Stop the Job Suckage: Day Four

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Day Four: The “Can’ts.”

Perhaps you read yesterday’s post and decided that you “can’t” find any solutions to incorporating a particular quality into your current career/job.

Perhaps because there’s no time, no money, or because someone else won’t let you.

Yesterday I offered the example of bringing creativity into the workplace, and offered some example hypothetical solutions. One was to see if people from the office would be interested in getting together for a once a month art group.

Resistance–which is codename for that fear-based part of ourselves that doesn’t want to try anything new because it would be, ugh, hard–is going to say something about how that’s a lot of effort, and you don’t even like the people from work anyway, and no one else is creative, and they’re not creative the way you want them to be creative, and you don’t have a house where that could happen, and you’d feel stupid if you put it out there and no one responded, and…

Okay, cool. So Resistance has all of that come up. Now–what are you more committed to? Resistance, or stopping the Job Suckage?

If, right now, you’re more committed to Resistance, that’s okay. No need to cue the grand inquisitor. You’re not bad or wrong. You’re just at where you’re at.

If you read that and thought, “No, you don’t get it, I’m not committed to Resistance–I want to CHANGE,” then we circle right back to that list of brainstorming, and all of the myriad possible ways that life could get shaken up and look different because you were courageous enough to take a new step. 

Whatever Resistance comes up for you, accept it and then work through it. Beating down Resistance with happy affirmations does not work (you heard it here, first). Accepting that you have Resistance, that “Can’ts” come up, is part of the work. Courageously making a different choice is another part of the work.

What are you more committed to?

Maybe you’re overworked at your office and you want peace. Maybe you brainstormed solutions like, “Delegate work to someone else” because you were thinking of any possibility, but really, you can’t imagine that that will ever be a possibility–there are budget cuts, there is no one else who can take the work, etc.

Okay, fine–that might not ever happen. In what other ways can you bring peace to the workplace? Five minute meditation? Closing your eyes and breathing for thirty seconds?

Resistance is going to pop up and go–”But that’s not what I WANT, I want the kind of peace that comes from not having as much work; it won’t work for me to close my eyes and meditate, I NEED the solution to be that someone else takes this work off of my hands!”

Recognize that that is Resistance. Resistance is going to tell you that it’s all or nothing. Resistance is going to tell you that taking any step that is not THE SOLUTION is wrong.

So, to what are you more committed?

Review your list of brainstorming items. Put a star next to the ones that you most wish would happen. Put a checkmark next to the ones that you notice you are most Resistant to–the ones you believe are most impossible to have happen.

Challenge: start daydreaming about the changes you most wish would happen, working out possibilities like you’d move puzzle pieces around to see where things fit. Notice the Resistance that comes up.