Career Planning and Management Inc.

Feature Story

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

A Collection of Career Assessment Tools, Workbooks and Resources for Individuals, Counselors, Consultants and Organizations

*Recommended Reading from our Career Resource Library:

By Dan King

It’s Sunday night and you’ve got that familiar “pit in the stomach.” It’s now just another weeknight. Tomorrow you’ll return “to the grind,” begin your long, slow crawl toward “over the hump” day, and trudge along until, “thank God, it’s Friday” again. Sweet freedom.

Is this what your work life has become? A prison sentence? Five days a week in the slammer with two days off for parole on the weekend? If this is how you “earn your daily bread,” you better hope that someone slipped a file into the dough, because you need to break out, man. You’ve done your time.

You expend roughly 80,000 hours of your life at work. That’s a lot of time to put into something that drains the life out of you. Sure you need the money, but at what cost? You can’t just consign your life’s work to nothing more than a financial equation with the hope of somehow achieving success and happiness along the way. Your stale work life will lead to an unhappy home life, your negative energy will wear on others and, soon, no one will want to be around you. You’ll lead a solitary life, confined to a soulless job. Is that your legacy?

Victorian poet and novelist, Charles Kingsley, once said: “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” People who are enthusiastic about their work pursue their passions as fervently as they pursue their paychecks.

If you want to escape your situation, you’ll need to stop punishing yourself and commit to a consistent, continuous, career rehabilitation plan. Here are some tips for breaking out:

Face Your Fear - For most people the idea of changing careers can be both exhilarating and terrifying. That’s because desire is merely the flip side of fear. Fear can paralyze you from taking action, but desire can propel you forward. If you focus on your desire to change more than your fear of the unknown, you’ll be well on your way to freedom.

Go Your Own Way - Our early career choices are strongly influenced by our parents, teachers and friends. We often just follow the paths that others have laid for us. But this is not your father’s or mother’s worklife – it’s yours. Let go of the crippling effects of approval from others. It’s your life and it’s okay to live it as you please, as long as you don’t break the law.

Explore the Unknown - You can reduce the fear of the unknown by gathering information. Face it - you don’t know what you don’t know. If you knew what you don’t know, then you’d know what you need to do (read it again). What type of career change will meet your needs? Clarify whether you need a full career change, a career shift, or an industry or sector change before you leap.

Talk With Others Who Have Changed Careers - If you only stick within your inner circle (co-workers, friends, family), you’ll mostly hear reasons why you shouldn’t make the change. Talk to other people who have made successful career changes. Find out what worked for them and ask for suggestions and ideas to help you.

Start with Small Steps - It’s hard to change careers when you’re currently holding down a full-time job, so it can easily take “back burner.” Break the tasks down into weekly actions. Don’t wait for a long-weekend – or your vacation – because you’ll resent not having time to relax. Small steps, integrated into your daily work, can produce big results over time.

Have Fun - If you expect to find more enjoyable and rewarding work, then the process of seeking it out ought to be enjoyable and rewarding. If you see this as just another chore on your “to-do” list, you’ll find reasons to avoid it. If you can’t enjoy the process, don’t expect to enjoy the end result.

People who love their work don’t generally sit around on Sunday nights saying, “oh good, tomorrow’s another work day.” But they’re not debilitated by the prospect of another workweek either, perhaps because they perceive of their work as more than a money machine. Earning money, in and of itself, is not fun. It’s how you earn it that brings the greater reward. So, if you want a worklife that’s more than a Monday through Friday sort of dying, you have to create it. There is no “get out of jail free” card.