Why are you so unhappy at work?
When you were a child, the adults around you probably made comments about the things you were good at doing.
“You’re great at math.”
“You’re a natural born writer.”
“You’re so smart in biology.”
These external compliments gave you little hits of dopamine that made you feel happy for short periods time. Dopamine is the feel-good hormone! Get enough dopamine hits from someone or something, and you want more and more.
This is how social media works, too. Someone likes your post or shares your tweet and you get that instant sense of gratification. And then, you want more. You begin posting and tweeting and snapping more often and checking your social media feeds more frequently in search of the dopamine inducing “likes,” “shares,” and “replies.” Your behavior is influenced, and in some cases, controlled, by your social media feeds.
Back to those childhood compliments.
Your parents and the other authority figures were trying to be nice when they complimented you on something you did well. It’s nice of them to notice you at your best. So, you sought more of their attention. Maybe you focused on doing more of the things for which they complimented you – even if you didn’t necessarily enjoy doing those things.
Most adults want their children to be happy and successful. They often try give their children a shove in the right career direction by following their compliments by suggesting career paths.
“You’re great at math” became “You’re great at math, you should be an accountant.”
“You’re a natural born writer. You should be a journalist.”
“You’re smart in biology. You should be a doctor.”
On the surface, these seem like natural and sensible correlations. Good at math? Find a job that requires lots of it like accounting, engineering, insurance underwriting, economist, statistician, financial planner, etc.
There’s a big leap of faith we make when we decide out career path solely on what we do well. Sometimes we rush in assuming if we are skilled at the tasks, we will enjoy the work.
That is not always the case. In fact, it’s rarely the case that the things we do well in childhood and early adulthood will lead us to a job or a career which we enjoy. We’ve been encouraging people to follow career paths based on their strengths and natural abilities for as long as we’ve been sending people off to work. Isn’t it ironic then that 70% of people in the workforce today are dissatisfied and disengaged from their jobs?
What are we missing?
The question we’ve been asking is too simple. We typically ask: What do you do well?
We need to use a two-part question instead: What do you do well and enjoy doing?
It’s never guaranteed that what you do well is something you enjoy doing.
To help visualize the effect of this phenomenon, I use the Career Satisfaction Matrix and it helps us focus on where the issues are in someone’s career path. The matrix has two axes: Skill Level and Enjoyment Level.
You can analyze your current level of happiness and satisfaction at work using this matrix. Follow these steps:
Make a list of all the tasks you do in your current job. Think back over the last week, month or year and just make a long list of the things you do in your current role.
Once you’ve made your list, try to estimate percentage of time you spend doing each type of task.
Go through each task on your list and decide if you do it well or do it poorly. (For this exercise, define “doing it poorly” as below average performance.)
Once you’ve divided the list into “do well” and “do poorly,” go through the list again and decide if you enjoy doing or dislike doing this type of task.
You have now created a list of tasks broken into one of four categories. You could transfer these items onto the matrix to help you visualize where you spend the majority of your time throughout a typical work week or work year.
In which quadrant do you spend your time at work? Let’s take a look at these in counter-clockwise rotation around the matrix.
ASPIRATION
If you’re in the quadrant where you’re doing something you like, but you’re doing it poorly or less than average, then the prescription for you is to focus on mastery. Take some courses, find mentors, get some training, and learn how to do those tasks better. Try to spend more time doing that type of work to advance your skills. Learning how to improve on skills you enjoy using will not feel like “work.”
FAILURE
This is the danger zone. The red zone of performance. If you do a task poorly and dislike doing it, it’s past time to find another career path. You will find it difficult to improve your job performance because you don’t enjoy the task and you have no real natural skills for doing the work. You will likely fail in this role.
DRUDGERY
If you are doing something you do well but don’t enjoy doing, you’ll be bored. It’ll feel tedious and you need to find a way to minimize the amount of time you spend doing that task. That might mean changing jobs. That might mean discussing the situation with your manager and deciding to shift some of the responsibility to someone else who perhaps enjoys doing that kind of work, or maybe allows you to train someone to take over that part of the job from you.
FLOW
When you do something well and enjoy doing it, you will often find yourself in a state of “flow” where you are fully immersed in the tasks, you feel energized, you enjoy the process of doing the work, and it may feel like time ceases to exist. Try to spend as much time in these types of tasks. There is a danger in this quadrant: The better you perform these types of tasks, the more likely you will be asked to take on more responsibility. For example, if you are an excellent salesperson, you may be asked to take a promotion and become a Director of Sales where you manage people. The promotion may be a “reward” for your outstanding work as an individual contributor but you may be moving into a role which might put you into a position of doing things you do not enjoy doing (managing people, forecasting revenue, training employees). If you’re not mindful of what you enjoy doing well, you can find yourself in another quadrant which may be difficult to escape once the promotion has been put into place.
There are two recurring career trajectories that can be highlighted by the matrix.
Burnout
When you are doing tasks in Q4 (Drudgery) for too long, you might slip into Q3 (Failure). This is a path into on-the-job burnout. If you spend the majority of your time on tasks you do well but don’t enjoy, your skills can easily deteriorate as the boredom of the job slowly saps your energy. It will be a slow and almost imperceptible decline in skill level as you avoid learning new ways of mastering the skills. It will be difficult to stay motivated on mastering new skills. Failure is most certainly a possible option and outcome in this scenario.
Growth
Moving from Q1 (Aspiration) to Q2 (Flow) is a journey of great personal growth. You will feel challenged as you improve your skills in areas of work you enjoy doing. As you approach Q2 (Flow) higher levels of performance will feel easier. You’ll look forward to each work day and you’ll embrace multiple opportunities for learning new skills. You will be in a perpetual state of seeking greater mastery. As a result, you will move from success to significance where your efforts begin to positively affect your co-workers, clients, and community.
You’ll likely never have a career where you can spend all your time in the Flow state of Q2. However, you can begin to focus on ways to maximize the amount of time you spend in Q1 and Q2 while finding ways to delegate, outsource, or significantly reduce your time in Q3 and Q4.