Are you thinking about making a drastic change in order to find job satisfaction? Read this post by Master Teacher Steven Tomlinson first.
In the current issue of Fast Company, Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do with My Life?, offers some cheeky tough-love for those of us looking to boost career satisfaction: don’t expect love at first sight.
A “calling” is not something you know, the moment you see it. For real people, in the real world, a sense of “calling” is something you grow into, over the course of your life, by having an impact on your organization and the community around you.
My mentor used to advise would-be career changers to “try first to make your current job more like the one you think you want.”
For a lawyer friend who is a frustrated filmmaker, that meant volunteering to help produce settlement videos at his firm. An engineer who wanted to get into sales volunteered to give technology briefings for customers visiting his plant. Both these guys ultimately created satisfying new roles without leaving their companies. Turn a small experiment into a career refresh by bringing in a missing piece.
Harvard and INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra, in her book Working Identity, argues that we rarely find career satisfaction as a result of a dramatic change. According to her research, intentional, incremental, and persistent investigation — experiments, new relationships, and trying on new stories about ourselves and our work — delivers the goods.
If you expect to find career bliss off-the-rack, expect a long, frustrating search and lots of reactive course corrections. Why not commit to the hard work of crafting a custom fit between your talents and passions, and work that can really make a difference? Stuckness is usually about us, not the job. You could recast your current job as a starting point. Start gently applying pressure — adding what’s missing, a bit at a time — and build momentum. As people see what you’re trying to do, the right doors will open and a more satisfying career will evolve organically.
Photo courtesy of adorkable21.
[...] Steven Tomlinson teaches at the Acton School of Business where he teaches the popular Life of Meaning course, among others. If you liked this speech, you might also enjoy these posts he wrote about not fearing failure and finding your calling. [...]