In his book, The One Thing You Need to Know:… About Great Managing, Leading and Sustained Individual Success [Simon & Schuster UK Ltd. 2005], Marcus Buckingham shared a statistic: “Only twenty percent of people report that they are in a role where they have the chance to do what they do best everyday, and that the rest of the world feels like their strengths are not being called upon everyday.” The operative word in this statement is “role.” The rest of the eighty percent are not mediocre or incompetent, they are just not in the right role. Below are five steps that can help anyone discover what could make them a “twenty percenter” and find their path to career enlightenment.
Take a Short Vacation
A short break will help a person struggling with his job. It might be that this person just got promoted or got assigned something new or different, thus stress enters the picture. Or the opposite could be true: this person might be feeling bored or hampered by the job.
Whichever is the case, a short vacation will help this person put things in perspective. A worker or a business owner will have to distance himself from his work for him to understand where the source of dissatisfaction is coming from.
Engage in a Visioning Exercise
In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People [Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1989], Stephen Covey makes a brilliant suggestion: take the time to write down a personal mission statement. The burnt-out worker should imagine himself in his best state, five years down the road. What kind of person is he? What does he hope to be? He should be creative and specific with the details because this will help him create his future happiness.
Identify One’s Top Strengths
It’s best for someone unhappy with his job to reassess his strengths. He should take personality tests that take occupational preference into consideration like a Myers-Briggs Test, Keirsey Temperament Sorter or a MAPP (Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential) Assessment. Some of these can be taken online for free.
Another excellent resource is Marcus Buckingham’s book, Now, Discover Your Strengths[Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2001], which includes an online strengths assessment test. A person who is unhappy with his occupation usually will find that there is something about his job that is making him struggle unnecessarily. He should seek out what seems effortless for him. What did he love to do in his youth? What do his friends ask him to do for them?
In his book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (And When to Stick) [The Penguin Group, 2007], Seth Godin advises individuals to know the difference between a short struggle that will lead to more long-term rewards (the dip) and a cul-de-sac or a cliff. The latter are struggles that are fruitless because there will be no improvement over time. If a person has always been weak at a certain subject and finds that this subject becomes part of his everyday tasks, then he will naturally struggle for as long as he is performing this job.
Research Potential Roles and Career Paths
In their book, Changing Your Course: The 5-Step Guide to Getting the Life You Want [Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.2008], Bob and Mel Blanchard state that fear of the unknown is the main barrier that stops people from living their dream. It’s not even the lack of money or potential, it’s just the lack of information. The best way to take down this fear is by learning more about potential career roles and paths.
A person who has identified his strengths should start researching occupations that highlight his strengths. An excellent resource for finding out more about a potential career’s compensation, a key concern of anyone who wants to change careers, is payscale.com. The website requires a sign-up but will provide pay information about certain occupations within the fields and country of one’s choice.
Take Immediate Action on One’s Next Steps
It is important to address any kind of job dissatisfaction, stress or unhappiness immediately. Based on the U.S. Department of Labor 2008 report on Time Use, the average employed American spends an average of 7.6 hours a day, a third of a day or half of an average person’s waking hours. That’s a lot of time spent being dissatisfied or unhappy. It’s easy for someone who has a lot of questions to get stuck in analysis paralysis.
However, working on each question everyday will help him hurdle a big transformation. It can be as simple as researching an aspect of a potential job or making a phone call to someone who is successful at what he does. As long as a person is working courageously on sub-tasks of a bigger overall step, this will help a person break down what seems insurmountable.
Not everyone is blessed with a job that perfectly suits him. However, that’s not the end of the story. The good news is, anyone can take control of his happiness. All it takes is taking the right steps and learning more about a potential change of career or job. A job or occupation takes up half of an average person’s waking hours. Thus, finding a job or occupation that makes one happy is very important in anyone’s overall wellbeing.
First, one has to distance one’s self from the job to better understand the problem. Next, one has to imagine what a better future looks like and find out one’s strengths. Lastly, one has to learn more about potential career paths and take action immediately on pursuing this course, even if these are small steps at first. These small steps will take anyone through to their trajectory.
 |
