I wanted to write a series of posts that you could apply to your job. Something you can relate to wether you are a salesman, doctor, telemarketer or a store manager. Do any of those professions have anything in common with each other? Yes, no. Doesn’t matter. My goal is to give you some tools for you to think yourself and your job (or profession) so by knowing where you stand you’ll have a clearer picture of where you are going to decide where you are going (because options are always better than a single and deterministic path).
Your (any) company (or profession) operates like a pump. It pumps energy from you and that energy is transformed into productivity. Problem is that this energy doesn’t differ from any other kind of energy in the Universe: it’s not infinite. And there are more bad news; this energy must also be used in the other spheres of your life such as your education, social support networks or at home with your family. Moreover, your job demands several things from you: commitment, effort, dedication and time (lots of it).
Sometimes, work draws too much of this energy at the expense of the other spheres. You can note this when your relationship with your husband deteriorates, when you can no longer frequent your buddies at the pub every week or when you can’t spend as much time as you wanted with your kids. You get the idea.
But not everything is bad news. As long as your job provides you with the tools and resources to cope with the stress it (naturally) generates, you are fine. If things go smooth you get identified with your company, start wearing its Jersey and all that energy gets “contained”. That’s what the act of working basically does. It’s an energy container and channeler. It channels that energy towards productive goals. But this is as long as you play the game by your job’s rules.
So what happens when you get kicked out?
“Your Job” also hosts a lot of significants (things that mean something to you) like career aspirations, economic goals, the way you see yourself, the way you present yourself to the world and the way you signify your own self (I’m a Lawyer, I’m the Manager of X, I’m a Doctor, etc.). Sometimes (specially at work) you forget you are Ann Sawyer, Peter Brown or Sean Higgs and you become a function, a role or a title. The moment you lose that (you get fired, you retire, you quit) all the energy that was held together by the organization loses its scaffolding and gets free. The problem with free here is that it’s not tied to anything, it’s free floating energy and we humans need that energy to be linked to something, like other people or institutions.
Let’s forget for a second about the extreme scenarios (lay off and retirement). Let’s just say that you are having problems at work because your budget became too tight or because your boss is a douche. In this case, the exigencies from your job’s side become greater and the means to deal with them, scarcer. What happens here, when there’s a big differential between the invested energy and the resources you receive to cope with the tension, is that stress kicks in due to the impossibility to equalize them.
The moral of this story is that it’s OK to invest your energy in your job. It’s what makes professionals strive to succeed. But don’t disconnect from your support networks and family because if things don’t work out as planned you’ll need them close enough to relocate that free energy we talked about a few lines above. And if stress already knocked on your door, follow this link.
Continue reading the second part.
Image Credit GotAllSports
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Article by Fernando
The guy in charge of this blog - husband, Psychologist, former Manager, Blogger, Job Coach, Recruiter and Information Junkie. Yes, I am all that.
Fernando has written 237 awesome articles for us at FT Careers Blog
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