Tag: finding your passion
It doesn’t have to be your dream job to be a great job
Some people feel called to a singular career. They are compelled to pursue their dream job, whether it is in the arts, sports, medicine or a niche role that the average person may never know exists.
Some of them will achieve the career success they’ve been striving for. Others might find that their passion becomes their side gig while they do something else to pay the bills.
For the rest of us? We may never have a dream job, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have satisfying careers and happy, full lives.
When I try to imagine what my dream job would be, I picture waking up in the morning full of excitement to get started on my work. After that…I draw a blank.
Granted, I’m not a morning person and it can take an hour and two cups of coffee before I feel like doing anything. But no matter what time of day, I don’t have a burning, persistent desire to do any one type of work.
And yet, I love my job.
My projects are varied and interesting. There’s always something new to learn. I like and respect the people I work with. I enjoy the flexibility of working from home. My earnings pay the bills.
I notice every day how grateful I am for the job that I have and the lifestyle it enables me to live. That includes having enough spare time to volunteer with organizations that I care about.
Volunteering gives me a mission-driven sense of fulfillment that is different from the gratification I feel when I successfully complete a work project. But if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t devote every day to my volunteer projects. I’m happy with the amount of time and energy that I’m spending in that area of my life. And I know from having tried it, that writing full-time doesn’t work for me either.
A large part of what makes my life feel full and satisfying is that I both love my career and its demands are manageable. It allows space for other meaningful pursuits.
It’s not my dream job, but it’s a great job.
If you’re worried that you’re running out of time to discover your passion and turn it into your job, I hope you realize that isn’t the only path to a fulfilling career.
Maybe you’re like me and you will find the most satisfaction by spending your time in several different fields – even if some of them are unpaid. The easiest way to discover this is by following your interests. Researching and talking to people who are involved in the fields you’re interested in are low-commitment ways of exploring what you might like. Learning what doesn’t work for you is useful information, too.
Another possibility is to start with the job you already have and see what can be improved. If you like your field but not your workplace, you can look for the same type of job at a different employer. If you’re bored, you can seek out new projects – maybe one of them will be the first step on a path to a new role.
You don’t need a dream job to be happy with your work.
Dealing with career disappointment
It is disappointing when you are not where you want to be in your career.
Maybe you thought by the time you were this age that you would be managing a department or earning a milestone salary.
Maybe you hop
ed that after working this many years in your organization, that you would have been promoted by now.
Maybe you expected that after the education and training you spent time and money on that you would enjoy your profession – but you don’t.
Or you’ve bounced from job to job and still don’t know what kind of job would make you happy.
I’ve met so many people that are frustrated with their careers for these reasons. The ones that are currently experiencing it often tell me that they feel defeated. They aren’t hopeful that they will ever find career satisfaction. It can be hard to believe it when you’re in the murky depths of a job disappointment, but I can tell you with certainty that is that there is still time for you.
You could still achieve the specific career goal that you have right now. There could be one small shift in your organization – a new manager or a new set of responsibilities that changes everything.
One man that I met about 10 years ago could not seem to get a break in his workplace. Let’s call him John. Year after year, John got not-so-great performance reviews and it seemed like he wasn’t going to move up the career ladder at his company – his career was stalled. Then out of the blue, John’s manager left the company and his new manager took an interest in him. He gave him recognition for his work that he hadn’t had before and praised him to other managers. That year, he finally got promoted and apparently continued to do well – very well: I ran into John last year and learned that he still works for the same company and is now an executive.
The small shift could come from something as simple as on-the-job training that you’re required to do.
A woman that I know, “Abby”, was content in her marketing job at a medium-sized company. Then her manager sent her to a training seminar to learn process improvement that would help the department run more effectively. Abby returned from the training lit up with passion for the techniques she learned.
I remember how excited she was when she talked about it. Her perspective of work went from “this job is ok” to “I know what I want to do with my life.” She kept finding ways to apply her new knowledge. At first, this was within the company she worked for. Then Abby sought out more training on her own, met people in the process improvement field, and through those connections got a full time job doing work that she loved.
If you haven’t found a meaningful job yet, you still can. In my research about people quitting jobs, I heard from dozens of people who were frustrated and exhausted with their work, yet found their way into career satisfaction. I spoke with people in their twenties and people in their late sixties – and all the decades in between. It’s not too late!
Many of the people I talked to could not have imagined their careers they have today back when they felt stuck and unhappy. There were no overnight changes. Instead, they followed their interests one step at a time and discovered opportunities along the way.
If you don’t know where to start, the most useful advice that I learned was to just learn more about whatever topic it is that you’re interested in and see where that leads. This might mean going to a seminar on whatever topic you are curious about. Or looking up information about it on the web or reading a book. Or volunteering for a cause that you care about. I’ve met full-time, paid care-givers at three different animal sanctuaries who started as casual volunteers. They are some of the happiest job-changers that I know.
Just take one step in the direction that interests you. It might lead you down the hallway of your current organization into a slightly different role, or into the dream job you never knew you wanted.
Finding Your Passion is Overrated
The whole “finding your passion” blitz is getting on my nerves. There’s an onslaught of books, classes, blogs and life coaches all telling us that there is a specific reason we’re on this Earth and we should be spending time and money figuring out what that is. In fact, if we’re not able to articulate our life’s passion in a mission statement format there’s something lacking in our lives and we’ll never be happy until we figure out what it is.
I met a life coach at a networking event a few weeks ago who seemed annoyed when I shared my thoughts on this topic. She informed me that her job was to help people find their passion whether it was their work or a hobby. “If you talk to someone long enough, you eventually find what lights them up,” she said.
OK, well that’s great if some people need helping figuring out what they’re interested in at $90 an hour. But I don’t need a coach to know that I light up talking about animal welfare issues. I’ll talk to you for a half-hour about what makes a good or bad sanctuary and then I want to stop talking about it and go on with my day. I like to visit sanctuaries and donate money to them and sign online petitions but I’m not compelled to do anything else about it. Maybe someday. Or maybe not.
When I conducted interviews for my book, I met people who are living their passion after quitting their corporate jobs. One woman’s most important hobby was scuba diving. She bought into an existing scuba business and now spends her work and leisure time on her favorite activity. I love those stories and think people who have a clear conviction about what they want to do with their time are fortunate to have a singular focus.
But I’d like to reassure the rest of us that there’s nothing wrong with our lives if we don’t have a specific calling. Maybe it’s more important to be happy, satisfied and at peace with our daily lives.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been an avid consumer of the “find your passion” type of book and class and coaching for years. Life coaches are a great resource for gaining clarity and taking action to increase satisfaction with our lives and I think that is more important than pursuing a validation for your life that you might never find.
Coaches are also helpful to overcome blocks. My sister, Kristen Sutich, is gifted at coaching me to feel at peace during difficult times and helps me make plans that sustain my goals. (She specializes in grief issues and helping moms send their kids to kindergarten, but I recommend her for general life coaching, too.)
I also took a tele-class this fall called “Find Your Calling Now”. It was led by Martha Beck who is my author-idol and whose books have inspired me for years. In the class, Beck talked about the Hero’s Journey, which the geeky writer in me loved, but in the end, I was nowhere closer to finding my life’s calling than before.
During the time period when I took the class, I was writing my book, working on a small startup company and spending a LOT of time wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. Even though I believed in the value of my projects and still do, they are not my life’s burning passion. I don’t jump out of bed at 5AM every morning because I’m filled with excitement to revise my book. My book is important to me but it isn’t magic. It takes energy and focus and discipline to work on it. It is similar with the startup business. The business model is compelling, but it doesn’t drive me.
At the present, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been with my work life. My main consulting gig provides interesting work that pays the bills, my clients are nice and I work from my home office. The freedom of doing my work in my own space is a huge part of my happiness. I make a healthy breakfast and lunch every day and can take a break to go for a walk from my own front door. I drive to the office for meetings and make a point of checking in with people when I’m there instead of taking for granted that I’ll see them each day. This arrangement also gives me the time and energy to work on my other projects outside of business hours.
It took trial and error to get to this point. In some ways, my life resembles the one I had a year ago. I’m doing marketing for the same company that I left last June. I’m even in the same office complex – how weird is that?! But now I’m billing my hours from my home office as the owner of my own consulting company and that is a world of difference.
It is a satisfying feeling to look back at the week with gratitude because every day was a great day. Am I living my life’s passion? No. But I’m deeply happy. And that’s more than enough for me.
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