If you’ve typed that into Google, you’re probably not in a crisis, but you can just feel that something isn’t quite right.
You’re good at your job. You’re paid well, nobody’s bullying you and nothings gone terribly wrong and yet on a Wednesday afternoon you’re sitting there thinking, is this it??
Then you feel guilty for thinking it, because you know what the alternative looks like and plenty of people would love to have your job.
So here’s what I’d do when you’re feeling this way and the order I’d do it in! Because I sit with people in exactly this position every week, and the thing that gets them out of it is never a bigger decision. It’s actually a smaller, dare I say more boring one, done first.
I’m not going to tell you to find your passion
I should say this plainly, because it’s what most articles on this question will tell you and I think it makes people feel worse.
If you had a passion you’d already know what it was. Telling somebody with a mortgage and two children to follow their heart is not advice.
What you can do is work out what you enjoy, with evidence, from what you’ve already done. Then be completely practical about where that fits, with the salary and the hours and the commute all still on the table. That’s a logical process and anybody can do it and that’s what I’ll walk you through in this article.
What feeling unfulfilled at work usually turns out to mean
When somebody tells me they hate their job, they almost never mean all of it. They say it like they mean ALL of it, and then twenty minutes later we’ve found that two parts of it are fine and one part has been quietly ruining their week for a year.
There are four separate things inside a job and they go wrong independently of each other.
The work itself. What you actually do all day, and whether any of it uses the things you’re good at.
The company and the package. The pay, the hours, the commute, and whether you’d say the company’s name out loud at a party without wincing.
Your manager and the people around you. Whether you’re trusted, whether you’re backed, and whether there’s somebody you’re dreading on a Monday morning.
Where the whole thing is heading. Whether there’s a job above you that you’d actually want, and whether anybody is moving you towards it.
Go ahead and score them out of ten, separately, on paper. Most people find that two are fine, one is average, and one is on the floor.
That one on the floor is your actual problem, and it’s almost always smaller than the thing you were about to do about it.
“Unfulfilled” is usually the word people reach for when they can’t tell which of the four it is. The feeling is real but it’s also vague, and that vagueness is what keeps people feeling both overwhelmed and stuck.
Why reading job adverts doesn’t work
Here’s what most people do when they feel unfulfilled, and I understand why.
It’s Sunday evening, the children are in bed, the laptop’s open, and you type “career change ideas” into Google. You read a list of forty jobs, but none of them feel right, so you close the laptop and end up feeling worse than when you opened it! And you’ve probably been doing this on and off for two years.
The reason it doesn’t work is simple. A list of jobs is an answer to a question you haven’t asked yet….
Nobody recognises themselves in a job or a list of tasks, until they have a clear map of what good looks like for them. Until you can clearly map out what you want, a list of tasks will be just that and you won’t know whether it’s a ‘good’ list or a ‘bad’ list.
Start with last week, not with next year
Here’s the exercise I’d do first. It takes about ten minutes, you can do it tonight, and all you need is a piece of paper.
Write down the three parts of last week you’d happily do again.
Then write down the three you’d have paid somebody else to do.
Two rules. They have to be actual moments rather than parts of your job description. “The Tuesday meeting where I untangled the thing nobody else could” counts. “Stakeholder management” doesn’t. And it has to be last week, not your best week ever, because what you’re looking for is what your ordinary week is made of.
If you can’t remember last week well enough to do it, carry a piece of paper around for a week and write things down as they happen. That’s better anyway.
Then dig underneath each one
This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that actually tells you something.
Say you wrote this one down, because a lot of people do: “I love taking something complex and explaining it to a non-technical stakeholder.”
Ask yourself why. What is it about that you really enjoy? Because it’s not actually “taking something complex and explaining it to a non-technical stakeholder.” that is the surface layer, it’s the outcome. What is it that sits below that that you really enjoy.
Maybe it’s the moment their face changes and they stop pretending to follow. Maybe it’s that you were the only person in the building who could have done it. Maybe it’s that for twenty minutes nobody was checking up on you and you got to do it your own way.
Those are three completely different answers, and they send you to three completely different jobs.
So keep asking why until you get to a feeling, because ultimately we’re all searching for a feeling. You might want to be the person who makes the complicated thing make sense, or the one they come to when it’s gone wrong, or the one who gets handed something and left alone to do it properly.
Then do the same with the three bad ones, because they’re just as useful.
Say the thing you’d have paid somebody else to do was the monthly report. Ask why. If it’s because you’re fairly sure nobody reads it, then what you’re missing is work that lands on somebody. If it’s because it was four days of sitting still on your own, it’s the four days on your own you can’t stand, and the report is innocent.
You’ll know you’ve got to the bottom of it when the answer isn’t about your job any more. “I like being the one who explains it” is still about your job. “I like watching somebody relax because I’ve just taken the fear out of something” isn’t, and that one will follow you into any industry you walk into.
What you need more of, and what you need less of
Now you can say it in one sentence, and it won’t be a job title.
It’ll sound something like this.
“I want more of making the complicated thing simple, in front of people, with somebody waiting on the answer. And a lot less of writing documents nobody reads.”
Write your own version down, because it’s the most useful sentence you’ll write all year. Every decision after this gets measured against it.
Two things happen once you’ve got it.
The first is that you can work out how much of your week that good thing takes at the moment. Add it up. If you realise it is a very small part of your 40 hour work week, then your job isn’t to find a new industry, it’s to see how you can increase the time spent on what you truly enjoy.
The second is that you finally have something to hold a job advert up against. Now when you look at a list of tasks you can clearly identify what ‘good’ and what ‘bad’ looks like!
Can you get it where you are, or do you have to move?
This is the question everybody jumps to first, and it’s the one you can only answer once you’ve done the part above.
There are four sizes of change here, and people reach for the biggest one far too early.
Change the shape of the job you’ve already got. You stay put, and you go after the piece of work that’s full of the thing you want more of, and you hand something else back. This is the one people dismiss in a second and it’s the one that works most often, because you already have the relationships and nobody has to take a risk on you.
Change company and keep the job. If the work itself scored eight and your manager scored two, you don’t need to retrain. You need the same job somewhere the people are better, and you could be there by Christmas.
Change job and stay in the industry you know. Your sector knowledge still counts for something here, so this is a lot less frightening than it looks from the outside. A lot of my clients land here.
Change discipline entirely. Sometimes this genuinely is the answer. It’s a real change, it takes planning, and it’s worth doing properly rather than at eleven o’clock at night on a Sunday.
Start at the top of that list and work down, rather than starting at the bottom. Most people do it the other way round, which is why they end up looking at two year retraining courses for a problem that was one conversation with their manager.
What if everything you wrote down is bad
Sometimes people do this and all four things are in the bad column. If that happens to you, don’t throw the exercise away, because it’s telling you something specific.
It usually means one of two things, and they have very different answers.
Either the work itself is the thing scoring two out of ten. If that’s it, then moving to a similar job at another company won’t fix anything, because you’ll be doing the same days in a different building. That’s when a real change is worth planning properly, and properly is the word that matters.
Or you’re too tired to tell. If you’ve been running on empty since the spring, everything looks grey, including the parts you normally like. You can’t make a fifteen year decision from there. Get some actual rest first and then do the exercise again in a fortnight.
When it’s worth talking to somebody
The part you can’t do on your own is being able to look at your answers without judgement. Even when we do this research we often bias ourselves, we believe we are a certain person so we find it difficult to challenge ourselves. There’s where an outsider can really help. Because they will help you decipher your answers from a factual point of view and not an emotional one.
That’s what a first call is for. Forty five minutes, on Zoom, free. You tell me what’s going on and what you’ve already tried, I pull the four parts apart with you, and I tell you honestly what I think you’re actually dealing with. If one of my programmes is the right answer I’ll say so, and if it isn’t, I’ll say that instead, and you’ll still leave knowing which part of it is wrong.
[Book a call with me] https://calendly.com/alicegraves/50min