It’s never too late to find a better fitting job
Are you dreaming of the weekend? Or the next holiday? Can’t get excited about the next big change at your workplace?
If you’re feeling flat and unhappy at work, you may be ignoring what you are really good at. Do you even know what your special skills and qualities are?
Is your job a good fit for you?
If you aren’t sure about your strongest qualities, traits, and abilities, it’s time to take stock. A job that’s the wrong fit for our personality and abilities chips away heavily at our self-esteem. When others want us to be different, we lose confidence in ourselves.
Not being a good fit with our job can tip us into depression. We lose our spark. Even so, many of us hang in there. We point to our good days. Mostly, we persevere, thinking our living expenses and our responsibilities. We compartmentalise. We justify. Look, it’s ok. But it’s not great. No, we’re not especially happy but we can do this.
This compromise happens to so many of us.
How we look for work doesn’t help
We can be forgiven if we’ve landed in a position that doesn’t bring out our best. Because the way we look for a job can be all wrong.
There’s so much fear around finding employment. Because we want a job, we’re encouraged to apply for lots of positions. We go for the best title, salary, and conditions. Our inner eye is on the things we will be able to afford, and this is quite a lure. We hunt for the best paying job we can find that vaguely resembles our skillset.
We pay for doing ill-fitting work later. Have you reached this point?
Finding something meaningful
The secret is happiness is to dig into who you really are, your strengths and what you bring to the table. Instead of fitting yourself into a position that sounds good, but which only partially satisfies you, it’s the time to get to know yourself at a deeper level.
Here are three types of questions you can start with:
What do I like to do in my spare time and why? What does it say about the kind of person I am?
What are my strongest attributes? What do I know about me that’s helped me face the more serious challenges in my life? What am I most pleased that I can do?
What have I learned from others, and from my experiences, that has changed me for the better?
It may seem strange to ponder these kind of questions. It can be unfamiliar territory. Yet happiness will come from using your ‘superpowers’, the innate abilities and interests you genuinely have, in your work.
Finding a good fit for your uniqueness will change your days. And your life. It’s not to late to make the change.
Your work is to discover your work, and then with all your heart, to give yourself to it. – Buddha