The Great Apathy

I wrote a post on LinkedIn recently about individuals going through their working life on auto-pilot. And how on Sunday afternoons thoughts turn to returning to the workplace filled with dread, torment and ambivalence. Or maybe not back to the workplace, maybe you are working from home, and it is just the drudgery of what you do that fills you with dread? The thought of checking back in and acquiescing to auto pilot mode for another day, week, month or year.

So why is it so?

Well, if you speak to the large majority of people, particularly in my age demographic, their working life hasn’t necessarily been planned or orchestrated it has happened more by chance. And they haven’t necessarily been the Conductor!

One of the standard questions we ask our kids when they are young is What do you want to be when you grow up? When they are really young the responses are filled with things like firemen and astronauts and policemen and builders. However, as they age and the question has some meaning, very few are clear what they want to be when they grow up. Hell, I even ask the question of people in their 50’s and they don’t know!!

I suspect for many their story will be similar to mine in that my industry and career sort of happened rather than it being any sort of formulated master plan.

I left school and joined a Bank, with the intent of studying part time at Uni. Why? Because that is what most people did. And because banking was a good profession, a safe career, largely recession proof, reliable income and a career for life.

So, I became a Banker, with the only evidence of me being able to do it being an aptitude test and similarly my passion for it measured only by the fact that I had applied. So armed with a strong set of principles I started out on my banking career.

Work hard, play hard, do the very best job you could do and then hopefully do it well enough to get promoted to the next level of opportunity. But on reflecting can I say I was really passionate about Banking, not really?

And for many years I stuck with the same formula. Rinse, repeat, recycle. No plan, no destination, just on auto pilot and my working career resembling an actor in a movie who is directed as to what to do whilst someone else is holding the script.

Armed with the knowledge that I appeared to be ok at this thing called banking, it paid the bills and was a steady income I stuck with it. I got to see some of the state and parts of the country that I possibly wouldn’t have had the opportunity to otherwise without giving things much thought.

Bearing in mind this is at a time very different to today. A time when you rarely changed jobs, let alone companies and even less so industries. A time when the strength of your resume was evident by how many years you had spent at an organisation to demonstrate loyalty. If you moved roles or companies or industries every 2 years you were a flight risk. My how times have changed.

And so, it continued on for the next umpteen years and sticking with the only industry I knew apart from a brief sojourn into the mining industry.

And then before I knew it, I was stuck. Stuck in a potentially loveless marriage but bereft of alternatives. I had done ‘banking’ all my life and that was all I knew. And that provided me with some comfort because banking was my safety blanket and provided me with a safe job, reliable income and certainty. And certainty is great, isn’t it?

And then came kids, and with the kids comes responsibility and the need for certainty. So, the opportunity to do something different fades away. And you have added more years stuck in the industry, and the rut you are in just got a whole lot deeper.

I believe there are a whole group of people out there, who got to today the same way, who are sitting there thinking their kids only have 2,3,4 or 5 years left of school and if I can just get through that period, it will be ok. And with time flying at a rate of knots, it will be gone in no time. But do you really want to be wishing your life away?

And whilst many times I have felt the same way, there is part of me that thinks that sounds like you are existing rather than living. And if you consider that 5 years of life is 6% of your time on this earth and that you spend the majority of your life at work, don’t you owe it to yourself to break the cycle?

If you are sitting there on a Sunday afternoon filled with dread, what can you do?

Well, here are some tips

1.????Undertake an assessment: It wasn’t until I undertook a career alignment psychometric profiling assessment that I knew. I knew the categories of roles that my personality traits aligned with. Now I am not saying everybody needs to undertake this activity for you may already know, but if you don’t and are still trying to work out what it is you want to do when you grow up, this could in part be the solution.

2.????Get a Coach: Clearly, I will be biased here, and I will declare I am Life, Executive and Leadership coach so who would have thought I would promote coaching hey? But coaching gets you results and unless you are extremely fortunate to have a group of friends that are able to apply coaching methodologies, you will more likely get more sympathy than solutions. There are plenty of Career coaches out there who are happy to chat that I can connect you with

3.????Passions: Work out what you are passionate about and what you would love to do for a job. A number of old sayings fit the bill here.?Work is called work, because it isn’t Fun and if you can get paid to do something you are passionate about, it doesn’t feel like work. For me it is coaching that gets the juices flowing and helping people who are stuck become unstuck!! And I probably already knew this through experience, but the assessment I undertook confirmed it

4.????Plan: If you go back to what started the journey for you to get to where you are at today, it is likely through ?a lack of planning. So why not start? To quote a Coveyism, begin with the end in mind. Start with your retirement and work backwards. How many years do you have left and how do you intend to fill those years with joy instead of apathy?

5.????Networks: For all the introverts out there, who have just started to twitch I am not talking about networking per se. But with COVID now providing an ideal platform you have a better reason to network remotely, rather than attending all manner of events. So build your network of connections

6.????Know your value: I often say to people in coaching sessions, you are the only person in the world who can de-value your value and what would be your motivation to do so? Know your value both from a market $ perspective but also the value that you provide in the activities and roles you perform.

7.????Side hustle: If you can’t find any passion in your work, find a passion outside your work. What is it that you are REALLY good at? And then work out how you could do more of it and then monetise it. Mine was coaching, but for others it could be drawing, writing, developing presentations, public speaking and the list goes on. Remember there are far more jobs and opportunities out there than there has ever been

8.????Understand the power of social media: For the longest time I resisted it, but now ignoring it is like being a flat earther, there is no going back. So, you need to embrace it or find someone who can embrace it with or for ?you

9.????Surround yourself: Build yourself a team. Your team who are working for Team you. Be it providing support, challenging your thoughts or providing opportunities it is far easier doing this with others than it is by yourself

10.?? - Whatever else you think you could do that would help you!!

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So, there you have it, a plan for the remainder of your working life. Free of charge.

And as you sit there on a Sunday afternoon, at the start of winter, freezing cold, with the days getting progressively shorter and darker and then overlay that with returning to the ‘salt mine’ tomorrow, what have you got to lose?

And remember action starts with a thought!!

And finally ask yourself Are you a pig or a chicken as a wise man once asked me, ?for in the relationship of bacon and eggs, only the pig is truly committed. How committed are you??