The "I am Happy and Authentic" Career Trap
Don't disqualify discomfort and fear when making career choices.
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Evolution has equipped us with a great many survival instincts. One of them is fear, a sense of dread influencing our rational decision making, guiding us away from high-risk situations.
It is useful and necessary in most cases, don't get us wrong. Yet when examined in a career development setting, fear turns into a paradox: rather than something to run away from, it has the power to indicate something we should be running towards to. After all, the greater the perceived risk, the greater the associated award can be. It is the things that frighten us the most, make us procrastinate the most, that may be the most worth pursuing.
It is like this:
You may deeply wish for more control over your time, but the thought of starting your own business is too frightening for you to take even the first step towards that desire. You may wish for more accountability and recognition in your job, but with it the risk of failure increases and you end up not working towards that promotion. It can even be the fear of discovering your own limits that prevent you from moving an idea from concept to action. Because: what if you actually can't do it just yet and things are more difficult than expected.
To our minds, it is time to understand fear as a natural part of life, something we willexperience and should learn to expect, observe, negotiate. More than that, listen to it as an indicator for when something actually matters to you.
A strange phenomenon permeates companies the world over, and is perpetuated by social media's ever greater appetite for portrayals of boundless hedonism: if you are not at all times happy, authentic, the best version of yourself, you are a failure. Obviously this is unrealistic and a risk to your mental health and resilience. But more than that, masking your "negative" emotions bereaves you of a vital part of your career compass. We need people to come alive at work and be articulate about their values and expectations towards their employers. This means leveraging your full emotional bandwidth, to know what opportunities to walk towards to. And which ones to say no to.
Live up to your feelings people, have that grumpy day and love it too.
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Nikki and Tom