What’s love got to do with it?
Classic wisdom says to find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. The modern upgrade is: find your passion. But for those of us who just need to pay our bills, that advice can seem out of touch, if not downright toxic.
Not long ago I was completely burnt out. I was in a job where my skills were underutilized. My strengths and ideas went unappreciated and unacknowledged. I knew I needed to make a change and hired a career coach to help me update my resume and figure out where to begin.
We went through my entire work history. But she didn’t only ask about my daily responsibilities and accomplishments. And thank goodness!
Maybe you’re like I was.
I knew I was turning in projects and completing assignments well and on time. But after years of a culture that rated “above and beyond” effort as the bare minimum, and management practices requiring constant hustling-for-worth against ever-shifting demands, I had a hard time identifying where I had “succeeded.” By that time, everything about the job left me with a sense of failure – no matter how much others told me I was doing good work.
Maybe like me, you know you’re ready for a change. And maybe, like me, you’re ready to take the next step in your career or pivot to something else entirely. But maybe you’re not sure where to begin, and the idea of pulling out your resume is exhausting even to think about.
I just needed to find my next step.
First, take a deep breath. Really. All the way in, and all the way out.
My coach asked me not only to think of the things my former boss might count as an achievement. She wanted me to think more broadly about the things I loved doing: what made me feel happy, what I looked forward to, what I was proud of. She also invited me to think beyond just a professional context to hobbies and volunteering, other things I did in my free time, to explore what really lit me up inside.
We’re taught that work should be hard; that “hard work” is somehow virtuous. Often people doing “dream jobs” in the nonprofit and arts sectors pay an income penalty because, the reasoning goes, being able to do meaningful, or even fun, work somehow should be a reward in itself. If someone does something for the love of doing it, society says, they should do it for free.
What makes something valuable?
But no one has ever paid bills with fun and love! So we learn to devalue those things we enjoy, what we’re good at, the things that come naturally and easily to us. Because if they’re not “hard work,” they must not be valuable work.
Of course that thinking is wrong-headed. There is no inherent virtue in hard things just because they’re hard. It’s the exact opposite. We excel at things that readily make sense to us in ways that they simply don’t to others. And it’s natural to enjoy sharing our expertise. Instead, the very things that are most fun and easy are our superpowers! The fact that no two humans are exactly alike means those things are different for each of us, yet necessary for the benefit of all of us.
Find your secret superpower!
Focusing on the things we most enjoy, the moments we’ve felt most proud, reveals our strengths most clearly. When considering a jump to something new, the most profound way to meaningful contribution is to lean into those strengths. We can find roles with requirements that align with the things we most enjoy. And it’s okay to draw from outside professional work history – experience is experience!
Deciding to leave a steady job can feel overwhelming. But the first step is to reclaim the value of doing work you love and seeing things that come easily as the strengths they truly are.
