What Happens When Your Career Doesn't Align With Your Strengths

When we are in a career that is misaligned with our strengths, there are some pretty deep consequences.

Brene Brown talks about this in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection.

She says:

“Squandering our gifts brings distress to our lives. As it turns out, it's not merely benign or too bad if we don't use the gifts that we've been given.

We pay for it with our emotional and physical well-being. When we don't use our talents to cultivate meaningful work, we struggle.

We feel disconnected and weighed down by feelings of emptiness, frustration, resentment, shame, disappointment, fear, and even grief.”

It’s such a big price to pay.

So how do you know if your career is misaligned with your strengths?

Let’s talk about some of the key signs and symptoms.

Feeling undervalued and underappreciated

It’s as if the real you isn't being seen or utilized.

There’s a feeling of “wasted potential” or “I’m not being all I can be.”

In his book, The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks talks about this sensation of “rusting from the inside out.”

Of course, these are very vague sensations and may be hard to identify if this is what you are experiencing.

But I encourage you to start paying attention at work.

Do you feel seen?

Do you feel appreciated?

Do you feel like you are living up to your potential?

Constant uphill battle

When you are trying to improve upon your strengths, there is usually a pretty good ROI.

You put in the effort and see results.

Sometimes the effort is still frustrating- because growth can be a painful process.

But once you can normalize the discomfort and frustration of growth- working to improve upon your strengths is SO rewarding.

But trying to improve your weaknesses

feels like this constant uphill battle.

You put in so much time and effort, and at the end of the day- you are still below par.

It feels like writing with your non-dominant hand.

Harder than it should be and has embarrassing results.

(No matter how hard I try, my handwriting with my left hand…. is completely illegible.)

No rage to master

When you are working with your strengths, you’ll feel this inner drive to learn and excel.

You feel motivated by this internal desire towards mastery.

But when you are NOT doing work aligned with your strengths,

Generally, your efforts towards improvement are motivated more by external pressures.

In surgery, I was driven to obsessively practice my knot tying

not because I was fascinated by surgical techniques

but because I didn’t want to get yelled at in the OR

and I didn’t want to hurt my patients.

It was external motivation vs. internal motivation.

If you are developing skills within your career because of external pressures

That's usually a sign that the skill itself is not aligned with your strengths.

Missing out on the flow state

The flow state is a magical place where you lose track of time because you are so deeply engaged in what you are doing.

When you're in a career that's not aligned with your strengths

You miss out on this flow state experience.

You usually DON’T lose track of time, and instead, you are very much tracking time.

In medicine, I was always looking at the clock.

I was counting down the hours and checking off the patients left until I could leave for the day.

A big reason for this is because the tasks I was expected to do all day, were very much NOT aligned with my strengths.

If any of these signs or symptoms sound familiar, it's a good indicator that your current career is not allowing you to use or develop your strengths.

Which is likely one of the reasons why you are unhappy in your career.

Maybe you don’t know exactly what your gifts and talents are

and that’s ok.

But what’s important to recognize at this point is this:

does it feel like you are using and developing your natural strengths in your career?

Or does it feel like a constant uphill battle?

The more you can be real and honest with yourself here, the better.

There’s no wrong answer.

Only more information.

See you back again tomorrow, for day 8!

Want the audio version of this lesson, where I expand on each piece a little more? It’s on the Life After Medicine Podcast on Apple, Spotify,?and Everywhere Else.