Recently, I admitted that I was unhappy at work. It’s been a nagging suspicion for a while, but I actually found myself starting to say it out loud. This is not an easy stage for me, as my work, like little else, has always been a default success area. I have had the luck of having many amazing opportunities at a young age, jobs with freedom and responsibility, experiences that introduced me to what it feels like to truly contribute to something. In these jobs, I have been able to travel domestically and abroad, with hands-off remote management and a decent amount of recognition to feed my ego.
The résumé I describe has been on hiatus. The last three years have been a blur in my personal life, and I found myself holding on at work instead of really giving to it. This has some benefits: lunchtime yoga, shopping and errands between meetings, actually cooking dinner, the ability to confidently plan weeknight commitments, and a lack of work-related stress.
I’ve heard people claim that there are three aspects of life that can never all be good at the same time: job, home, and relationship. I will say, now that I have settled in to San Francisco as my happy home and my relationship is the best I could hope for, the job is living up (or down) to the urban myth. It’s becoming increasingly harder to go somewhere five days a week, sit for eight hours, and leave with no lagging passion or concern. I am craving more inspiration. I am feeling underutilized. In an attempt to help focus these feelings, I made a list of the things I want in my job that I do not feel I have today:
- Utilize my talent and expertise
- Get excited and feel passion for the work that I do
- Make a difference to the people I work for and with
- Continue to support my lifestyle and begin to save some money
- Maintain flexibility to work remotely whenever needed.
- Be awarded enough time off for myself, my relationship, and my family
Once I admitted this to myself, my first reaction was to get a recruiter and get out. But that meant actually leaving my job. I asked myself: Is walking out the right thing to do? Am I being impatient? Irrational? I started to make a connection between this reaction and others I have had in relationships when I simply walked out when things went south.
Work does have a lot of the same problems relationships can:
- You feel stifled
- You feel underappreciated
- You feel overcommitted
- You feel underqualified
- You feel overqualified
To my credit, I have been jumping ship less and less as I get older, allowing myself to grow through more “bad” experiences. Lately when I feel as though things are suffering in my personal life, I try to stop and calm down, communicate, and work to resolve the issue. This has been a blessing when I do it, so I started to consider applying the same theory here. When I thought about it, it didn’t seem like a good idea to leave my role before I truly addressed the current issues.
So, I waited for a while and then decided to communicate—very openly and honestly—with my boss. I told him all of the above. I told him I was unhappy with the way things were and presented some ideas about how I think these things could change. I told him that if they did not change, I would have to leave.
About three weeks later, the tides turned. Not a huge shift, but my boss made a major effort, which made me realize I did the right thing by sticking by for a while. I am now in a period of “working things out.” You could call it couple's counseling for my company and me. My manager and I both shared a lot of information about our current state at work and now I feel like I have a better handle on what the future might bring. I’ve taken back some control and made the initiative to end the dissatisfaction. I’ve also been smart enough to update my résumé and commit to a timeframe that if things do not materially change, I will more actively pursue something else.
