Am I in The Right Job?

by Anna Baréz-Brown

There is no such thing as a perfect job. It does not exist. Talk to any multimillionaire, Oscar-winning actor, top model, CEO or gin taster and you will soon realise that every career has its downside. We need to craft our vocations, so they work best for us. But most of all we need to craft ourselves to fit our vocations.

Our relationship with work is central to our happiness, vitality, and ability to self-express—to be our true selves. To feel fully alive, we need to make work work for us. Every day that I work, I grow to understand more about it. And I find that the forces behind it—the forces that drive us to work and shape our relationship with it—are not as they first seem.

Does work make us happy? Researchers for the LSE attempted to answer this question by tracking and interviewing 50,000 people over three years and they found out that work makes us more unhappy, than anything else, apart from being ill in bed. People were generally positive when reflecting on the meaning and value of their work in their lives. Yet actually doing their job elicited some personal cost in terms of the pressure and stress they experienced.

Such pressures not only influence our happiness but can also warp us into being somebody we are not – often into somebody we don’t want to be.

Getting the right job is not an exact science. Sometimes we miscalculate either what the role will involve or our ability to fulfil it, and sometimes we just don’t quite fit in with the company or, indeed, the culture we’ve joined (and then we set up on our own).

I’ve had jobs that made my heart soar and let me unleash qualities in ways I could never have imagined. During those years my experiences became richer, I had more meaningful relationships, felt a greater sense of achievement and led a more fulfilled life both inside and outside work.

Equally, I have had jobs where I was unhappy, and it felt as if each day of my life was being squandered and my most valuable resources (time and talent) were ebbing away. Worse still, I knew that my precious love of life was being leached from me.

At Shine, we believe that life and work are intrinsically linked. They are not separate; they are one. If we want to live an extraordinary life, we have to make our work equally extraordinary. When your work resonates with purpose, you jump out of bed every morning, excited by the possibilities the day holds for you. Everything else in your life seems to have a glow about it, and you exude much more personal shine.

We are always free and have always been so. We just forget that and become trapped by our own perceptions (I’m very good at feeling trapped). Yes, we need to make money but there are countless ways to do that. The job you do is the job you have chosen to do. There is no gun to your head. If you don’t like it, you need some change which does not necessarily mean leaving your current employer but looking for other opportunities within your company.

My favourite story here involves my beloved business partner of 10 years Caroline Whaley who worked at Nike in high-powered marketing jobs all over the world and at some point had reached the point where she wanted a different kind of challenge. When she told her then-boss that she thought it was probably time to step away from the business, he introduced her to The Nike Foundation and in particular, a cooperation with DFID focused on empowering girls in Africa as a route to eradicating poverty. The scale and scope of the opportunity really excited Cal and her motivation and vocation changed 100%. She ended up staying with Nike for several more inspiring years.

It’s your responsibility to make your job as good as it can be so that you can be as good as you can be. No one can do that for you.