Unhappy career choices, how people can’t decide what they want to do
unhappy career choices
Lisa is a social worker who chose her career because it was what her mother did. Her mom was always so inspired by her work representing and advocating for the poor that Lisa thought she would find the same energy and enthusiasm. Never happened. She is deeply unhappy with the job and would do something else, but she has no idea what she would do in her place. She is in a quandary about what to do.
Alex is an accountant who is not happy with his career. He’s a brilliant guy who does his job pretty well. He makes a good living, much better than most. However, money and professional success do not give you any sense of satisfaction. He knows that he can change careers, but he has no idea what he would do in his place. He never had the ambition to be an accountant. He was always good with numbers, high school teachers and college professors encouraged him to become an accountant. Indeed, he has always felt that the race chose him and not him the race. He feels left in a dilemma about what to do.
There are many other people like Alex and the reasons are many and varied. For example:
1. Boredom due to the repetitiveness of the work.
2. Low salary with a lot of workload.
3. “Burn out” due to work pressure.
4. Too many years in the same job for it to no longer be a challenge.
5. Absence of a career ladder for promotion.
6. Experiencing work below one’s own abilities and skills.
7. Experiencing the work as too difficult and beyond one’s abilities and skills.
8. Very short vacation time.
9. Working in a corporate environment that does not respond to the needs and suggestions of workers.
10. Work in an authoritarian environment where there is a lot of hostility.
11. Low prestige and status for the type of job.
12. Disappointment and disappointment about how they initially thought the race would go,
These are just some of the factors that cause job and career dissatisfaction.
Despite the fact that so many people are not happy with their career choices, they stay at their jobs without making any changes. For some, a gloomy or pessimistic view of life leaves them with the idea that nothing better can be expected in their lives. Then, too, there are people who want job security no matter how unhappy they are with their circumstances. These are people whose productivity declines over the years. Poor evaluations and low pay are acceptable trade-offs for the sake of job security and stability. His approach to unhappiness at work is to count down the days until every holiday, every vacation, and until the day you retire. Of course, there are people who need their current job no matter how unhappy they may be. These are people with families to feed and clothe, and mortgages to pay. Many people don’t seem to realize that they might have choices and make decisions and changes in their career paths. Believing they have no options, they just continue, stubbornly and stubbornly, in the same job, never realizing that their lives could be better. Then, too, there’s the cold, hard fact that today’s economy doesn’t guarantee finding another job, even if you make a career change.
There is another type of career person who, like Alex and Lisa, is not happy with what they are doing and who is aware that career change is possible and desirable. However, they have no idea what they would do for a living if they didn’t maintain their current status. So often it’s about people, like Alex, who never knew what they wanted to do. When asked what their dreams were as children, they blank out and report that they never had dreams. When asked how they selected their current job, they provide explanations of how they found the job or how the job found them. However, these people make it clear that there was no motivating force driving them towards what they are now doing. Perhaps the fact that he pays “good money” was as good a motivation as anything. For this individual, as for many others, there was a time, years ago, when the economy was different and people were guaranteed a job for the rest of their lives.
Today, with a rapidly changing economy deeply affected by the international situation, including the inroads made by China and other nations into our economy, including the fact that many companies have now moved abroad where labor and manufacturing They are less expensive than in the United States. there is no longer any guarantee of working for a company or even in one type of business for the rest of a person’s life.
People who return to a job without any kind of vision or ambition often find themselves in a crisis if the company they work for changes location to a different part of the country or goes out of business altogether. At that time, the individual feels confused and unsure about what to do. That is when they can seek psychotherapy. If their hope is that therapy will somehow help them find a job, they are sorely disappointed. In the therapeutic office, they have no better idea of what they want to do with the job than before they lost their current job. All they know is that they are not happy with their situation and they want to work, but they make little effort to find work because there is nothing they want to do.
How did this happen?
This happens as a result of feelings of depression that precede the closure of your company or the loss of your job. Subsequent discussion in psychotherapy often reveals the fact that parental attitudes towards work during childhood were extremely negative. In these cases, whether the father was a doctor, a postman, or something else, they hated their job and made it abundantly clear when they came home. These attitudes and feelings were absorbed by their children even though they did not know it until they entered therapy. Without a role model to convey a commitment to work and career, these individuals, as children, had no ideas about being firefighters, police officers, or anything else. In fact, they couldn’t bring themselves to imagine following in their parents’ footsteps because of the bitter complaints they heard at home.
In some cases, parents interfered with childhood daydreaming and role-playing if they (the parents) objected to the type of job the child dreamed of. Of course, that kind of parental intrusion into a child’s fantasy world interferes with the development of creativity and imagination in this budding mind. The child who has this kind of experience and grows up without unlimited opportunity to imagine themselves as a nurse, doctor, health worker, or whatever, is left without the ability to imagine themselves defined by any kind of career. They may work, but without joy, pleasure, or any sense of accomplishment.
In treatment, I hear many of these types of people complain that their friends have gone way beyond them in their lives. The complaint is not that their friends earn more money than they do, but that they talk about themselves, with pleasure, as accountants, lawyers, plumbers, or any other profession or type of job. In other words, your friends have a sense of commitment to something more than just making some money. They have a commitment that is envied by the person who does not have a guide to who they are or what they should do.
What is the solution to this dilemma?
This is a difficult question to answer, but one of the suggestions I work with in therapy with someone struggling with an identity crisis about their career goal is to ask them what kind of work they would like to do, but without worrying about the issues of the reality. What kinds of reality problems are being referred to here? These are the reality issues that your parents used to interfere with your imaginations as children.
Among these reality issues are things like:
• Salary considerations.
• Additional professional education.
• How to pay for additional professional education.
• Whether or not it is possible to earn a living in the type of work envisioned.
• Believing that the profession or type of work has too high or too low a status.
• What other people might think about the career choice.
These are just some of the issues that plague many people when they think about their careers. What is particularly disturbing is that these types of questions prevent people from allowing their imaginations to place them in one type of job or another. The fact is that people are capable of making things happen on their own if they allow themselves the opportunity to dream.
An amazing example of someone who made dreams come true
Many years ago, when I was working in a hospital psychiatry department as a clinical social worker, I met an elderly psychiatrist who always seemed energetic and enthusiastic, far beyond any of the other professionals in the department. These other, much younger professionals included nurses, social workers, secretaries and, of course, psychiatrists. On one of those rare days when there was a break in the fast pace of the day, I asked him where he got his energy and enthusiasm from and if it had anything to do with anticipating retirement, which I didn’t think was an inappropriate question considering the fact that who was seventy-five years old.
I was speechless to hear that retirement was not a consideration as she had just completed her residency in psychiatry and this was her first paid job as an assistant psychiatrist in a hospital. Incredulous but relieved by her good-humoured response, I asked her how that was possible. He told me with good humor that when he was in his sixties, he and his wife agreed that he should pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a doctor. Rejected from all American medical schools, he went to a school in the Caribbean, completed his program, returned to the United States, took the tests, passed, and then was accepted to an American school where he completed his medical training. Undaunted by the fact that most hospitals did not want to hire such an elderly man, he kept looking for a job until he found his current position at a hospital that was not afraid of the elderly.
This inspiring story is true and underscores the fact that it is never too late if someone has a dream they refuse to give up on, regardless of the odds against its realization.
The message I am conveying is: allow yourself to dream and do not let others discourage you, regardless of the odds against achieving your goals. Maybe it’s something you can’t do now but, in the future, there is always hope, that is, if you stick to your dreams and refuse to listen to those who say no.
Help is available. Contact Allan N. Schwartz, PhD at: [email protected] or by phone at: 720-470-2028. Dr. Schwartz practices psychotherapy in Southwest Florida.
