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It was a complete blank for me. A complete and utter blank.
That’s what Louise McNee said when she was asked by our team “What would you be doing if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now?”
She had no idea.
Here’s the thing. That’s not just Louise, that’s most of the people that we work with.
Why Imagining Career Happiness is Hard
Most of us can’t really imagine what something so drastically different than what we’ve already done might actually be like. So how would we know what else is out there?
Here’s an example:
I used to live in a very poor, very small town in Northern Idaho. Some of the residents didn’t get out very much. When I was 8 years old, my second grade class took a field trip to the nearby dam.
To get to the top of the dam you had to go in an elevator.
Several of the students in my class had never been in an elevator before.
Some of them didn’t even know what an elevator was. (Yes really).
If you asked them to imagine what they wanted to use to get to the top of the dam, if they weren’t going to use the stairs, I don’t know if they would have been able to tell you.
Maybe they would have said a hot air balloon or an airplane just because they had heard of those, but honestly I don’t think those would have been particularly functional for getting to the top of a large structure.
If you would have asked them what an elevator feels like they would have looked at you like you were crazy. After all they just found out an elevator existed and if they had to guess they would probably be wrong.
However as soon as they had experienced riding on an elevator they instantly knew what it was, what it felt like AND that it was the mode of travel they wanted to use to get to the top of the dam.
Your career is a lot like that elevator trip to my second grade classmates. When you only know that where you are isn’t where you want to be, it’s hard to imagine what you might actually want to be doing when you’ve never experienced it before.
The Recipe to Create “Stuck” in Your Career
Louise had three other things that were keeping her stuck in the same exact place.
- Every day when she finished work she was drained. Her current work wasn’t creating energy for her it was sucking the life out of her. This meant that finding the energy to look for other work or figure out what she really wanted was hard. It also created an endless cycle where by the time the weekend rolled around, and she had a couple days off, she needed those for recovery only to be able to do it all over again.
- She was putting an immense amount of pressure on herself to find the “one perfect career” that would contain all of her interests. By doing so she was defining herself completely by her career and creating an impossible task for herself at the same time.
- She had already changed jobs multiple times thinking this would solve her problems. It hadn’t worked. This left her feeling even more unsure about where she wanted to go.
These three areas along with the earlier challenge of imagining where she actually wanted to be were making it nearly impossible for Louise to move forward.
She had to begin breaking it down into much smaller steps and pieces to be able to move forward.
Want to learn exactly what she did? Take a listen to the episode above! 🎧
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