Jul 07 2019
96

5 Life Lessons: #3

By Jeanne

Follow your dreams, but don’t be surprised when your path takes a few unexpected turns.

This lesson is about choosing a career that makes you happy. Life is too short to hate your job. When you hate your job, you are unhappy for a good portion of your time. Life is way too short for that.

This is a lesson I know well. Years back, I worked as an instructor and consultant for a local training company. I worked there for almost ten years. For the first seven, I loved it. I had a lot of variety, I used my brain to help solve people’s problems, and I learned a lot. The last three years, not so much. The company went in a direction I didn’t like, they changed their business model to chase the next new thing in training. That’s all fine, but the leaders weren’t admitting that they were planning on virtually eliminating the business line where I did most of my work.

As a result, I was bored. I was cranky. I felt undervalued and I was unmotivated.

Boredom sucks.

After a long, stressful consulting gig ended, the company laid me off. There was no new work lined up. No surprise there. They laid me off in a really crappy way, but that’s another story. At that point I was mad, I railed against the unfairness of the situation, I stomped around the house.

Until I realized how much better life was already. I hated that job. Why did I stay so long? I was lazy, after so long I was unsure of what else to do. So I freelanced for a few years. Loved it. Hated the uncertainty of my income though. So when one of my gigs turned into a permanent opportunity, I took it.

I had learned some stuff as a result of this experience. I promised myself that I would never again work in a job I hated. When you love what you do, when your brain and your heart are both engaged, you look differently at your work. It’s no longer a job, it’s a career. It’s no longer drudgery, it’s fun. When you look up and see the how late it is, and realize how much time has passed while you were submerged in whatever you were doing, life is good. Watching the clock sucks. Don’t do that.

Life is a long and winding road. When I look back on my career, I’m not where I expected to be. Although I’ve never been a job hopper, my work has taken twists and turns that I never saw coming. Because of a part-time job I had when I was in college, I took a position as a bookkeeper and I took a lot of accounting courses. What was I thinking? I didn’t know myself well enough to listen to that inner voice telling me that I would be bored in finance. I was lucky to have a semester where I took both organizational psychology and training needs assessment to realize I was on the wrong path.

I could’ve stayed on that track, I had a lot invested in it. But that light bulb went on when my org psych professor had us take an IQ test and I realized that I consistently score higher on verbal/written areas than math. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no math dummy, but I wasn’t playing to my strengths, and what sense does that make when you look at careers?

I don’t regret my paths or my decisions, because I am where I am today. I love my job -so far. It’s only been 14 years. When that changes, so will I. I’ve kept that commitment to myself, and that’s the key for me. It’s not always been an easy road, that’s for sure. Some elements of my work life have really sucked, but that’s for another day. What’s important is that I am engaged with what I do, I love my team and co-workers, and I’m happy to go to work.

I wish that for you.

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Tagscareers Life Lessons

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