by Gilda Bonanno LLC www.gildabonanno.com
I was on the train recently and overheard the
man next to me on his cell phone, saying, “I hate my job!”
Do you
agree with him? How do you feel about the
job where you spend most of your waking hours and which may occupy your
thoughts even during your sleeping hours?
If you are
suffering from career burnout, you wake up to the sound of your alarm clock
with an awful feeling in the pit of your stomach because you have to go to work
today. Or you feel the “Sunday night
blues” – as the sun sets on Sunday, you begin to feel blue, because in the
morning the work week starts again and there is no holiday on Friday.
In the
long term, ignoring your feelings of career burnout can be very detrimental to your
physical, emotional and mental health, your relationships and your career. When you’re facing career burnout, you have
two choices: you can either recommit to your job or make a change.
Recommit to Your Job
Rather
than feeling miserable at work every day and then going home and sharing your
unhappiness about your job with your family, try to rediscover or create an
aspect of your work that excites you.
Remember why
you got into the field in the first place and what you used to enjoy about it. Or be creative and figure out what else you
could do in your job to make it more interesting for you and to provide more
value to your employer. For example, if
you’re an IT project manager who enjoys public speaking, could you offer to
represent your company at industry conferences? If you’re an interior designer who enjoys
sharing your experiences, could you mentor newer designers at your firm?
In order
to pursue a new or newly rediscovered portion of your job, you may need to
develop or hone your skill set. And you
will have to be persistent and savvy in how you market this to your manager so
it’s a win-win-win: for you, your manager and the company. Exploring these others facets of your work will
make it more enjoyable and allow you to recommit to your job.
Make a Change
If you’re
not able to recommit to your job, or you’re not willing, or circumstances don’t
allow it, the only other option is to make a change. You could change roles,
functions, departments, locations, companies or even careers.
I’ve quit
my job to change careers and let me tell you, it’s not easy. You don’t just wake up in the morning and
say, “Today, I’m quitting!” While it might feel good in the short term to do
that, it’s not the reality.
In order
to make a change, you need a plan. First, you have to answer three questions:
“What am I good at? What do I like doing? What does the marketplace need?”
And where
your answers overlap is the sweet spot that you can build on. It’s not enough if only two areas come
together. You may be good with numbers,
but you don’t enjoy working with them.
Or you may love computer programming, but you’re not really good at
it. Or you may love drawing and be good
at it, but no one is willing to pay you for it.
That’s not enough.
All three
of these areas have to come together and then you have to be creative in
building a new role or career in that magical space where the three intersect. Like
with recommitting to your job, you may need to brush up on your skills or
develop new ones. And you
have to be clever when you’re looking at the marketplace and trying to
anticipate needs.
You have
to look at your knowledge, skills and experience with a fresh perspective so
you can identify new opportunities where you can provide value and feel
fulfilled. You’ll also need a timeline,
a strong financial plan to support a temporary change in or loss of earnings and
the support of your advisers/mentors and your family.
Continuing
in a job that you hate is not doing any good for you or the company. And while it may provide a certain sense of
financial stability (which may be an illusion given the variability of
companies and the prevalence of layoffs), it is eroding your sense of worth and
fulfillment and destroying your happiness.
Is that
really the legacy you want to leave – “she worked at a job she hated and then
she died”?
Don’t want
until it’s too late. Make the decision
now whether it’s time to recommit to your job or quit your job.
Gilda Bonanno's blog www.gildabonanno.blogspot.com