Dissatisfied with your job ...

Getting a job is a great aspiration to many whether it is a first job, a change or just when bouncing back from a gaping lull of unemployment. The first days usually leave special memories.

For the unhunted majority, having a job comes after a serious search, normally following several applications made, mostly unanswered and some rejections coming with varying levels of professionalism; besides job promises that get broken and end up deeply buried.

We take up jobs for different reasons, such as to settle our bills, deliver some project, improve our quality of life etc. Similarly, many factors work together to help us move on whether from our own choice or as necessitated by other circumstances.

At times we sign up for jobs without a clear picture of what they entail much as we also quit some jobs with regret. In between, we get first encounters with people, gain new experiences, work on our key result areas and continually assess our progression and sustainability in those engagements.

The ambition we have when taking up a new job tends to give the enthusiasm to perform well at the start. This can grow significantly, stagnate or wane altogether leading to dissatisfaction, stress and intense mental evaluation of the desired state.

Perhaps this explains why thousands of job applications are received for a single opportunity, pitting diploma holders against first degree holders and those with advanced degrees. Others simply resign their fate to destiny after unsuccessful attempts.

Career is not always defined by the academic curriculum taken. The measure of the knowledge lies in how it is used productively to solve problems and improve the quality of life. Real competence allows one to succeed not only in certain environments.

A medical graduate left her entry level job and ventured into agribusiness. An experienced computer programmer left writing software and started tailoring. Today both are employers of many. Elsewhere, a human resource manager in banking quit the job to start a corporate training business and the difficult early days are well in the past.

Thus, the true spirit of doing what you love is in loving what you do.

Every job is for a purpose in your life. A job may look so appealing from the outside, but right in it may be so unfulfilling. Some of the uninteresting experiences we gain in the job become really useful in coping with future opportunities and once in a while even open doors we would never have imagined.

Some things are not just a fit for everyone. So do your best always, if it doesn't work out, life allows for learning in every undertaking. How well we use these define our next level of satisfaction.

Find time off to relax, recollect and build up your energy levels when feeling dissatisfied. The mind re-freshens up during relaxation away from routine exercise. Concentrate on what really matters to help avoid spending energy on debilitating or counterproductive endeavors.

Leaving an extremely unfulfilling job environment for none occasionally helps people to see things from a different lens. Equally, relinquishing a job you love not only to actualize succession planning, but also to primarily give others a chance at it is an important rare gesture indeed.

Do a sweeping soul search to find out the basis of the dissatisfaction. The sooner we get to know this the better for us to adjust. It's not strange to think that our problems come from others, putting ourselves in a self-defense mode and apportioning blame.

This may serve to delay us from taking the essential steps to keep us satisfied. Sometimes there is just no fitting alternative or better job for you within reach and all you need is to make the one you have great!

Share your challenges with trusted persons with capability to understand your situation and offer useful guidance. Not everyone who seems to mean well for you really does so. The furthest others may go is to empathize with you.

If you tend to be impervious to diverse opinions, most people will generally soothe your ego keeping you with a false sense of fulfillment. The few, bold one who will let you know the pure, bitter truth including your individual weakness should be your fortress.

Network with people in your lines of interest and competence within and without your immediate reach and consistently build appropriate links. Constructive networking includes having regular follow ups and just checking on how your network performs.

Not so much about keeping loads of printed business cards in your growing piles of card holders, advancing near incessant personal interests, having long scrolling lists of phone contacts in your cell phone; whom you hardly communicate with through the ages or waiting to make surprise calls when you see a desired opportunity at their place.

In all cases, carry on a promising attitude and continually expand your boundary of limitations. It is revitalizing to have learnt of someone who started off selling roasted maize by the roadside, who saved and opened a retail business and finally owns a fleet of transport vehicles.

It is much to do with the motivation that drives us along the way, the passion and the commitment to achieving our goals.

"The ignorance of how to use knowledge stockpiles exponentially." Marshall McLuhan (1911 - 1980) Canadian Sociologist.

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