Rare is the man or woman who can walk with graceful indifference to their career. I once had a music teacher advise me to learn all the theory I could, and then forget it.
Be the best you can be in your craft and then let it go. Really.
Identity and career are two parts of life that should never meet. If they do, it can be lethal, and very difficult to separate. A career can take over and leave true identity on life support. I speak from experience. It takes a long time to regain, or replace, what you lose.
I’ve found these dangers in the mixing of identity and career:
Quiet resignation. This occurs when we get older or have been at something for a while. The lie we tell ourselves is “we’re in too deep, and it could be worse.”
The high. It feels good in the moment, so we desire the thrill. We enjoy being seduced by flattery and accomplishment. Nothing quite like being the one to watch.
The ghost of our father. This one is so subtle. We watched a man, or a woman, toss away life for not much in the end. That script then becomes our own.
The payback. Somewhere we got wounded and the chip appeared. This is the closet sociopath coming out to wreck the place.
The false obligation. We pull out all the noble reasons for staying. “I have a mortgage, I have my kid’s college education.” It’s as if we think we’ll be excused for our fear in the end.
The choice is mine, the choice is yours. We have to remember that career is a great dance when the identity is kept separate. The challenge is found in living in a culture that values the opposite.
Most organizations, these days, are speaking the language of happiness. For some entities it’s just talk, for others a striving everyday.
Employee happiness and engagement are connected. Maybe it’s obvious for you. I come from a view that says your company is not responsible for your happiness. Only you can own that. Whether it’s changing roles, transferring geographically or firing your boss with your feet, it still comes back to you.
Why are so many employees unhappy?
My answers:
Employees make choices that lead to unhappiness. On the whole, we live unbalanced and incongruent lives. The unbalance is found in our willingness to pour mind, body and soul into one area of life, while ignoring another. See the work versus family civil war, many are fighting right now. As someone who used to value my work over my family, it is a civil war. The incongruent part is the BS we tell the world. For example, “family is number one for me.” Nobody is perfect, but if you know you haven’t lived this out in over two years, you’re living incongruently. These are the recipes for unhappiness.
Employers foster unhappiness by the conditions their employees work under. Here’s the deal, if you are a CEO and you expect an employee to get excited about the stock price or last quarter’s earnings, you need a straight-jacket. Happiness and engagement happen when there is a great mission to achieve, something beautiful to create or a dangerous problem to solve. Without those, most will leave, or worse, die and stay.
Employees have defined happiness incorrectly. For me, happiness is fluid. It’s not a genie to be captured in a bottle. If you would have looked at my life yesterday, I would have been 90% happy and 10% unhappy. Those numbers don’t make me special, I just chose to be happy 90% of the day. I chose to be unhappy too. I think many are too fixated on happiness. Like life, happiness is not an arrival point. If we look at happiness as fluid, we’ll be better able to handle the stuff of life. Maybe we’ll find that moments of unhappiness are not the end of the world.
Employers are living in the past. Organizing your company like the industrial revolution happened last year is a disaster. Most employees live life in and around the 21st century. It frustrates the hell out of them when they’re treated like an assembly line worker or treated as if they’re a 4th grader.
In the end, every employer has an agenda. It may be a fit for you, or not. Either way happiness is your animal to wrestle with.
Great conversation with Alan Corey, author of the The Subversive Job Search: How to Overcome a Lousy Job, Sluggish Economy, and Useless Degree to Create a Six-Figure Career. His insights might surprise you.
Why do you think most
job-seekers trust the status quo approach to looking for new employment?
No one is
taught job hunting in school so many job hunters get their job searching advice
from a trusted family member or friend who they think has great job. They want
to know how he or she was able to do it so they can replicate the same steps.
Unfortunately, that advice is always outdated as they’ve probably have held
that job for five or more years and even worse, it may be the only job they
have ever had.
You want to
talk to someone how is constantly job hunting. Ask them how they are getting
noticed? What is working and what is not working? I’ve had 5 jobs in 24 months
and I learned a lot as I was constantly on the hunt. And I’m still learning
more. But the big difference is that
employers are hiring differently than they have in the past.
A decade ago,
employers hired based on an employee’s potential. If you came from a good
school or had a college degree, then you’d be worth taking a chance on. But now
employers don’t have time or budget to train new employees, which means job
seekers need to come in with value on day one.
It’s on the job seeker to pay to get their own training, have to find
their own way to build up their own skill set, and create their own working experience. Showing you can come to work the first day with value is the
difference between getting noticed or not by a hiring manger in today’s
economy.
In your book you discuss your
struggles with depression. It seems like depression would go hand-in-hand with
a loss of a job, what advice would you give to someone in that spot?
Yes, I was unemployed for a
year and suffering depression and the number one thing is getting help. Depression
sucks the life out of you, and without help from family and therapy I may still
be there. Talking about it helped a lot
and allowed me to look at my situation in a new light.
If you find yourself in this
situation reach out to family, friends, and professional help. My therapist
gave me the tools to get back on my feet. There shouldn’t be shame associated
with losing your job. It happens. It’s life. I realized I was one of millions
suffering from lack of employment and it gave me encouragement to try job
hunting in different ways. I eventually
made job hunting my number one focus, stopped blaming others for my problems,
stopped blaming the economy for poor job prospects, and taught myself how to
job hunt subversively.
Is it important to know what’s
most important in your life when considering the next opportunity?
This is a
huge key to job hunting. I’ve job hunted for different reasons based on my and
my family’s needs. I’ve taken jobs just for the paycheck, I’ve taken jobs for
the experience, and I’ve even taken jobs for the abundance of vacation days it
provided. Each served a different
purpose of my life at different times.
It’s crucial
to recognize where you stand in your career. If you are entry level, go for the
experience. Or better yet, go for what excites you or what you want to learn
about. And realize that every job you
land may end quicker than you think it will, so always be building up your
skillset so you are instantly employable in case you get laid off. By taking
after-hour classes, networking outside your office, and reading your career’s
industry-focused magazines you’ll begin to learn what it is that you want from
your career and you’ll also know what it will take to get there. Working on
your career doesn’t just stop when you leave the office.
Where do you see the U.S. job
market heading in the next 3-5 years? Will people get more subversive in their
approach to finding employment?
I think the
job market will be improving and I see no other way to job hunt than to be a
bit subversive. You have to make yourself a big fish in this huge sea of job
applicants. This can be done by branding yourself correctly, working online or
for free to earn a reputation, or finding ways to be noticed within your career
niche. If you are labeled as an expert
at something, even if it is just one tiny task or responsibility, this goes a
long way to get employed. Someone out there will have a need for this expertise
and is willing to pay top dollar for an employee to fill it. If you recognize what these skill sets are
with your career, you’ll be no longer be a job hunter, but you’ll be head-hunted
instead by well-connected recruiters and hiring managers. The ideal situation
for anyone looking to further their career.
What advice would you give the
person, just out of college, trying to land their first job?
With hard work comes experience, with
experience comes opportunities, and with opportunities comes luck. And with all of these four things working for
you, then comes wealth. To be a graduate shows you’ve got the ability to work
hard, but most graduates lack experience that makes them the in-demand hires
they want to be.
I’d recommend freelancing online via website like odesk.com and elance.com to
earn real-world experience as quickly as possible and to prove you are a self-motivated
candidate. This is also a great way to learn what you like within your career,
learn what skills are in demand, and make a little money on while you job hunt.
Furthermore, they’ll have actually talking points to discuss in future
interviews that can help them make a great first impression.
My friend, Andy sent the following video from TED this week. It's a great talk on how we get work done and how we don't get work done. It may strike you as revolutionary or foreign, but I see it as the future of how we will get work done.
You've heard it a million times; "think outside of the box." Maybe more would do that if the people asking were not invested in the box industry. I used to be more tolerant of the think outside the box admonition. But I've moved to a place where I stop the train if someone tries to put me in a "box" or any other confined category.
I spent a good deal of time in the banking world before moving onto my mission at Epic Living. I was successful in many eyes. And to this day, I still have people who think my life then was nirvana or even better, I should go back to it because I was so good at it. When I tell them how much I loathed it, the inevitable furrowed brow appears.
I no longer take it personally.
The biggest reason people want you in a certain box has very little to do with you. It really is about them. It's much easier to keep order and predictability when a friend or colleague stays the way they're perceived. When someone makes a move outside that zone it produces anxiety, fear and even loathing. Call it a move to protect what they perceive as safe and secure.
