Tag: career passion

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Superbowl Career Ad–Emotional Truths, But Don’t Just React to the Negative

I confess I didn’t watch most of the Superbowl ads.  I did see the end of the game and all of the Boss of course.  But I did look later for the career ads just to keep up my career coaching cred in some weird way.

The careerbuilder ad made me laugh with its clever repetitions and images.  But with my coaching hat on, I also saw that it was containing some basic emotional truths about career or job change.  The ad showed a woman screaming in her car when she arrives at work, bosses showing no respect, people crying and punching toy koala bears.  Actually, doesn’t sound too funny when you just write it down.  But it’s through the humor that we can get to the tougher emotional truths sometime.

Most of us do wait until we feel incredibly angry, sad, frustrated, disgusted or dissed before doing anything about our jobs.  Studies show we are more likely to act in response to getting rid of pain that going for pleasure, getting rid of unhappiness than going for happiness.  That can keep us in so-so positions, which eventually will also drag us down emotionally.  It just takes longer, like water dripping until it finally makes a hole in the stone.

I Twittered about this today, how the ad showed some basic situations and feelings that revealed underlying emotional truths we need to notice and deal with.  A colleague, Shaun Jamison, replied that the problem is we often then jump from the frying pan to the fire.  I agree.  In trying to end our pain we might take rash action, having probably waited to

It’s not that the pain we’re feeling isn’t a good indicator about what to do.  It’s just incomplete.  What’s missing in part is our careful thinking about what else we can do, what jobs are better fits–but what’s also missing are the happy emotions.

The happy emotions of joy, peace, contentment, excitement can guide us to envisioning a job we’d really like.  In my coaching, I always start out finding out what really gets people energized, passionate, excited.  Doesn’t matter if it’s nonwork stuff.  First get to that connection with your energy and passion and desire, and we can then use our thinking to figure out how to apply those passions into a better career and job.

And yeh, it doesn’t hurt to be able to laugh at our problems sometimes too, as with the ad.

 

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One True Career?

Do you have only one true career? And if you miss it, will you be doomed to unhappiness at work, or a gnawing feeling you should have chosen a different career?

Choosing Careers–Not a one time thing

Not if you are a man I’ll call Tom. Tom, in his late 50s came to my class. Unlike some midlife career changers, he had no complaints about his current work. When he completed college, he became a high school teacher for about 15 years. Choosing a career helping kids learn worked out very well for him. He loved it. But after 15 years, he had more career ideas he wanted to explore, other passions to turn into careers. He decided to move on. He loved cars and opened up a car detailing company. That succeeded. He loved that too. And almost on schedule, about 15 years later, he was ready to start work on choosing his third career, which is why he came to my class. By the end of the class, he had decided he was going to go into a home remodeling business with his son. Third true career.

Lots of people change jobs and careers all the time. But his story was a great example of someone consciously choosing a sequence of authentic and passionate careers that were meaningful to him.  Multiple career visions.

Choosing careers that don’t exist…at least for you?

You might say, that’s fine, but every time you think about choosing a career you’ll love, you get depressed because you know it’s impossible, so it isn’t about any sequence of passions but not being able to get any to materialize. Maybe you want to open your own travel agency and can’t get the money, or you did open it but couldn’t get enough business. Maybe, you are like one woman who asked me a question on a call in show where I was responding as a career life coach. She HAD found her ideal career, and she had been living it. She was a farmer. Her problem was that an illness had made it impossible for her to continue farming.

In these cases, the lesson of Tom is relevant. You are a mix of lots of passions, and the world is so complex, there are so many ways to express those passions that any one career idea–even if it doesn’t work out or no longer works out–can be altered and leave you fully satisfied. In other words, you are a complex being with so many ways to express yourself that you don’t have to fear being shut down. You can almost always generate new, passionate career ideas.

You can look to other passions as Tom kept doing. Or you can find out what you most loved about being a farmer or becoming a travel agent, or whatever it is, and try to find a different way to express that in a work setting.

For instance, it turned out that the farmer also loved kids, so she could write about her experiences as a farmer and even about overcoming her illness and disappointments for a motivational and educational kids’ book. Maybe what the potential travel agent loved about opening an agency wasn’t booking standard flights to Chicago and San Diego, but helping people find exotic adventures.If so, maybe our travel agent could talk to an existing travel agency and see if they might be willing to offer a specialty in exotic travel that he could run. Maybe he didn’t really want his own agency with all those headaches anyhow. He just wanted to do something out of the ordinary. Or he might decide he could fulfill his passions another way by serving as a tour guide to unusual locations.

In short, yes–do look for what you really want to do and go after it with great enthusiasm and persistence. Don’t give up easily.At the same time, you have to be flexible and creative to find the best and most realistic ways to express that passion and contribute your talents and gifts to the world.