Do you wake up on a Monday morning, jump out of bed, ready to embrace another week at work? Or do you find it harder and harder as each Monday comes, to tear yourself away from under the duvet?
Considering that we spend so much time at work, it is really sad if the work that you do leaves you unfulfilled, so much so that you constantly watch the clock and wish the day away.
If you are feeling unfulfilled at work, have you stopped to consider what it is about your job that leaves you feeling this way?
For many of the women that I work with, the reason that they are unfulfilled at work is because the work that they are doing is not aligned to who they really are. Often women fall in to careers or choose a career path which is not really what they truly want. It could be pressure from parents that causes them to enter a profession that is not really them.
Jasmine was in her early forties and was a successful solicitor when she started questioning why she felt so unhappy at work. She hadn’t wanted to be a lawyer but that was the career path her parents had wanted for her and because she was so young at the time, went ahead with their wishes for her.
A particular career path could be chosen because an opportunity presents itself when a woman is very young, before she even knows who she is. She then ends up carving out a career within that organisation or industry. It is surprising just how many women are doing jobs that they do not enjoy because it is not who they really are.
A client of mine was really unhappy at work. Her job was quite pressurised but the pressure was not the cause of her unhappiness as she did not mind working under pressure. When we touched on her values and I got her to examine what her values were, that was when the penny dropped. She realised that the organisation’s values and her values were not aligned.
Having come to this realisation she was then able to get a clearer idea as to what she needed to do and she created an exit plan to find something more aligned to who she was.
If the work that you do goes against your values (and who you are), long term, the effects of this can manifest itself in many ways. You may find that you start to get stressed out at work or dread going in to work in the mornings. It can even start to impact on your confidence levels.
Another client of mine is very creative but the job she did stifled her creativity. She had started to doubt her ability to do her job and this in turn knocked her self confidence. She never received feedback about her work from her manager which only fuelled the doubts she had about herself.
She was forcing herself to do a job that was only leaving her miserable. She had joined the organisation because she thought it would benefit her working in that sort of corporate environment but deep down, she did not agree with how the organisation operated.
If you are feeling unfulfilled, miserable or unhappy at work, how aligned is the work that you do to your values? If it is not, what are you going to do about it?
Author Bio:
Carol Stewart is a Personal Development, Career & Business Coach and founder of Abounding Solutions. She works with women in their forties who are unhappy at work but are too scared to do anything about it. She helps them to develop the confidence to make a career move and find something that they love. This could be a complete career change or it could even be exiting the corporate environment and setting up their own business.
Carol herself made a significant career change in 2011 when at the age of 44 she left the organisation she had worked in for 28 years, went back to university and set up her own business. She is also a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management and a Member of the Association for Coaching. Carol’s free ebook ‘5 Steps to Pursuing Your Passion at Mid-Life – A Guide to Designing a Career You Love’ can be downloaded at www.aboundingsolutions.com
