Are You In The Right Job?

A friend of mine have appar­ently been read­ing my posts on dis­cern­ment and deci­sion mak­ing the past weeks. He asked me over the week­end if he was meant to be in his job. We had a longish con­ver­sa­tion after­wards and we made sev­eral dis­cov­er­ies. These I will dis­cuss in more detail here.

First of all, let me say that I think it’s a human thing to ask whether we are meant to be doing some­thing, or meant to be with some­one. It’s some­thing very human to look for some kind of final­ity and ought­ness and mean­ing in things. It assures us not only that we are doing things right but that we are doing the right things.

That is why I love the Fil­ipino trans­la­tion of the word for mean­ing: kahu­lu­gan. The word kahulugan’s root word is HULOG—which means TO FALL. So that when you find kahulugan—when you find your mean­ing, there’s a sense of things FALLING INTO PLACE. When things fall into place, there is peace, and a deep sense of joy.

Hav­ing said that, and as with many things in life, there is no one for­mula to all this. While some of us may want to have some final­ity before we make deci­sions, and some of us want the dream job before we even grad­u­ate from col­lege, our real-life expe­ri­ences show us some other real­ity however.

Jobs become step­ping stones to other jobs. The kind of work that we end up doing is usu­ally not the kind of work we set out to do when we started. While I wanted to do train­ing when I started in the cor­po­rate world, I ended up doing train­ing design, and even­tu­ally strat­egy design, which was never part of my orig­i­nal plan. Now I’m doing con­sult­ing, which is some­thing I didn’t set out to do, but is some­thing I thor­oughly enjoy. Things fell into place for me with­out my mean­ing to. And a year ago if you had asked me what I would do a year from now, I would have given you a totally dif­fer­ent answer.

That is because in life, a lot of things are trial and error. How­ever dif­fi­cult it is to accept. we have to be open to the pos­si­bil­ity that our true call­ing might be totally dif­fer­ent from all our edu­ca­tional prepa­ra­tions and all the plans we have made.

But hav­ing said that there is no for­mula, it would still be help­ful to have some guide­lines to con­sider when we’re think­ing of whether we’re in the right job or not. Here are some ques­tions you might want to ask your­self when you want to know whether you are in the right job:

1) How do you respond when some­one asks you about your job? Do you smile when you’re talk­ing about your job? Or are you sad? Or indif­fer­ent? If you’re gen­uinely pos­i­tive and not just putting up an act, then it’s a sig­nal that you must love what you’re doing. When you love some­one, you light up when you talk about him or her. It’s the same about your job. So the next time some­one asks you about your job, catch your reac­tion. It will give you an ini­tial idea about how your job really is, from the emo­tional level.

2) What makes you happy, what inter­ests you? And I’m not talk­ing about just being excited or thrilled here, but about being deeply happy. Ask your­self why cer­tain activ­i­ties make you happy or are ful­fill­ing for you, and pay atten­tion to times when you are really enjoy­ing your­self. Notice prob­lems that stir your com­pas­sion or excite your imag­i­na­tion. Reflect on sto­ries of peo­ple you admire. And ask your­self why you admire these types of people.

BNET puts it this way:

“…If you’re not inter­ested in what you’re doing or where you’re doing it, you’re never going to be able to put your heart into your work. So if your com­pany, indus­try, sub­ject, or sec­tor doesn’t engage you, it would be in your inter­est to start explor­ing how to iden­tify one that does. Is there a topic, issue, or activ­ity that you’ve enjoyed or been curi­ous about for a long time…art, math, pol­i­tics, social ser­vice, sci­ence, con­struc­tion, the envi­ron­ment, for example?”

3) What is your innate skill? Know­ing your skill is the next step, but only after ask­ing your­self what makes you happy. If you focus on your skills before you uncover your pas­sions, you limit your­self to jobs that uti­lize your cur­rently rec­og­nized skills. If you start with your pas­sion and inter­est, you find many options that either match your cur­rent skills or require only min­i­mal addi­tional training.

It is impor­tant to have your inter­ests and your abil­i­ties over­lap to cre­ate the type of busi­ness activ­i­ties that you both like and are good at.

The list below might be a good way to begin to under­stand what your inter­ests and skills are. Check which activ­i­ties you are inter­ested in, and then check whether these are the ones you’re good at:

* Admin­is­tra­tion
* Analy­sis
* Bud­get­ing
* Copy­writ­ing
* Cre­ative think­ing
* Deci­sion mak­ing
* Empa­thy
* Facil­i­tat­ing
* Flex­i­bil­ity
* Ini­tia­tive
* Inno­va­tion
* Inter­pre­ta­tion
* Lead­er­ship
* Lis­ten­ing
* Men­tor­ing
* Nego­ti­a­tion
* Oper­a­tions
* Plan­ning
* Prob­lem solv­ing
* Process man­age­ment
* Project man­age­ment
* Research
* Pre­sen­ta­tions
* Team­work­ing
* Vision

Once you’ve iden­ti­fied your strengths, con­sider how many of them you’re using in your job, and in what way.

4) How’s your work­place? Think about the orga­ni­za­tion you work for. How big is it? Do you like work­ing with a lot of peo­ple, or do you pre­fer a small, con­ge­nial group of co-workers? Apart from size, some of the other fac­tors you might con­sider are the following:

• the type of orga­ni­za­tion: pub­lic or pri­vate sec­tor, profit or non-profit, national or multi­na­tional, aca­d­e­mic or com­mer­cial, prod­uct or ser­vice ori­ented, cen­tral­ized or decentralized
• the organization’s finan­cial con­di­tion, polit­i­cal cli­mate. com­pany growth, cur­rent, and future sta­bil­ity and reputation
• your com­pen­sa­tion and ben­e­fits pack­age. You have needs that must be met, and because of that it’s not just salary that should be considered—other ben­e­fits are equally impor­tant (i.e. pen­sion, life and dis­abil­ity insur­ance, health ben­e­fits, per­for­mance incen­tives, hous­ing sub­sidy, leave cred­its, sched­ule, etc.)

Ref: BNET​.COM