You may feel stuck, but the truth is you always have choices.
If you want to be happy with your job, that’s your choice to make. Now you may be feeling like you don’t have a choice right now, so you just accept living this way. But the truth is that you do have a choice. Sometimes denying that you have a choice seems easier than thinking about all that is involved with making a different choice. We make change seem overwhelming by looking at it as a huge, scary idea rather than breaking it down into manageable parts. Instead of allowing yourself to feel overwhelmed by thinking about creating this change in your life in one fell swoop, let’s break the process into steps that you can deal with, one at a time. Let’s start with looking at your choices.
3 Choices in Your Job:
- Maintain the status quo. Take no action and influence no change.
- Make an adjustment somewhere in an effort to influence positive change.
- Let go to explore a better fit
I know what it is like to feel stuck in the status quo. I lingered in this Choice #1 for three years because I couldn’t see that I had other options. Actually, I did know that I had options, but I perceived them as coming with such huge risk that I wasn’t willing to let myself explore them at any depth. So my other choices hung over me like huge clouds of risk that I never allowed myself to entertain. I was lucky enough to have an understanding boss who recognized how miserable I had become. He was the one who opened my eyes to Choice #2, with his offer to decrease my work week from five days to four. At first that step seemed very risky as I calculated over and over how much money I was giving up for my decreased work week. Yet that one extra day helped me to clearly appreciate the difference in the quality of my life doing a job that no longer fit and doing what I loved. Four months later I was ready to implement letting go. Moving from Choice #2 to Choice #3 was easier than stepping from Choice #1 to Choice #2 because I had experienced dipping my toe in the water of risk and realized that I had survived.
The first step to change is often the most difficult.
Excerpt from Inner Architect: How to Build the LIfe You Were Designed to Live
by Susan Hanshaw.
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