Truth be told, I spent most of my life in pursuit of a new job. I went from being an attorney on Wall St, to a midsize, midtown firm, to a tiny boutique law firm, to a freelance legal writer, to an at home mom, to a volunteer, to part time roles, to full time roles, and back to part time roles, to a part time role plus a private coaching practice. Exhausting, right?
In all that time, I wasn’t moving toward any particular goal, I just knew that I didn’t like the job I had at the moment.
The reality is that I ended up in a perfect place for me, but I didn’t have to take this long, scenic route!
I could have gotten here more quickly if I had only known that I was in control of how I felt about all the “things that were wrong” with my jobs.
I wish I realized that they were puzzles to solve, not problems to escape!
So here is the wisdom I gained from years of job hopping.
I know that this is counter-intuitive, but, DON’T LEAVE YOUR JOB IF:
You hate your boss
You are anxious or overwhelmed
You feel like an imposter
You think your peers are not helpful/educated/good at their jobs
You have too much work to do and don’t have balance in your life
You don’t like the “toxic” culture
I know that these are the most popular reasons most people have for leaving their jobs.
BUT the problem is that the same things are likely to happen at the next job. Even if you do all the due diligence about your next position, you can’t control what happens after you get there. There are no guarantees that you will be happy if/when a new boss comes in, new employees are hired or your workload expands.
Unless you approach this cycle differently, you remain a victim of circumstances that you can’t control, and may be faced with even more challenging problems than those listed above!
And chances are you will either continue to change jobs before you are ready to take the next step in your career, or you will feel stuck and miserable in the job you have.
The alternative is to figure out how to deal with difficult situations and people, how to set boundaries around your workload and use your time wisely to be efficient while maintaining work/life balance.
If all of these issues were manageable, you would only need to change jobs when you have stopped growing in your current role and have exhausted all the opportunities at your disposal in your current company. Or you just decide you want something different.
You would give yourself the chance to be moving TOWARD you next step, not running AWAY from your last one.
Think about it this way. If you have a boat with a hole in it, you don’t just buy a new boat and hope that it never gets a hole. Face it, boats get holes, and it is silly to keep buying new boats every time a boat springs a leak! Instead, you learn how to fix the holes. Then you can pick a great boat that serves your purpose and know that you can enjoy it for as long as YOU want and that you can fix any holes that would ruin an otherwise perfectly good boat going in the direction you want it to go.
I spent much of my life buying new boats. ONLY at the last stop did I learn to fix the holes. And I am going on 5 years of happily coexisting with all of the ups and downs of my job!
Get some help figuring out how to fix the holes and save yourself a lot of time, bandwidth and energy that you could be using to intentionally move forward in your career instead of sidestepping the puddles on the floor!
If you don’t know where to start, contact me at betsy@betsykentcoaching and I will help you get started.
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