire field of vision. You will also need to ask yourself a few questions: “What type of impact do I want to have?” “What do I want to create?” When you answer questions like this, you can then logically design the plan for your life on a whiteboard, or a piece of paper and then align your skills, talents and the like to create your dream destination.

Framework

How do you start building this?

Some call it a moonshot strategy and there are three-parts so you can have that fulfilling career: Would you like a promotion at the place you already work at, do you want to do the same thing at a different company in the future, or would you like to quit and go sell wood in a forest?

Commit

Truly changing one’s life is to commit, truly committing to creating a more fulfilling career is what we feel is the first step. If you don’t know what it is your passionate about, then what are you doing? Are you serious? You should have a voice inside of your head saying, “Is there something more?”

Do you know there is something else just waiting for you? You need to increase that commitment, explore both what you want, what you want to see in the world, and within your family, would this help you by implementing the change and what do you lose by not making the move? We are motivated by pleasure or pain. When we put the two together, just think how powerful that can be.

Commitment can also be a forced act such as moving as a family, the job changed either by a lay-off, downsizing or firing.

Create

Once you have made the ‘commitment’ to making your change, then the real work begins – you have to get off your butt and put the video games away and start creating your new career. You must re-discover. You need to know more than just “what” you want to do, it is more important to understand the “why.” This is the passion and the reason you want to do something. It clarifies the value you are placing on the ‘thing’ you want to do. Is it an adventure. freedom, security, teamwork, impact?

Next, you have got to build and it’s easier with a community of like-minded individuals. In life, we are constantly in contact with people. We reach out and even if we don’t know them directly, we must think whom can help us gather the insights that we need to determine if our goal for our potential career is aligned with the things that we most value?

Fear is real, most of us don’t like stepping out of our comfort zone and talking about the unknown, or we assume that we don’t have what it takes or if it’s impossible. This is probably the greatest anchor that prevents us from playing the biggest role in our self-happiness and having the career we want to have. Do not let doubt creep into your mind of saying like: I’m too young. I’m too old. I’ve never done anything like that. I don’t have money.

One of the biggest things we hear is the obligation fear statements like, I have a mortgage to pay for.

Is your job the only job that pays money? We use this false dichotomy – either I will be happy and homeless OR I will be unhappy doing that and have a financially secure future.  There are so many ways to create anything, including your happiness and financial freedom. You simply need to define what your maximum workable number is, and know that you won’t make a leap for anything less than what will give you the financial freedom you want.

One of the most important things for you to consider on your path is your tactics and understand the art of telling your story of the person you are becoming, and not who you were before. You can’t be that same person ever again.

When you are asked to tell yourself to someone do not rely on where you have been, the great school you attended or awards you have won. Those are the past. Talk about the company you are now running or the impact and potential of the project you are now endeavoring to implement. As soon as you flip your story, your success will follow.

Contribute

Once you have created your plan, determined your career move there is still one more step, you need to contribute. What? You may be asking yourself – it isn’t just about me? No. Haven’t you learned anything from the Hallmark Channel? The hero goes back to the community where they started and share “How they did it”.

So, in your case, ask yourself how and to whom you can pay this lesson forward. Could you mentor someone who is on a similar journey and show them the light to a shorter path to success? You have the critical insights and information that you can provide to others looking to do the same thing you did. Strengthen the community if for no reason we can shorten the Hallmark Movie Season by just one less movie? Please, can you help humanity out?