Ever heard the joke which runs "So you hate your job? There's a support group for that. They're called "Everyone" and they meet at the bar."
Okay, it's a bit corny, but it does point at a cultural truth: we're often taught it's normal to hate our jobs. We might moan about work to colleagues and family, but we don't necessarily do anything to fix it.
Because we're convinced that hating our job is "normal", we carry on each day, going through the motions, getting irritated by all the usual things, and going home feeling a bit fed up ... but never really thinking that we can change anything.
The truth is, there's plenty you can do to fix your job – and much of it is considerably less drastic than quitting. The first step is to stop expecting to dislike your work, and to start looking for ways to change the things which are driving you nuts.
Fixing the Little Things
Sometimes, a job that's sapping your energy can be fixed with just a few little tweaks.
Let's say it's a real drag for you to be at your desk by 8am. You have to force yourself out of bed every morning, you never get time for breakfast, you hate driving in rush-hour traffic, and you find it hard to concentrate when you get to work.
Instead of accepting this as an inevitable part of your job, look for ways to make it easier:
With almost any little problem, there will be multiple ways to make it easier. So stop telling yourself that "this is just how it is", and start looking for solutions. (If you're really stuck, post about your problem in the comments, and see if someone else can come up with an idea for you!)
Fixing Job-Related Things
Sometimes, what really bugs you at work is some particular aspect of your job. Maybe you have a routine task which always frustrates you. Or perhaps you've just ended up bored in your particular role. Maybe you're overwhelmed and struggling to get through all your work.
Again, it's very easy to just assume that this is how things are, and that you can't change it. But have you even tried? Let's say you're swamped with work. Could you:
Don't assume that other people in the office will necessarily realize that you're struggling. Often, busy people end up with more work on their desk because they're recognized as being efficient and hardworking. Yes, make sure that your efforts are being noticed – but don't let people use this as an excuse to expect more and more from you.
When Big Fixes Are Needed
Sometimes, no amount of tweaking is going to make your job better. Perhaps you went into a career which, in retrospect, is never going to make you happy. Maybe you have an irreconcilable personality difference with your manager. You might have simply lost all interest in a job which you once enjoyed. You may have experienced significant changes in your home life (such as marriage, a new baby, or illness) which mean that your job is no longer a comfortable fit for your lifestyle.
You may want to think about much larger steps like:
Of course, all of these require serious consideration. But don't rule them out. You can find work which you enjoy and which uses your real talents, skills and interests.
Is there anything about your job which is driving you nuts? Share it with us in the comments ... and see if anyone has an idea for how you can fix it!
Written on 5/17/2010 by Ali Hale. Ali writes a blog, Aliventures, about leading a productive and purposeful life (get the RSS feed here). As well as blogging, she writes fiction, and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing.
The Hard Truths About Building Your Own Success
Posted by SoMeOnE at 8:39 AM Labels: Career, Entrepreneur, Success
Have you noticed that society often looks at successful people in hopes of somehow copying their magic formula? I know I have done this and fallen into the trap - the trap of thinking, praying even, that there is one magic solution for success and that it can be replicated by anyone with enough sheer will and desire. Clearly this is not true.
I don't want to miscommunicate here; of course it makes sense to learn lessons from people who have achieved the goals we want. They did something right and some of their ingredients may indeed work in your success recipe too. As Tony Robbins says: "Success leaves clues".
Clues however are not the entire story and as mentioned above, this is your success plan. Realizing this and taking full responsibility for yourself makes a huge difference. Look at you, your desires, your abilities, and with that, your chances of actually being successful increase substantially.
Here are some key realizations that I believe you should consider along your path to success. Take one, or a few, and if they are counter to your current beliefs debate yourself on how this view impacts your plan.
By seeing through some of the illusions bandied around about success we can get clear on what we need to do and see the wood for the trees. Things become much easier once we take responsibility for our own success.
Sometimes we have a warped way of looking at success as a magic formula to be cracked. Life in this ‘post magic formula cracking’ world is easy, abundant, problem free, but completely illusionary. The other point is that successful people have put the effort into achieving their success. Most of the time success hasn’t fallen into their lap. To achieve success in any area of life we need to put one foot in front of the other and move towards our goal.
Life is never solved. Recently, I have started working on a self employed basis as a mentor. I have wanted to be self employed for a very long time, particularly doing work I love like mentoring, and it is great to finally do that. However, I have realized that success often brings new sets of challenges that we might not have previously thought about! I am acutely aware of being grateful for where I now am, but also aware now that I am here that there is no magical place to get to! Doing what you love everyday is great but it is not problem free.
While the end result may be a great new product, website, or service, it's the process of developing that idea that often builds your character and provides the most learning opportunities. Look back on something significant you have achieved. Now look at the lessons you learned along the way. Would you really swap them so you could have fast forwarded to the result? However difficult things may be it has made us who we are today.
As society speeds up and we have more gadgets and technology to make life easier, we are getting used to quick fixes. If we don’t achieve something quickly we think it’s not worth achieving or that it is taking too long. Life isn’t a race. We don’t get a badge for the speed at which we travel through life. I sometimes find myself falling into that trap with my blog - thinking it should be more developed or have more subscribers. When I catch myself thinking like this, I try and take a step back and remind myself about what I enjoy about what I am doing and that building anything worthwhile takes time.
Following on from my last point, there is no ‘quick fix’. Anything worthwhile does take time. We need to learn to develop the skills of being persistent and keeping the bigger picture in mind. I think this is why people sometimes say that personal development books don’t work. What they are forgetting is that the missing link is hard work. Reading a book or going to a seminar alone will not change our life. Knowledge, taking action, inserting inspiration, hard work and patience is what will make the difference.
It is for us alone to find our passion. No one can teach us their passion. Others can help us find our passion and can also share their experiences in a way that can help us find our own but our passion is fundamentally different for each of us. Our passion is a unique cocktail of our own inner whisperings, life experiences and individual skills and talents. It is our job to try new experiences in order to hunt our passion(s) down. For example, I didn’t realize I had a passion for blogging till I stumbled across the blogosphere last year whilst setting up my website for my coaching services.
By all means, enlist the help of good mentors and learn from others who are further along a similar path. But, remember that we all have a unique path and it is our job to work out how to bring that to the fore. Sometimes the reason we look to others for the answer to ‘success’ is because we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t trust ourselves to do our own thing, to take a risk and to shine. We need to learn to trust ourselves. Start today, listen to what your intuition is saying and start doing what feels right for you. 
Written on 4/28/2010 by Jennifer Smith. Jen is a Life Coach and Personal Development blogger who can be found at Reach Our Dreams. You can connect with Jen on Twitter @reachourdreams or if you liked this article then why not subscribe to her RSS Feed?
I am a member of a very special club. It’s a club that I’ve sometimes been embarrassed to be a part of, but at the moment, I’m quite proud to belong to.
I’ve been looking for a proper name for this club. Cast your vote or add an idea below:
* People of the Random Resume
* Knights of Les Resumes Incoherent
* Proud Owners of Resumes With Invisible Logic (otherwise and aptly known as POOR WILL).
I could go on with the names and in case you haven't guessed my issue, I've accomplished a lot during my career but my resume leaves people with a furrowed brow, if not a headache. There is no flow, there is no evidence of promotion.
I've never made career decisions strategically. I never took a job because of how it would look on my resume, or because of the next job it would prepare me for. Instead, I allowed myself to be led by my creative and intellectual appetite. I’ve moved from studying Shakespeare to writing books, from helping organizations navigate change to going to business school, from helping people giving their money away to coaching and writing.
I know lots of people like me, people who aren’t tying their careers to a company, an industry or even a function anymore. Instead, they are weaving careers with some combination of:
Is this wrong? I don't think so. Although, I know that a lot of these people feel bad of about the lack of order in their resumes the alternative is to stay stuck in unfulfilling, boring careers because they are afraid to take a creative leap out of their industry or function—afraid to end up with a work history that sounds incoherent or odd.
Those are the people that this message is for and here’s what I want them to know:
This approach of designing a career out of current passions and interests rather than a long-term strategy is not without some tradeoffs:
But, none of these things are the end-of-the-world outcomes that the little voice of fear in your head is chattering about. These are simply tradeoffs and you get to decide if the tradeoffs are worth it for you.
All of our professional paths have consistency and order. It’s just that sometimes that consistency and order is not obvious at the surface level. It’s happening one level below the surface, in what I call “the work underneath your work.”
This is the work you actually do underneath your title, job, role, or project. That work comes out of who you really are – your particular strengths and gifts.
For example, my friend Kalli has moved from HR to Marketing to teaching roles across a few different industries, but consistently, she has been solving tough, time-pressured operational problems with a very collaborative, consensus driven approach. That’s one of her particular gifts, and it shows up in every job she’s been in.
What have you really been doing in your work—in across your various past roles? Creating new ideas, building teams, negotiating relationships, problem solving, mediating, synthesizing, organizing, fire-extinguishing? Look at your work history through this lens and see what you discover.
Find some succinct language to describe what you really do – the work underneath your work – so that you can share it with prospective employers, current employers, and colleagues. Talk about it so that the people around you know the kinds of opportunities you are looking for and that you thrive in.
Look for opportunities to do the work underneath your work. Look for problems that need the particular kind of solutions you bring, gaps that your particular gifts can fill.
Industry expertise is decreasing in value. As information becomes democratized, what used to be hard to gain “industry expertise” is becoming much more accessible--through online sources, books, and live and virtual education.
In fact, industry expertise is just one more form of technical knowledge. As Daniel Pink argues in A Whole New Mind
Plus, as the pace of change accelerates, everyone is constantly learning their industry anew, whether they just entered it or have been working within it for a long time.
For those of us with seemingly incoherent resumes, and for those longing to go do some thing that won’t make obvious sense on their resume, this is all very, very good news. 
Written on 4/13/2010 by Tara Sophia Mohr . Tara s a writer and coach who blogs at Wise Living. You can receive her free unconventional goals guide, “Turning Goals Upside Down and Inside Out to Get What You Really Want” by clicking here.
Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, originated the theory of soul mates. He believed that humans were born with 4 arms, 4 hands, and 2 faces. Zeus, Greek King of Gods, saw this as a potential threat and split everyone in half; thereby, condemning everyone to a life of trying to find their other half in order to be whole.
In modern day life, we consider our soul mate as someone who has similar characteristics, dislikes and likes, as well as compliments our differences. What if the same concept applied to finding our “soul job?” This would be a job that we enjoyed going to everyday, yes, there would be some bad times as well as good times, but there is still a sense of fulfillment and gratification at the end of the workday. It is important to note that a soul career/job doesn’t have to satisfy us financially, but gratify us emotionally and intellectually. Here are a few tips in finding and “mating” with your soul job:
It takes some people a lifetime to find a soul mate, and some are still unsuccessful. Finding a ‘soul job’ requires keeping an open mind, being persistent and ambitious. Does your half have what it takes to get what you want to become whole?
We all know that it can’t be peaches and cream everyday. For example, firemen realize that they are going to be saving lives and going into fire and smoke-filled homes and buildings to save lives, but they still do it. They understand the threats and still come to work everyday and give 110%. You can do the same.
Ever thought about working in a job that you would otherwise think unsuitable for you? Currently, you may be a clerk or cashier in a retail store, did you ever think about being a doctor or a nurse? Think about why you haven’t started on the journey to being who you want to be, and then think about what it takes to become whole and get the job you really want. It may seem frightening at first, because you are considering the time, money, and effort, but wouldn’t it be worth it? Aren’t YOU worth it?
After thinking about what you really want to do, determine what steps you will need to complete to accomplish your goals. Will you need to go back to school? How long will it take? Do you know someone already in the field that can give you advice and even be a mentor? Now is the time to begin living the dream that will become a reality. Be realistic, you know you won't be a certified nurse in a year. Realize time constraints, be optimistic. This will make getting your soul job all the more satisfying.
So you like the company you are with, but the job position isn’t really what you want to do. Be consistent and check the job board or company listings. Be subtle and let people know you are interested in taking on more responsibilities in order to reach your goal within the company. If the job you desire requires more education or experience, refer back to tip #3 and research what you need to do to get to where you want to be.
Written on 4/02/2010 by Dewoun M. Hayes. Dewoun has worked as an administrative professional for over 15 years, starting as a legal secretary. She writes at the Office Professionals Place, a blog that is committed to training, educating, and consulting professionals with the necessary tools, tips, and techniques needed to institute the “pro” in professional.