By the time you reach your 40’s, there’s a very good chance that you have lost a job or two (or four, [cough]), either by redundancy, pressure to quit, or being out-and-out fired.
If it happens once, you can chalk it up to being one of those things. If it happens again for the same reason, then you really need to start taking note. A third time, and you are clearly in a pattern of your own making. Yes, your making, and it does not matter for what reason you lost your job.
This does not necessarily mean that you are a bad person, or a screw-up, and perhaps you were actually in the right when you were ‘let go’, but the fact remains that you are the one out of a job. Unfortunately most of us keep going back to the same pattern, and I can assure you, you will eventually run out of decent options.
Hopefully if you find yourself in the above scenario, you are now prepared for a little self reflection. WHY do you keep imploding at work? What is it that YOU keep doing that makes your unique talents and skills so easily replaceable? There are basically two negative extremes here:
- You are completely deluded as to what your strengths / talents actually are; and
o - You are actually a jerk.
If you’re a nice person in a position to do what you do best every day, would you really have been ‘laid off’ from an organisation that’s still in business?
The issue is that most of us are not always nice, and for more reasons that anyone would ever care to know about, we are probably also not doing what we love to do. Quite frankly, most of us are not even doing the things we’re good at, let alone love. For every kid who knows at the age of six that they want to be a doctor, there’s a hundred kids with no clue. That cluelessness can last a lifetime, but life goes on and you have to do something.
What happens to most of us is that we bounce from one thing to the next, and by more luck than judgement, we find something tolerable. But instead of using the steady income as a springboard to what’s next, we hold out for the perfect job, the perfect title, or a passion. The perfect role does not exist, not if it comes with a title. No job description I’ve ever seen is based on my skill-set or talents, it’s based on what the company I work for thinks they need.
Fair enough you might say, they’re the one’s paying you a wage, but it’s completely self defeating in my opinion. It puts us in a position where we have to balance the good with the bad, which can only ever be frustrating to the point where we start to focus on the bad. Once on this downward spiral it is very difficult to stop, and we may find ourselves in a position where our job is at risk. Whether we know it at the time or not.
We have always had a choice, this scenario has always been of OUR making, but hindsight is not going to help here unless it’s in the form of self reflection, and lessons learned. So what DO we do now? Leave for another company before we get fired and start the same pattern all over again? Start your own business because we’re basically unemployable?
Or, are you going to do what you should have done years ago?; take a long hard look at yourself. Wherever you are in your career, you MUST ask yourself every day whether or not you are doing something sustainable. If you are going home exhausted from frustration each night, or are constantly complaining about something, there’s a very good chance you are in the wrong place and will wind up having to make a difficult decision.
Or that decision is made for you.
Forget the company you work for (unless you hate their ethics / values), and forget your title (it’s limiting), are you mostly doing what you are best at and maybe even enjoy? If the answer is yes, then by all means defend your job if threatened, if the answer is no, you should probably see it as a wake-up call.
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