For years I had a job that people in my industry were envious of. I worked from home. I got to be creative (sometimes). I didn’t have a (direct) boss.
But the longer I did it the more I realized I was staying at it partly because people said I should love it, even though I really didn’t.
I saw the negatives. The stress. An industry in flux stuck with old thinking and bad leadership. The work that didn’t really matter beyond the transaction of getting a check.
Think of the positives!
You should feel fortunate that you still have a job with the way our industry is!
You don’t have to commute!
You don’t own a tie!
You’re making great money!
What looked like positives to them sounded like ‘not negatives’ to me. And there is a big difference.
Hey, I didn’t get kicked in the testicles today!
It’s hard to spin that as a positive. It’s great and all. I don’t want to be kicked there. But somehow that being the benchmark for good leaves something to be desired.
So I made the decision to do something with actual positives. I had to tune out peer talk and listen to my internal narrative. I needed to identify where my GPS was leading me.
But the scariest part was realizing I had to step into this without a full picture of what that meant.
The GPS was only giving me the first part of the directions. Go left.
There was no second step revealed until I completed the first.
But I could see real positives in that first direction. Doing work where I could get up every day and make a living while making a difference.
So look at the positives of where you are right now. Are they really positives? Or more like ‘not negatives’? What can you do to identify where more real positives lie and how can you reprogram your GPS to get you there?