JobJoy: Finding Your Right Work Through the Power of Your Personal Story

Introduction to Revised Edition

Almost 15 years have passed since the first edition of this book was published in 1995. I have decided to re-issue as an eBook and update some of the information and stories.

Electronic publication makes it easy and effective to access resources with social media tools, including hyperlinks, podcasts, blogs, and more. I hope you will use the tools featured in this book.

Although I have learned a lot about career assessment and career coaching during the intervening period, one consistent theme is the enduring power of your personal story to provide accurate and reliable information about your right work.

In this edition, I am also featuring profiles of clients who have made successful transitions to careers based on the assessment process outlined in this book.

You can’t cheat life

We pay a heavy price for neglecting our authentic selves in favor of our social selves. When our sense of identity gets wrapped up in our work, we tend to think of ourselves more in terms of what we do for a living than in terms of a core set of talents and values.

When we make career decisions based on pleasing others, we are nurturing our social identities, and if our jobs disappear for one reason or another, it can shatter our self-esteem.

However, if we have a sense of who and what we are in terms of our right work then we are more grounded in a personal sense of security. When we have a clear picture of our authentic selves, we are usually more confident in our ability to ride the roller coaster of life’s ups and downs.

I really HATE my job! This is a phrase I hear almost every day as a career consultant who works with individuals in career transition. During the past 15+ years, I have been granted special access to the life stories of individuals. I have spent tens of thousands of hours in the company of thousands of individuals who have shared intimate and revealing details about their ideas, fears, hopes, ambitions, successes and failures.

For example, when Elizabeth came to see me, she was 52 years old and had been working for 37 years, most recently as a public servant sitting in front of a computer all day as an information analyst.

Her job required her to process about 90 email messages a day, plus 120 pages of info from the Internet, plus another 20 alert messages from subscriber-based services. She estimated only 10 of these 200+ messages were truly relevant to her job. She felt "stuck’ in her cubicle reading all day. She wasn’t the only one suffering from information overload. Of the 10 analysts employed in her section, 5 were on long-term stress leave.

Elizabeth herself appeared very fit and healthy. But she felt trapped in her job. She wanted help but felt severely constrained by her life circumstances. When she told me in no uncertain terms: I hate my job! I asked her what she did with all that negative energy? Was there an effigy of her boss that she could punch and kick during her lunch hours in order to discharge her frustration? No.

There are only two ways to process that kind of negative energy. One is to explode, such as the worst cases of going postal when a worker shoots his co-workers or boss. The other way is more common: we implode and the negative energy manifests in stress and dis-ease.

Although Elizabeth had a strong desire to do something, she felt unable to do anything because (1) she was only 3 years away from taking early retirement, and (2) she had two teenage children who aspired to a university education and needed her financial assistance. She felt compelled to continue down the same path.

I have a lot of compassion for individuals who feel trapped in this kind of employment situation: damned if they do leave their job (and risk financial insecurity) and damned if they don’t leave (and risk their health). It is sometimes called the dilemma of ‘golden handcuffs.’

Every 6 or 12 months, I’d contact Elizabeth for an update, asking her how she was coping. After two years, I got an email from her sister saying Elizabeth could not reply because doctors had found a tumor in her brain the size of a lemon. Three months later (and 2 years after we met) I cut her obituary from the newspaper and closed her file. She made it to age 54. Like many people in her situation, she never collected that precious pension.

However, her story, and similar ones I’ve encountered in my work, inspired me to write this book. We all know someone who is defeated by their job, perhaps a family member who is crushed by their job; or, a friend who is underemployed and humiliated by the mundane, boring, and repetitive tasks of their work; or, a colleague who has been rendered impotent by the hierarchical structures of the institution he or she works in.

Many of us have toiled for hours, months, even years, in jobs that are empty of meaning or purpose. We understand how many of the organizations and structures around us are designed to take away our individual power. Most of us have the feeling that we are always pleasing others, fulfilling their intentions for us. Little attention or respect is given to what we want, to the details of our personal fulfillment, to how our talents and motivations can be leveraged into meaningful service to others and society.

I am not suggesting that Elizabeth’s career pain caused her cancer but I am suggesting that it contributed to her dis-ease. Her case is perhaps an extreme example of what thirty years of job dissatisfaction can reap. However, some individuals have heard Elizabeth’s story and told me they would trade places with her in a heartbeat. They would relish the opportunity to sit in front of a computer every day reading emails in order to collect a public service salary and pension. For some reason, they believe they are impervious to the very pressures and stresses that undermined the well-being of Elizabeth and her colleagues.

Common sense defies their assumption. They too would experience stress, possibly burnout. However, the stress of struggling to pay bills, looking for jobs, coping with unemployment also takes a toll on health and well-being. The sad reality is that many individuals are managing career pain of one kind or another. If your work experience is full of pain, why not suffer in a cash-for-life public service job? This reasoning is rooted in a belief that work is suppose to hurt, that’s just the way it is. The temptation to cheat life is strong. Roll the dice, and hope you beat the odds and actually get a chance to collect your pension and enjoy a long, healthy retirement.

I work with scores of people every year struggling with burnout, depression, confusion, and cynicism. In almost all cases involving lengthy career pain, there is a serious degradation in the energy levels, health condition, peace of mind, self-confidence, courage, self-respect, happiness, freedom, and other aspects of their personal well-being. That negative energy has to go somewhere, and the sad truth is, it often turns against our bodies in the form of serious lifestyle illnesses.

In fact, the consequences extend beyond the individual. According to the World Health Organization, is the number one cause of disability in North America. It costs employers more money in lost productivity than any other illness. And the costs to society, in general, are huge. You can’t cheat life!

I hope to show that there is another way to approach your career. You don’t need to roll the dice and gamble away your life force. We can approach career choice systematically, with deliberate intentions to make the most of our talents and motivations. We can identify and define work settings that will recognize, reward and motivate us for what we do naturally and easily. We can identify specific job titles that best match our unique combination of talents, motivations, acquired skills, experiences, values and priorities.

It’s never too late to discover who we really are in terms of our right work. As adults, we have all the resources we need to grow into that person, and use tools and techniques that will help us become who we are in very practical and realistic terms. In adulthood, we find our value, not in acceptance by others, but because we believe in our worth. It’s a wonderful day when we can say in honesty, I know who I am and I’m glad I am me.

When we have the courage to really live, we find joy. Paul Tillich, a 20th C. philosopher, said, Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous Yes to one’s own true being. This takes courage in a world that is constantly trying to make us into something else.

That is why I call my career service and books JobJoy, to provide practical tools and encouragement to individuals to reclaim their authentic selves and to leverage their natural strengths and motivations into specific jobs and careers.

Preface

The purpose of this book is to help you find your right work, based on the evidence of your own life story. Everything you need to know about combining money with meaning is already inside you. This book will help you find it so that it can be developed into a specific job or business that will fill you with job joy!

This is not a how to book—how to write a resume, how to dress for an interview, or how to network. There are hundreds of books dedicated to those topics. Many people buy those books; some people even read them. But I have found that few people act on those books in any meaningful way. Why?

Career change of any kind—making a career switch in mid-life, looking for your first job, refashioning your current job—is an extremely difficult exercise for most of us. I put it on the same level as other sea changes in our lives making the decision to get married, or starting a family, or divorcing a long-time spouse. Is it any wonder there is a great deal of stress, anxiety, even fears around career changes?

Career transitions require a great deal of motivation. Few of us are able to muster the motivation required. Job-hunting requires self-confidence, a solid faith in your value as a human being who has something unique to offer the world through work. Few of us have that faith. This book will help you discover and develop that faith based on a very clear and real understanding of who and what you are in terms of work.

I have a private practice as a career consultant. In this book, you will follow the same process as my clients. You will have an opportunity to do exercises that will help identify and define your natural gifts and talents. The exercises will also help uncover your Key Success Factors and correlate them to a specific job or business that will recognize you for what you do naturally and effortlessly.

I strive to identify what is unique about each one of my clients, what is the essence of who and what they are in terms of work. I see this clarity. I then work with my clients to translate this clarity into reality, into a specific job or business. My goal is to help them find their right work as soon as possible—often with no further training or education required!

So, this is not a how to book. It is a do it book. It is an opportunity to make a real and positive change in your life. It is my hope that you will seize this opportunity. I am going to explain my process and why it works, then encourage you to do it!

My Story

I know the power of this process myself. This is my passion, to help individuals discover and define their purpose in life based on their natural gifts and talents. Although I read and study widely in this area, I am not offering you a second hand technique learned only from books.

I too suffered for many years in jobs that gave me very little satisfaction, in both the private and public sectors. I often felt bored, under-employed, under-challenged, undervalued and underpaid. At other times, I had a great deal of freedom in how I organized and performed my duties. I enjoyed considerable status, prestige and some influence. And yet, my job situation never felt right.

At age 22, I started doing the exercises in Richard Bolles’s job-hunting manual What Color is Your Parachute? I was determined to find my right work, to work with passion. I read many self-help books and career guides but I seemed to slip further from job satisfaction, even as I climbed higher up the success ladder in terms of status and pay.

In the end, I hired a career consultant in California who gave me the clarity I needed to make a career transition. Ironically, this professional career counselor with 20 years experience showed me how my combinations of natural gifts, education, experience and self-knowledge were ideally suited to a new career as a career consultant. It had been the first time in 20 years that she had made such a recommendation to one of her clients.

The recommendation of a career consultant is a difficult piece of advice to accept. All kinds of doubts and anxieties rear their ugly heads in the face of radical change in our lives. But I could see that it was not such a radical change at all. I had, in fact, been doing this work in one way or another all my life. The form it took as a career consultant was simply one way to maximize its enjoyment for me. Now, years later, I can see how right she was! And I am so grateful she did.

True Stories

In this book, I am going to share with you large chunks of my personal story. This is one of my first principles: to be open, honest and frank about where I am coming from. Unlike most career counselors, I offer you the experience of my own life as a case history that you can follow closely through the book. My autobiography is a book in itself, but I have extracted pieces to share with you. It is not easy to share the intimate details of my life with complete strangers. I do it because I try to adhere to the principle that we should not do for others what we have not done for ourselves. I want to give you a feel for how you can do the exercises.

Throughout this book and its exercises, I will teach and lead by example. Many of the exercises include examples from my life to help you tell your story. I hope my story will help you make the connections between the process and the product. I know the power of the personal story because I have examined my own. I am going to share the facts, people, and events of my own life with you, as well as the insights and conclusions that have given me power to choose and act in my life.

In addition, I have asked some successful career-changers to share their stories as well. In some cases, names have been changed to protect the confidentiality and privacy of the people who appear in case examples; however, all the events are based on fact.

The profiles of clients that appear as features are clients who have agreed to use their own names, photos, and links to their websites.

Hopefully, this range of personalities and vocations will encourage you to take the plunge yourself. These are the stories of ordinary people just like you and me who all have the power to do extraordinary things. They have made significant changes in their lives, changes that have resulted in job joy! The same can be true for you.

Get Help Now

Ideally it is best to read the book, and do the exercises in sequence. However, not everyone has the time or inclination to go through a book like this in a systematic fashion.

If you want to skip ahead, simply click here on JobJoy Exercise to find out how the JobJoy exercise in this book can help you change your life and change your career. The process starts with where you start. The point is to start!

Who should read this book

Any person who hates their job, who feels fed up with their work, frustrated, dissatisfied, or unfulfilled with what they do for a living. You will benefit from this book and this process.

Does this sound familiar?

___ You feel under-employed.

___ You lack clarity about your purpose in life.

___ You hate getting up in the morning to go to work.

___ You sabotage your work teams and your projects.

___ You are on sick leave.

___ You want to change jobs but feel stuck.

___ You fear downsizing, layoffs and restructuring.

___ You push your passions to the periphery of your life.

___ You long to combine meaning with money.

___ You feel lost and confused about finding your work.

Do you say to yourself at least once a week: There’s got to be more to life than this! There is.

Recognize first that you are not alone if one of these descriptions fits you. Over the last 30 years study after study—by such eminent organizations as the Menninger Clinic, the American Management Association, and the Wall Street Journal—have concluded as many as 90% of persons employed are not in their right work. Frustration, lack of fulfillment, even depression, can result from not being in your right work.

If you are a working person, and concerned about your health, read this book because your day-to-day health and how long you live are affected by work-related factors—whether you’re employed, how secure you are in your job, how much you enjoy your work. During the past 50 years, there have been many studies measuring the top indicators of human longevity.

Even more than good health and good genes, these studies often conclude that work satisfaction is a major factor in longevity, especially in men aged 50+.

Most people in our society live under the mistaken notion that their economic security lies in a job, any job. They sacrifice job satisfaction for job security. And yet, many of us will labor for years in mediocrity for the sake of a pension. This commitment to mediocrity can be dangerous to our health. Almost half of retired workers die before they collect a pension.

It can also threaten your economic security.