I have spent years of coaching many disgruntled, stuck and frustrated executives. As a result, I’ve created a list of the 7 most common reasons for career dissatisfaction. And I’ve suggested some steps on how to overcome this career dissatisfaction below:
1. Unmet Personal Requirements or Needs.
If you have a need to be free and independent you will most certainly resent that micro-managing boss. If you have a need for peace, you will struggle to focus in an open-plan office. You must first identify and then satisfy your personal needs if you want to be happy at work. Take the free Emotional Index Quiz to find out what your top four personal needs are. Raise your emotional intelligence instantly.
2. Bad Boss/Office Politics.
If you don’t respect or like your boss, you probably dread going to work. Or, if you’ve ignored office politics you may find you are suddenly sidelined at work by the more politically savvy. Learn more about how to become more successful at business networking and office politics. Read Talane’s Top 10 Tips for Mastering the Art of Networking article. If managing difficult people is the challenge then you’ll find help in this article.
3. Untapped Abilities.
Most people think it is great to have a load of abilities and natural talents. What they don’t realize is that if you have a strong ability, a natural talent, you have to use it. If you don’t, you may wind up feeling unfulfilled and dissatisfied in your career. We use the Career Change Coaching Kit™ to identify hidden talents that may not be fully expressed in your work or life. This way you can create a new career plan for fulfilling them.
4. Boredom/Need for a New Challenge.
While your job may have been very exciting at first, it is now as dull as dishwater. You are bored. We all need some change and a new challenge to stay interested in our work. I like to use the Workplace Motivators Report (one of the career tests in the Career Change Coaching Kit™). It helps to quickly identify your hidden values and motivations. No need to struggle to figure this out. One quick career assessment will immediately reveal your hidden motivators.
5. Hidden Musical Ability.
Sometimes clients think they need a complete career change when all they may actually need is to start expressing a hidden or untapped ability in their lives. This can be done either professionally or personally. Most people think that it is great to have lots of talents and abilities. It can be, but only if you are able to use them on a regular basis. You can’t just let an ability sit there on the shelf and get it down when you need it. Strong talents will demand expression somewhere in your life. If left unexpressed, these talents lead to vague feelings of frustration and dissatisfaction and can even be the source of a mid-life crisis. If you have musical ability, it may demand expression and require an outlet. Some of our clients find that by picking up an instrument, that lurking sense of dissatisfaction and that feeling that “something is missing” disappears. We use two different career assessments in the Career Change Coaching Kit™ . One of them can test for musical ability. You may have a hidden musical ability, even if you’ve never touched an instrument in your life.
6. Need to Work with Your Hands.
In today’s world, many jobs are abstract and the most tangible result you’ll get after working all day might be a printed report. This isn’t enough for those with high spatial relations visualization–the need to get your hands dirty so to speak. If you work hard all day and at the end of it feel like you haven’t produced anything real for your efforts, then you may have the need to work with your hands or produce a tangible product. I use an objective, scientific career test to spot this ability in the Career Change Coaching Kit™.
7. Need to Move About.
Not everyone is suited to a desk job and some people need an hour minimum per day of physical activity or they feel restless. We use the career test in the Career Change Coaching Kit™ to identify the need to move around, although you can often spot these people easily because they are usually the ones tapping their fingers and feet in meetings.
If you feel you haven’t tapped into your full potential, you are absolutely right. You haven’t. If you are at all like me, you might think that you should be able to figure this out on your own. I certainly did and was surprised to find hidden abilities revealed in the various career assessments that I never knew existed. Even my own mother didn’t know my real abilities! Once I knew what my natural talents and abilities were, I felt confident investing the time and money in training and education to change my career from banking to life coaching.
Why waste time trying to figure this out when you probably lack the tools to find out what you are really born to do and how your brain has been wired up since the age of 13 to do naturally and effortlessly?
We can help you figure out exactly where the source of dissatisfaction is coming from.
This way, you’ll know what to do about it and how to fix it. There are lots of possible solutions and it is well worth doing a bit of navel gazing to find out precisely what will make you truly happy in your career and life. That sure beats waking up every morning and hitting the snooze alarm (like I did every day when working at the bank) because you dread going to work.
Learn more about the Career Change Coaching Kit™ by watching this video.
