The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just a painfully necessary activity is a fairly recent concept.
When Dr Johnson published his celebrated dictionary in 1755, the word "fulfilment" didn't even appear. Yet, in today's prosperous world, we don't just expect to earn money through our work, most of us we also expect to find purpose, meaning and satisfaction in what we do.
This is a significant and new age expectation. Understanding this can help us in to answer why many of us at times in our lives experience career crises, these career crises can manifest themselves in the form of often the Sunday Scaries.
To help us in the quest for fulfilling work, here are six useful ideas. (Lifestoytt)
1. Accepting Career Confusion
Feeling confused about your career is perfectly normal. In the pre-industrial world, there were, at most, around 2,000 different trades. Nowadays, it's estimated that there are half a million different options. The result? We can become so anxious about making the wrong choice that we end up making no choice at all. Psychologists call this “the paradox of choice”: paralysis stemming from too many options. It is healthy to acknowledge that confusion is natural and fear entirely normal, but neither should scupper our chances forever.
2. Know Yourself
"Know thyself" is the oldest philosophical recommendation, and it is particularly relevant to careers. For 99% of us, knowing what we want to do doesn't arise spontaneously, unlike knowing what to eat.
Most of us don't have a calling; we don't hear a commanding, god-like voice directing us to accountancy or packaging and distribution. That doesn't mean we don't have passions or inclinations; we just don't know them clearly enough. This is a perilous position because not having a plan quickly puts us at the mercy of those who do have one. We only catch glimpses, little hints of our tastes. So, we must learn to pick up on these faint sounds.
Start by parking any concerns about money for a time—financial panic too often kills all dialogue with our more authentic, passionate side. Without being too logical or analytical, write down everything you've ever enjoyed doing or making, no matter how offbeat. In the long and confused tangle that follows, there will be the shape of an ideal future working self, but it will be very messy and in need of thorough analysis. That’s where philosophy comes in—it’s the art of clearing up and demanding logic from our first thoughts.
3. Take Time to Think
If it might take a couple of days, even a week, to choose a new car, it could fairly take a year or more of sustained daily reflection to start identifying a career that fits. We tend to feel guilty about this, imagining we're being self-indulgent. Far from it. We may need to empty every weekend for months to sort out the biggest conundrum of our lives. To avoid spending the rest of our lives trapped in a job unwittingly chosen for us by our unknowing 18-year-old selves, we need to be generous with the time we give ourselves to think.
4. Try Something
It’s tempting to imagine that we’ll be able to work out the shape of the workplace and our own characters purely through reflection, but we need data. We can only understand ourselves and others by colliding with the real world. In the process, we get to know both the world and our own natures. We should take small, non-irrevocable steps to gather information—for example, by shadowing, interning, or volunteering. We mustn’t think we always have to resign on Monday. We can investigate our futures through branching projects on the side of existing jobs.
5. Reflect on What Makes People Unhappy
Every successful business is, at its heart, an attempt to solve someone else's problem. The bigger and more urgent the problem, the greater the opportunity to flex our entrepreneurial muscles. Consider an average day and everything in it that might make someone unhappy—from losing house keys to finding the food a little greasy to arguing yet again with a spouse. Each of these is a business opportunity waiting to be exploited. It’s a chance for us to serve, which is what work really is. It's easy to imagine that everything's already been done and tried—nonsense. We’re unhappy enough for capitalism to have many more centuries of invention and creativity ahead of it.
6. Be Confident
So many bad self-help books are about confidence that it could be tempting to dismiss the whole topic as nonsense. But in a peculiar and rather humbling way, it truly does seem as if the difference between success and failure is sometimes nothing less than the courage to give it a go—the ability to imagine oneself in a role, to surmise that one doesn’t need to ask anyone for permission. Many top positions belong simply to those who dare to boldly ask for them. A lack of confidence is, at heart, a misunderstanding of how the world works. It’s an internalised feudalism that imagines only certain people—but not oneself—have the right to get certain things. It isn’t true. A lot more is possible than we might think at our moments of timidity and doubt.
Conclusion
These six ideas offer a pathway towards a job we won't regret on our deathbeds—a crucial criterion in our search for fulfilling work. The above is the essence of Onelife Coaching’s philosophy and values. The text was taken and adapted from lifestorytt - well worth a follow.
Our coaches understand these fears, paralysis, anxieties and guide our clients on the path to confident decision making based on a structured plan of approach within a realistic time frame.
Onelife Coaching - Live the life you love
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