Career Choices Are Life Choices
For the typical career professional, your daily pursuits are much more than just having a job and paying the bills. Remember the old adage about whether you "eat to live or live to eat"? We could easily compose a similar challenge about work: Do you "work to live or live to work"? Even based on the sheer number of hours we spend at work, this is an important consideration.
Assuming an eight-hour day and seven hours of sleep at night, approximately one-third of our waking hours are spent at work. For many professionals, especially physicians, this percentage is probably closer to one-half of their waking hours! That's a huge chunk of your life. This puts into perspective the significant impact our career choices can have on how we view our lives.
Understanding Culture and Language
Our language often betrays us. Notice that in the opening paragraph I used the word "spend," as in "the time I spend at work." This is how many people describe their work, and it doesn't sound like a highly satisfying pursuit!
This observation led me to create an exercise, which I have conducted with leaders regarding how they view their jobs. They are given three choices for assessing the content of their work. Please try this yourself. As I describe each of the three categories, estimate the percentage of your job that falls into each category.
The first category is "play." This is job content that is fun and what you would tend to do regardless of whether or not you were compensated for it. We have all seen people readily agree to do a task that was beyond the job description. Why? Because it was a task they viewed as fun, as an outlet for untapped creativity or a channel for self-actualization. If I tell myself, "I'm going to play," there is no resistance or creative avoidance. We all like to play.
The second category is "work." This is job content that is not play. It's work. This is activity that, although not fun, you would agree to do for reasonable compensation.
Illustration: My father was a mechanic and ran a DX gas station in Valley Station, Kentucky. He lived during a time when people might barter for goods if they didn't have the money to pay for them. A man asked my father, "I need my car repaired. Do you want to do it?" My father might reply, "No, I don't want to do it. I don't have any fun repairing cars. However, I will do it for reasonable compensation, say a 100 pounds of potatoes from your garden."
I can tell myself, "I'm going to work," and have a reasonably high level of commitment to follow through with this objective.
The third category is "misery." Job content in this category is not only not play, but there is no compensation imaginable to make it pleasurable. I tell myself, "I'm about to do something that I don't want to do and I'll be miserable doing it." I will be wonderfully creative in finding every reason to avoid that activity.
How do you see the composition of your professional experience concerning activities that are categorized as play, work, and misery? Here are the typical survey results among professionals:
Assessing Instinct and Life Choices
Life should be rampant with fun. I believe that one of your life goals should be to move yourself into more activities that are fun and away from activities that bring you misery. The initial step in toward fun is to identify those activities that constitute "play." To do so, first clarify your natural tendencies for interacting with your world in order to make better life choices.
There are personal assessments that promote this aspect of self-discovery. For example, completing the self-paced "Extended DISC" assessment can aid you in making better life and career choices as well as in determining how to be more effective in your current roles. Such an assessment can help you understand your intrinsic personality traits and behavioral tendencies that coalesce in the following categories:
Certain specialties may call for different aspects of these four personality dimensions. For example, an accountant may require more of the task/quality focus and attention to detail and procedure where a sales person may be more successful in the people-focus and extroverted category. A person who has differing natural tendencies may need to moderate behavior in order to work effectively in this specialty and be successful. This is not to suggest that someone with differing natural tendencies couldn't be successful in that role--only that adaptation may be necessary for professional effectiveness and personal satisfaction.
When you have to adapt yourself to fit a role, you may not be miserable, but it will likely be hard work. For this reason, it's best to choose roles that match your personality and behavioral styles.
When you are in a role that has some mismatches, plan for some conscious moderation to enhance working relationships and performance.
Understanding Your Mojo
There is another concept that can have significant impact on your day-to-day energy and performance. Also, it can promote a greater sense of "ownership" and job satisfaction.
Ask yourself: "Given a set of circumstances, how can I make the situation not only more palatable, but how can I transform it by my 'positive spirit'?" This is referred to as "mojo"--literally, a type of magic charm. For purposes of discussion, it can be regarded as "that positive spirit toward one's activities that originates from the inside and radiates to the outside."
Your mojo is not fixed or limited in quantity at birth such that "when it's gone, it's gone." It is renewable and each person governs how it gets renewed -- and it changes with different activities and circumstances over time.
The goal in renewing mojo is two-fold: First, choose activities that more naturally maximize it, and, second, generate as much of it as possible regardless of the activity. On the inside, high mojo results in personal excitement about the activity in which you are engaged at the moment. As it radiates to the outside, which it will, you will experience spreading positive energy to everyone around you.
What You Bring to Work
The first aspect investigates what you bring to a certain activity in personal or professional pursuits. This includes enthusiasm and energy, knowledge and "know-how", skills, confidence, genuineness, and authenticity. Obviously, you bring differing amounts of these attributes depending on the activity. For some activities, you might bring high amounts of several of these attributes, and for other activities you might bring lesser amounts.
What You Gain from Work
The second aspect deals with what a certain activity brings to you. An activity can bring both short-term and/or long-term returns. For the short-term, an activity can be stimulating and rewarding and promote personal happiness. In the long-term, an activity can provide meaning and help you to learn and grow. Overall, an activity can engender a sense that it was a valuable use of time, promoting feelings of gratefulness.
As with your inputs, the short- and long-term returns differ by activity. Some activities might have either a short- or long-term impact, whereas other activities may bring both short- and long-term impact.
Concluding Thoughts
Ideally your day is filled with activities that score high on most of the above inputs and returns. Over time, if you know which activities bring you happiness and meaning and which don't, the intent is to manage your life so that you do more of those activities which bring up your mojo and minimize or eliminate altogether those that don't.
But, life is not ideal. The reality is that we all have to do things we don't like some times. However, we're not stuck. Here are some quick suggestions for how you might engage, retain, or regain mo, even while you're doing the most mundane activities.
Life is much too short to simply tolerate it. Continually pursue some aspect of self-discovery as we talked about earlier. Take responsibility for forging a new path that is a better fit with your personality make-up. If that seems unlikely, and that is the reality for most of us, then take responsibility for being more effective in your current situation.
As simple as it may sound, by increasing your effectiveness, you can elicit a more positive response from others. Finally, take action to discover and enhance your own happiness and meaning--through new pursuits, by reframing current activities, by extending what you bring to the situation, or by finding hidden value. In so doing, you will experience more positive associations with others and a richer, more satisfying life in general.
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And now there is no work to sustain my practice in the locale where i have always lived.
I love my work because it has nothing to do with the Financially focused environment so many seem to think is an "asset" or an "investment" . Rather the work is about Home. The work is about sanctuary.
And now, the work has all but virtually disappeared due to greed and the wealth hoarding mentality of our American culture.
This feeling of powerlessness has left me lost and quite bitter. My work left me satisfied from creating something of "value" other than financially based value. Poof. Gone. the financially focused won out on this one did not they?
The musings of Mary Poppins:
In every job that must be done there is an element of fun.
You find the fun and - snap! - the job's a game.
Even if it’s only devising ways to do it quicker, and/or with less effort.
We all must pick a game to play and a role....those without a role or game populate our mental institutions largely eventually according to De Ropp, a great book I highly recommend it...
Also The Book by Alan Watts....
It's also similar to Joseph Campbell saying "Follow your bliss...!"
I quit. I began to work for myself. Now I do as I wish. I am beholden to no man or suffocating organization. I think more broadly and clearly. I am self sufficient. I am responsible. I pay my fair share ot taxes. I am independent. I direct an independent family. No individual or organization is going to compromise my ideas or ideals. I am an American.
'Your mojo is not fixed or limited in quantity at birth such that "when it's gone, it's gone." It is renewable and each person governs how it gets renewed.'
In my opinion, the key is: 'each person governs how it gets renewed'.
I couldn't agree more. But at the risk of sounding overly cautious, I would like to point out that this has TWO sides: it can entail all the potential you will ever need in your life - but it can also mean you can ruin it.
It's probably not a coincidence that the term 'mojo' has a certain magical ring to it. I'm not saying it's impossible to know how to make sure you don't waste your mojo. But I sure as heck claim that on the path upwards on the corporate ladder you have every reason to think twice about what exactly it is that might compromise your mojo - say, a few years down the road from now.
No activity is, in itself, either immanent or transient, and every person engages in both activity types. And every individual can, through various means of self-examination, make explicit to and for oneself which activities are which. One such means is suggested by this author.
The simple upshot of this distinction is that each person, by forging a path which maximizes what is, for oneself, immanent activity and minimizes what is, for oneself, transient activity, is engaged in an effort on the short list of "how to lead an authentic, satisfying life." And because "which is which for me" is not an essentially static configuration, we ought to help the young people in our lives develop the discernment and contemplative "how to" that will equip them with the means---the necessary "life tools"---for determining for themselves which is the wheat and and which is the chaff.
Sadly too many forget that life is too short and doing something you detest, makes for a miserable life.
I was lucky enough (or planned well enough) so that I enjoyed my entire working life as an engineer. As I got older I made the decision that I wouldn't do ANYTHING that I didn't enjoy any longer. I dropped being a manager - wiping away the tears of cry babies was never any fun. I stopped being an input to the bean counters - if they wanted to quantify my work they had to understand it themselves and I stopped doing rote work - that's what the new guys are for.
I was careful to only do well what I enjoyed doing. I only worked on new ideas and leading teams to create new ideas. My job became the most enjoyment I had in my life and I could not wait to get to work in the morning.
Lucky me - nope. I planned it that way.
It could be that any job with a degree of creation is what is needed to make you happy.
Good Luck to you and your happy brother.