63. How to Set Yourself Up for Career Satisfaction in 2022
A lot of people believe that career satisfaction is an outcome or a destination.
They think that when they have the right colleagues, boss, paycheck, or work culture, that’s when things will change and they’ll feel real satisfaction at work.
However, it’s my belief that career satisfaction is a habit, not a destination.
It’s a practice and a way of being, not a place you arrive at when the things around you change.
Not that we never choose to change those externals. Sometimes we do.
But changing them often does not result in immediate satisfaction.
Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself.
(Maybe you’ve even felt some crushing disappointment when you expected to magically feel satisfied after an achievement or a change and then did not.)
Changing where you work or how much money you make doesn’t automatically make you feel more satisfied.
And even when we do hit our goals and change the things we want to change, we’re often just on to the next goal afterwards, instead of spending any time at all cultivating some delicious satisfaction about what we’ve accomplished.
Satisfaction is not a treat that simply appears when we orient our work (or life) just so.
It’s an attitude. It’s a mindset. It’s, like I said earlier, a habit.
Instead of expecting it to appear, we need to create it.
Tune in this week to learn how you can develop this habit, and why it’s wise to work on the habit now rather than waiting until you’re in your perfect job situation.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why career satisfaction is a habit and way of being, rather than a destination.
The discomfort that will still come up, even when things are going amazingly and you have career satisfaction.
How our social conditioning teaches us to use anxiety, fear, and dread to run our careers, and why this doesn’t work long-term.
What you can do to see the ways your life and career are exactly what you used to dream of.
Why comparing your level of career satisfaction to other people’s isn’t helpful.
Why the more you can cultivate satisfaction now as a habitual thought, the more it will grow in the future.
How to tap into career satisfaction, even if your career is not 100% where you want it to be right now.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about how to set yourself up for career satisfaction in 2022.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. Happy New Year, welcome to 2022. The interesting thing about me saying that is while I’m recording this podcast it is, of course, still 2021 because I need to record my podcasts early to give my podcast team time to produce the episode and still time to have time off for the holidays.
So it’s interesting because here, now, in my life it’s still December. But when this podcast reaches your ears it’s going to be January. So this is really interesting for me because I feel like in my head I’m sort of in both places at once. I’m still in my own life, obviously, in December but I’m also imagining into 2022. Imagining into you going back to work, me going back to work, it being a whole new year and what that’s going to be like.
And it’s kind of a fun place to be, to be in this like double place of 2021 and 2022. And it’s been interesting because something that’s been happening for me in the end of 2021 has actually been me handling some of my own work stress and some of my own growing pains in my business.
And I wanted to share a little bit about that with y’all because I think it’s really important to know that even when you build the career that you’ve been dreaming of new things will still come along that you’ll be like, “Oh fuck, this is hard.” Or this feels scary, or I have no idea how to do this thing. And for me it’s been setting up a solo 401K.
So when I worked in corporate, obviously I had my corporate 401K. I don’t even remember how I set that up, probably I made some kind of choices clicking around in some kind of portal and then it just was magically happening. And I will say, as a business owner I miss that, where you just do some things and then paychecks magically arrive, and money magically go into the 401K. I know it’s not magic, someone else is doing the paperwork, doing the administration, making sure it all happens.
But I chose to do my own admin setting up my solo 401K because I like understanding how things happen and understanding what the work actually is. So that’s been super interesting. I could do it again, probably pretty easily, but going through it for the very first time brought up a lot of challenges for me.
And it brought up a lot of my beliefs, like if I’m not able to do something right on the first try or if I don’t actually know how to do something I still have, I’ve discovered in this process, a lot of beliefs that feel kind of terrible. And while I won’t say it’s been fun to have those beliefs get tapped into, it has certainly been educational, and it has given me some of my own coaching work to do.
All of this is to say it brought up this thing that I’ve been experiencing that’s been really interesting. And I may even do a whole podcast episode on this. So give me a shout on social or in my email if that’s something you want.
But what I’ve been noticing is before in my career I had this deep craving for more freedom, and I hear about this from a lot of people, people want freedom. But now I have a lot of freedom and that is very cool, and I love it and I’m glad I set myself up this way.
And it also means there’s a lot of things I don’t have to do. But if I want to do them then I also have to figure out how to do them or hire someone to do them because I’m not in a container where someone automatically does that for me.
So I’m not in a container where if I want a 401K I just click a few buttons in a portal, and it gets magically set up. I mean I guess probably I could hire it out and it may be that kind of experience. But when I made my analysis of this task I decided I wanted to do it myself for a variety of reasons.
And when I decided that I got the freedom to decide that, I can set it up any way I want to. And the way I chose to set it up involved doing a bunch of shit I didn’t know how to do and that did bring up all these feelings.
So I just want to offer that because I think we believe that we don’t have freedom and if we did or when we do have freedom it’s going to feel amazing. And there is some truth to that, but what I want to offer is that when we have freedom there is also some, let’s just say terror.
Terror of doing it wrong. Terror of there not being a guide. Terror of the mean shit I may say to myself if I fuck this whole thing up. And also there not being a right thing to do and me getting to be and having to be the person who makes the choices.
So I just wanted to offer that to y'all because I think it's useful to know that so that wherever you are in your career journey, you can realize that where you are in your career journey there's things to enjoy and things you'd rather change.
And I am at a very high level of career satisfaction, and career delight, and career freedom. And I love that and there's still things I'm enjoying and things I'd like to change and things that I'm trying to do that I don't know how to do yet. And I'm experiencing a lot of frustration about that. Which you probably are to, at whatever level of your career you're at.
So that's just something I wanted to say. And I think it goes really well with today's topic, which is how to set yourself up for career satisfaction in 2022 and beyond. So I think a lot of people believe that career satisfaction is an outcome.
They're like, oh, when I get the right job. When I have the right colleagues. When I have the right boss. When I'm in the right work culture. When I'm making the right amount of money. When I have the right flexible schedule. When I have the right benefits. When I have the right commute. And for some people it might be like, just when I'm more senior or when my kids aren't so small.
They're thinking that's when they'll have the career satisfaction. They're thinking it's an outcome that they're going to arrive at, and that the outcome depends on things outside of themselves happening.
And when I say outcome, I mean kind of like a destination, right? It's like going to Miami. You're going to Miami, and then you arrive in Miami, and then you're in Miami. But what I want to offer is that career satisfaction is a habit, not a destination. It's a practice, not a place you arrive at. It's a way of being, not something that happens when you get everything dialed in perfectly.
Now, this might sound insane to some of you, that's fine, but go with me on this. I'm sure that you've had goals in the past, and then you've achieved those goals. And then it didn't magically solve everything, and you weren't suddenly completely 100% satisfied with your life or with whatever area of life that goal was in.
In fact, usually what we do is when it looks like we're going to achieve a goal, we just go ahead and set a different goal for us to then work on achieving. Or we set a goal knowing that we won't even try to achieve it and then we just use that goal to make ourselves feel bad for like, I don't know, forever and ever. That seems to be I think I see a lot of.
So I think it makes a lot more sense to make career satisfaction a habit that we work on, a habit that we practice. Rather than thinking we have to get our career to be and look an exact perfect way and then we'll magically feel satisfied all the time.
First of all, y'all know I teach that life doesn't feel amazing all the time, even when you create a really amazing life. For instance, my business has grown so much that now I am working to set up that solo 401k I mentioned earlier, that's amazing. That's an amazing thing that I get to do that, and it brought up discomfort for me.
Discomfort in that I had to choose if I was going to do it or pay someone else to do it. And discomfort in that when I was doing it, it brought up a lot of self-criticisms I had about myself, that are just thoughts for me to look at, but still uncomfortable. But it doesn't mean my career isn't satisfying just because negative feelings are there.
The other thing, and we've talked about this in other podcasts is that the journey feels like the destination. So if you want achieving a certain goal to feel yummy, and delicious, and satisfying, then it really helps to practice feeling those yummy, delicious, satisfied feelings along the way. Because what we habitually think will be what we think when we arrive at our goal. And what we habitually feel will be what we feel when we arrive at our goal.
It can be true that sometimes we arrive at a big goal, and we felt like shit the entire way and it feels really good for like a minute. But usually it's not long lasting because, again, what we habitually feel, and think is what we will go back to once that little spike of achievement is over.
And an example that I've talked about before on the podcast is me paying down my student loans. When I was paying them down a lot of that time I was feeling really intense anxiety and a lot of like shame and dread and all these feelings. And when I paid them down it did briefly feel really good.
And then my brain like totally forgot that I had ever had student loans and that that was a thing I had achieved and that I could be like super proud of myself and happy and satisfied about that. And it immediately went to go find something else that I could, and it would argue should, feel dread and anxiety and shame about. Because that's what it was used to feeling.
Okay. So, career satisfaction is a habit. What does that mean? What does that look like? How do you employ that? And especially how do you tap into that if your career is not 100% where you want it to be? And it's probably not, because most of us around these parts have big goals, me included.
My career is blowing my fucking mind and I still now have things I want it to be and do that it's not being and doing yet. So how do we balance that? I also think this brings up a really interesting idea that people have where they think that they have to not feel satisfied in order to keep feeling motivated and make change.
I see this all the time, people are like, “But if I feel delighted in what I’ve already accomplished, if I feel proud of what I've already done, if I feel satisfied my career, then I just won't do anything else.” And I really think that that's some bullshit. I do believe that that's how most of us are parented, is to use negative emotions as fuel.
What I know and have seen as a career coach is that using negative emotions as fuel often leads to burnout. But that aside, I think there's something really interesting going on here of like, oh, if I already feel satisfied, and proud and delighted, why would I keep doing something?
But I really actually want you to answer that question. Not in that tone of voice. Here's the tone of voice difference, why would I keep working on it if I'm already satisfied? That's the tone of voice a lot of us ask ourselves.
But I want to ask you or to have you ask yourself in a curious, compassionate, kind, fascinated tone of voice. Which is more like, yeah, why would I work on goals? What reasons could there possibly be to work on goals or to work on changing my career if I already felt delighted, satisfied, joyful, proud, confident, et cetera?
Now, what I see a lot and what I've personally experienced is, if we have been using feelings like anxiety, and shame, and dread, and disappointment to run our careers and we stop using those, there may be a short period of time where we do just want to rest because we're exhausted from having used those emotions.
But once we stop using the negative emotions and once we have our rest, then we usually want to do some shit in our career because it's fucking fun and interesting. And because I personally believe that humans like to do shit. We like to be creative. We like to create value. We like to create outcomes. We like to have an impact on the world. I just believe that that's true. And that's what I've seen in myself and many other people.
So what I think is that after we maybe do need to take a little break to recover from our old way of being, we’ll start to be like, “Oh, yeah, I want to do some stuff. That could be cool.” So I think that's just something that I want you all to think about of, “Oh yeah, what if there's a way to do my life and my career that doesn't actually involve me having to motivate myself with feeling like shit? That could be really fun and interesting.”
Second of all, this isn't an all or nothing thing, right? So there may be, if you look at your current career, there may be things you really do want to change and there may be things you already really like. But a lot of us spend a lot of time thinking about the things we want to change and how we're not there yet.
And a lot of us are not spending a lot of time thinking about what we already like, or what's going really well, or the ways in which our current life and career is the one that we used to dream of. This is particularly true for me. When I worked in corporate I dreamed of having my own business and being able to replace my corporate income.
Now I have my own business and it is a little bit different with what the business's revenue is versus what my take home is. But the business revenue is almost three times what I was making when I worked in corporate. So that's pretty fucking cool.
And like I said, still things for me to do over here. But I can cultivate satisfaction in what I've done, even if I want to do more, and in what is working and what feels really good to me now. And the more I cultivate that satisfaction now, first of all, the more I'm going to have the thoughts that create satisfaction as habitual thoughts and then the feeling of satisfaction as a habitual feeling, the more likely it is that I'm going to feel satisfied whenever I get to where I go.
And satisfaction, delight fun, these make much better fuel to get where we want to go. I think so many of us are so afraid to let go of these negative emotion motivators because we think we won't go anywhere without them. But I think it's more like we go so much faster without them.
Now, I want to be clear, this is not about lying to yourself. It's not about saying everything in my career is amazing, if it's actually not and you want to headbutt many parts of your career in the face, right? So I think it's useful to get really clear and do an audit almost of your career. But go at it first looking for what's working, instead of looking for what's not working.
If there are things in your career that are what you want to be there, or are what you used to dream of, even if now you dream of something different, can we notice those and spend some time being satisfied in relation to them? Can we practice being satisfied alongside the desire to create more change?
Because I think a lot of us, again, think it's either or. Either I'm satisfied and then I don't do anything else, or I'm dissatisfied and then I change everything. But life and our careers are so much more nuanced, right?
So where am I satisfied? How can I really feel that, revel in that? Evaluate how did I get that thing that feels so satisfying? What worked? What did I do to make that be part of my career? Celebrate yourself.
And then we can look at where am I not satisfied? What am I dreaming of? Where would I like to have something different? Where would I like to have something that's a little bit more aligned to my vision of what I want career to look like for me?
But again, not waiting until we have all those pieces in place to feel satisfied. Not waiting until we have all those pieces in place to celebrate ourselves and our awesomeness and the really important work we're doing by setting our careers up in a way that feels satisfying to us.
I think so many people, and also this used to be me, feel like if we're not satisfied in our careers we're doing it wrong, or we're behind, or something has to change. It's almost like we're failing a race that everyone else is somehow winning.
But I see behind the curtain now because I'm a career coach and I talk to lots and lots and lots of people about their work. And some people aren't even trying to make their work something that is satisfying. And they're allowed to do that. There's no law that says you have to have a satisfying career, I just personally think it's fun and interesting to do so.
But what I want to offer to you is whatever level of career satisfaction you're at, if you care about that, you're not behind no matter where you are. If you care about that, you're doing great, you're in the right place. And you don't have to try to run faster to catch up with everybody else who may appear to be more satisfied than you.
First of all, a lot of us have no idea how satisfied or dissatisfied anyone else is and especially living in a time where people are putting our most shiny selves on like the Instagram and stuff like that. We spend so much of our time comparing our insides to other people's outsides.
That's a phrase I heard from some other brilliant person a long time ago and I can't remember who it is. But I think it's such a cool concept, so credit to you, wonderful human who said it, and thank you.
And for those of you listening, to circle back we spend so much time comparing our insides to other people's outsides that I think if we're not satisfied with our career, we think we already should be because it seems like everyone else is. But what I want to offer is most people are somewhere in the middle. They're satisfied with some things, they're not with other things.
And I think the people who are the most satisfied are not necessarily the people who have the most picture perfect careers. But I think it's the people who are noticing and reveling in and just relishing and delighting in the ways in which their careers are already satisfying. And then using that as energy to bring their careers into more alignment with what would be satisfying for them.
One other thing I want to make sure to touch on is the idea that career satisfaction is an inside job. So to go back to what I said earlier, a lot of us are trying to get our career into sort of this picture perfect place based on what it looks like on the outside. Based on external factors like where we work, how much money we're making, how many hours we work, how flexible our schedule is, what kind of work we're doing.
And all of those are super important, and if you have preferences I want to help you create those in the real world. Because we each have really specific things we want, and I think creating something externally that matches what you want internally is a beautiful thing. But no specific set of circumstances in your career is going to create satisfaction for you because satisfaction doesn't come from external things.
Satisfaction comes from the way we think about things. It's an internal, inside job. And so many of us are trying to create satisfaction by setting our lives up in a certain way, maybe in a way that matches our actual personal preferences.
Although a lot of times I see people try to create satisfaction by setting their lives and careers up in a way that matches societal expectations, which is definitely not a recipe for delight. And they're looking to these external factors to either create the satisfaction or not. And if they don't feel satisfied, then they often want to start changing these external factors. They're like, “Oh, I thought this would make me happy. But I did it, I still don't feel satisfied. So I'm just going to do something else.”
That's why I think it's super important to know that not only is career satisfaction a habit, and a practice, and something that even if we cultivate, we're probably not going to feel 100% of the time. It's also an inside job and no set of external things is going to create it for us.
Now, that might sound like bad news. But I think it's actually really, really wonderful news. Because it means you can practice satisfaction no matter where you're working. You can practice looking for what is working. You can practice evaluating, how did I create this thing is working? And how do I create more of it? Or how do I create it in this adjacent area? Or rather, how do I create something that is working in this adjacent area where it feels less awesome?
And when we create career satisfaction and celebrate what's working in the career we already have, it doesn't make us less likely to make those other changes. It actually gives us more energy to make those other changes.
When we realize that career satisfaction is an inside job, when we realize that we may have a lot more satisfaction in our current career than we think we do because our brains don't normally look for it and sort of hide it from us and we can go find it and revel in it and delight in it, a few things happen.
One thing that happens is our career feels a lot better and we experience more of those emotions we want right away, even before anything in the outside world changes. But the other thing that happens is, we do start changing other factors that we want to have changed.
And this is a really cool thing because if we realize that satisfaction is an inside job, then we start to solve that inside job ahead of time. But then we do work in the real world to make the career be what we want it to be also in those little circumstance details like what kind of work we're doing, what kind of pay we're getting, et cetera.
When we think that the career is going to give it to us, we change those factors but we're changing those factors to try to get something. And it can be very frustrating because we're like, “Okay, I think maybe if I change this thing,” and then we go to all this effort to change that thing and it doesn't feel good, because we haven't cultivated the satisfaction ahead of time. And then if we change that thing, and then satisfaction doesn't happen on the other side, it can be very hard to stay upbeat.
And in fact, it can feel like really upsetting. And it can wind up with us going into what I've been calling the pit of despair, the fuck it effect where we're like, “Oh, I worked so hard to change this thing. And then the career satisfaction didn't magically arrive. So changing things in my career isn't working, but the career I have isn't working. And fuck it, I'm just going to shut my computer, I just don't care. I'm just going to like hmm.”
And then we wind up staying in this experience of our careers that doesn't feel good to us. But we also don't believe that we can make it feel better or we're like, "Maybe I can make it feel better, but it seems like a lot of work.” And then we wind up staying in these unhappy situations for a really long time and thinking that the situation is the reason we’re unhappy.
So basically, my point here is that I think taking a look at your career and looking at what already feels really satisfying and really celebrating and delighting in that. And this is going to maybe sound silly, but spending time sitting with that emotion of satisfaction and just feeling it and allowing it and enjoying it. And then looking at the things you want to change in your career and letting that emotion of satisfaction be fuel for you to do that.
First of all, it's going to give you so much more resilience and ability to keep changing little things and keep tinkering and tweaking and testing and learning. But second of all, it's going to make all of that also feel much more enjoyable. And it's going to give you, again, so much more resilience for the short term and the long haul of having a career that feels really amazing to you.
All right y'all, that's what I have for you this week. Happy New Year again. I hope you're having a lovely January so far and I will talk to you next week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. Happy New Year, welcome to 2022. The interesting thing about me saying that is while I’m recording this podcast it is, of course, still 2021 because I need to record my podcasts early to give my podcast team time to produce the episode and still time to have time off for the holidays.
So it’s interesting because here, now, in my life it’s still December. But when this podcast reaches your ears it’s going to be January. So this is really interesting for me because I feel like in my head I’m sort of in both places at once. I’m still in my own life, obviously, in December but I’m also imagining into 2022. Imagining into you going back to work, me going back to work, it being a whole new year and what that’s going to be like.
And it’s kind of a fun place to be, to be in this like double place of 2021 and 2022. And it’s been interesting because something that’s been happening for me in the end of 2021 has actually been me handling some of my own work stress and some of my own growing pains in my business.
And I wanted to share a little bit about that with y’all because I think it’s really important to know that even when you build the career that you’ve been dreaming of new things will still come along that you’ll be like, “Oh fuck, this is hard.” Or this feels scary, or I have no idea how to do this thing. And for me it’s been setting up a solo 401K.
So when I worked in corporate, obviously I had my corporate 401K. I don’t even remember how I set that up, probably I made some kind of choices clicking around in some kind of portal and then it just was magically happening. And I will say, as a business owner I miss that, where you just do some things and then paychecks magically arrive, and money magically go into the 401K. I know it’s not magic, someone else is doing the paperwork, doing the administration, making sure it all happens.
But I chose to do my own admin setting up my solo 401K because I like understanding how things happen and understanding what the work actually is. So that’s been super interesting. I could do it again, probably pretty easily, but going through it for the very first time brought up a lot of challenges for me.
And it brought up a lot of my beliefs, like if I’m not able to do something right on the first try or if I don’t actually know how to do something I still have, I’ve discovered in this process, a lot of beliefs that feel kind of terrible. And while I won’t say it’s been fun to have those beliefs get tapped into, it has certainly been educational, and it has given me some of my own coaching work to do.
All of this is to say it brought up this thing that I’ve been experiencing that’s been really interesting. And I may even do a whole podcast episode on this. So give me a shout on social or in my email if that’s something you want.
But what I’ve been noticing is before in my career I had this deep craving for more freedom, and I hear about this from a lot of people, people want freedom. But now I have a lot of freedom and that is very cool, and I love it and I’m glad I set myself up this way.
And it also means there’s a lot of things I don’t have to do. But if I want to do them then I also have to figure out how to do them or hire someone to do them because I’m not in a container where someone automatically does that for me.
So I’m not in a container where if I want a 401K I just click a few buttons in a portal, and it gets magically set up. I mean I guess probably I could hire it out and it may be that kind of experience. But when I made my analysis of this task I decided I wanted to do it myself for a variety of reasons.
And when I decided that I got the freedom to decide that, I can set it up any way I want to. And the way I chose to set it up involved doing a bunch of shit I didn’t know how to do and that did bring up all these feelings.
So I just want to offer that because I think we believe that we don’t have freedom and if we did or when we do have freedom it’s going to feel amazing. And there is some truth to that, but what I want to offer is that when we have freedom there is also some, let’s just say terror.
Terror of doing it wrong. Terror of there not being a guide. Terror of the mean shit I may say to myself if I fuck this whole thing up. And also there not being a right thing to do and me getting to be and having to be the person who makes the choices.
So I just wanted to offer that to y'all because I think it's useful to know that so that wherever you are in your career journey, you can realize that where you are in your career journey there's things to enjoy and things you'd rather change.
And I am at a very high level of career satisfaction, and career delight, and career freedom. And I love that and there's still things I'm enjoying and things I'd like to change and things that I'm trying to do that I don't know how to do yet. And I'm experiencing a lot of frustration about that. Which you probably are to, at whatever level of your career you're at.
So that's just something I wanted to say. And I think it goes really well with today's topic, which is how to set yourself up for career satisfaction in 2022 and beyond. So I think a lot of people believe that career satisfaction is an outcome.
They're like, oh, when I get the right job. When I have the right colleagues. When I have the right boss. When I'm in the right work culture. When I'm making the right amount of money. When I have the right flexible schedule. When I have the right benefits. When I have the right commute. And for some people it might be like, just when I'm more senior or when my kids aren't so small.
They're thinking that's when they'll have the career satisfaction. They're thinking it's an outcome that they're going to arrive at, and that the outcome depends on things outside of themselves happening.
And when I say outcome, I mean kind of like a destination, right? It's like going to Miami. You're going to Miami, and then you arrive in Miami, and then you're in Miami. But what I want to offer is that career satisfaction is a habit, not a destination. It's a practice, not a place you arrive at. It's a way of being, not something that happens when you get everything dialed in perfectly.
Now, this might sound insane to some of you, that's fine, but go with me on this. I'm sure that you've had goals in the past, and then you've achieved those goals. And then it didn't magically solve everything, and you weren't suddenly completely 100% satisfied with your life or with whatever area of life that goal was in.
In fact, usually what we do is when it looks like we're going to achieve a goal, we just go ahead and set a different goal for us to then work on achieving. Or we set a goal knowing that we won't even try to achieve it and then we just use that goal to make ourselves feel bad for like, I don't know, forever and ever. That seems to be I think I see a lot of.
So I think it makes a lot more sense to make career satisfaction a habit that we work on, a habit that we practice. Rather than thinking we have to get our career to be and look an exact perfect way and then we'll magically feel satisfied all the time.
First of all, y'all know I teach that life doesn't feel amazing all the time, even when you create a really amazing life. For instance, my business has grown so much that now I am working to set up that solo 401k I mentioned earlier, that's amazing. That's an amazing thing that I get to do that, and it brought up discomfort for me.
Discomfort in that I had to choose if I was going to do it or pay someone else to do it. And discomfort in that when I was doing it, it brought up a lot of self-criticisms I had about myself, that are just thoughts for me to look at, but still uncomfortable. But it doesn't mean my career isn't satisfying just because negative feelings are there.
The other thing, and we've talked about this in other podcasts is that the journey feels like the destination. So if you want achieving a certain goal to feel yummy, and delicious, and satisfying, then it really helps to practice feeling those yummy, delicious, satisfied feelings along the way. Because what we habitually think will be what we think when we arrive at our goal. And what we habitually feel will be what we feel when we arrive at our goal.
It can be true that sometimes we arrive at a big goal, and we felt like shit the entire way and it feels really good for like a minute. But usually it's not long lasting because, again, what we habitually feel, and think is what we will go back to once that little spike of achievement is over.
And an example that I've talked about before on the podcast is me paying down my student loans. When I was paying them down a lot of that time I was feeling really intense anxiety and a lot of like shame and dread and all these feelings. And when I paid them down it did briefly feel really good.
And then my brain like totally forgot that I had ever had student loans and that that was a thing I had achieved and that I could be like super proud of myself and happy and satisfied about that. And it immediately went to go find something else that I could, and it would argue should, feel dread and anxiety and shame about. Because that's what it was used to feeling.
Okay. So, career satisfaction is a habit. What does that mean? What does that look like? How do you employ that? And especially how do you tap into that if your career is not 100% where you want it to be? And it's probably not, because most of us around these parts have big goals, me included.
My career is blowing my fucking mind and I still now have things I want it to be and do that it's not being and doing yet. So how do we balance that? I also think this brings up a really interesting idea that people have where they think that they have to not feel satisfied in order to keep feeling motivated and make change.
I see this all the time, people are like, “But if I feel delighted in what I’ve already accomplished, if I feel proud of what I've already done, if I feel satisfied my career, then I just won't do anything else.” And I really think that that's some bullshit. I do believe that that's how most of us are parented, is to use negative emotions as fuel.
What I know and have seen as a career coach is that using negative emotions as fuel often leads to burnout. But that aside, I think there's something really interesting going on here of like, oh, if I already feel satisfied, and proud and delighted, why would I keep doing something?
But I really actually want you to answer that question. Not in that tone of voice. Here's the tone of voice difference, why would I keep working on it if I'm already satisfied? That's the tone of voice a lot of us ask ourselves.
But I want to ask you or to have you ask yourself in a curious, compassionate, kind, fascinated tone of voice. Which is more like, yeah, why would I work on goals? What reasons could there possibly be to work on goals or to work on changing my career if I already felt delighted, satisfied, joyful, proud, confident, et cetera?
Now, what I see a lot and what I've personally experienced is, if we have been using feelings like anxiety, and shame, and dread, and disappointment to run our careers and we stop using those, there may be a short period of time where we do just want to rest because we're exhausted from having used those emotions.
But once we stop using the negative emotions and once we have our rest, then we usually want to do some shit in our career because it's fucking fun and interesting. And because I personally believe that humans like to do shit. We like to be creative. We like to create value. We like to create outcomes. We like to have an impact on the world. I just believe that that's true. And that's what I've seen in myself and many other people.
So what I think is that after we maybe do need to take a little break to recover from our old way of being, we’ll start to be like, “Oh, yeah, I want to do some stuff. That could be cool.” So I think that's just something that I want you all to think about of, “Oh yeah, what if there's a way to do my life and my career that doesn't actually involve me having to motivate myself with feeling like shit? That could be really fun and interesting.”
Second of all, this isn't an all or nothing thing, right? So there may be, if you look at your current career, there may be things you really do want to change and there may be things you already really like. But a lot of us spend a lot of time thinking about the things we want to change and how we're not there yet.
And a lot of us are not spending a lot of time thinking about what we already like, or what's going really well, or the ways in which our current life and career is the one that we used to dream of. This is particularly true for me. When I worked in corporate I dreamed of having my own business and being able to replace my corporate income.
Now I have my own business and it is a little bit different with what the business's revenue is versus what my take home is. But the business revenue is almost three times what I was making when I worked in corporate. So that's pretty fucking cool.
And like I said, still things for me to do over here. But I can cultivate satisfaction in what I've done, even if I want to do more, and in what is working and what feels really good to me now. And the more I cultivate that satisfaction now, first of all, the more I'm going to have the thoughts that create satisfaction as habitual thoughts and then the feeling of satisfaction as a habitual feeling, the more likely it is that I'm going to feel satisfied whenever I get to where I go.
And satisfaction, delight fun, these make much better fuel to get where we want to go. I think so many of us are so afraid to let go of these negative emotion motivators because we think we won't go anywhere without them. But I think it's more like we go so much faster without them.
Now, I want to be clear, this is not about lying to yourself. It's not about saying everything in my career is amazing, if it's actually not and you want to headbutt many parts of your career in the face, right? So I think it's useful to get really clear and do an audit almost of your career. But go at it first looking for what's working, instead of looking for what's not working.
If there are things in your career that are what you want to be there, or are what you used to dream of, even if now you dream of something different, can we notice those and spend some time being satisfied in relation to them? Can we practice being satisfied alongside the desire to create more change?
Because I think a lot of us, again, think it's either or. Either I'm satisfied and then I don't do anything else, or I'm dissatisfied and then I change everything. But life and our careers are so much more nuanced, right?
So where am I satisfied? How can I really feel that, revel in that? Evaluate how did I get that thing that feels so satisfying? What worked? What did I do to make that be part of my career? Celebrate yourself.
And then we can look at where am I not satisfied? What am I dreaming of? Where would I like to have something different? Where would I like to have something that's a little bit more aligned to my vision of what I want career to look like for me?
But again, not waiting until we have all those pieces in place to feel satisfied. Not waiting until we have all those pieces in place to celebrate ourselves and our awesomeness and the really important work we're doing by setting our careers up in a way that feels satisfying to us.
I think so many people, and also this used to be me, feel like if we're not satisfied in our careers we're doing it wrong, or we're behind, or something has to change. It's almost like we're failing a race that everyone else is somehow winning.
But I see behind the curtain now because I'm a career coach and I talk to lots and lots and lots of people about their work. And some people aren't even trying to make their work something that is satisfying. And they're allowed to do that. There's no law that says you have to have a satisfying career, I just personally think it's fun and interesting to do so.
But what I want to offer to you is whatever level of career satisfaction you're at, if you care about that, you're not behind no matter where you are. If you care about that, you're doing great, you're in the right place. And you don't have to try to run faster to catch up with everybody else who may appear to be more satisfied than you.
First of all, a lot of us have no idea how satisfied or dissatisfied anyone else is and especially living in a time where people are putting our most shiny selves on like the Instagram and stuff like that. We spend so much of our time comparing our insides to other people's outsides.
That's a phrase I heard from some other brilliant person a long time ago and I can't remember who it is. But I think it's such a cool concept, so credit to you, wonderful human who said it, and thank you.
And for those of you listening, to circle back we spend so much time comparing our insides to other people's outsides that I think if we're not satisfied with our career, we think we already should be because it seems like everyone else is. But what I want to offer is most people are somewhere in the middle. They're satisfied with some things, they're not with other things.
And I think the people who are the most satisfied are not necessarily the people who have the most picture perfect careers. But I think it's the people who are noticing and reveling in and just relishing and delighting in the ways in which their careers are already satisfying. And then using that as energy to bring their careers into more alignment with what would be satisfying for them.
One other thing I want to make sure to touch on is the idea that career satisfaction is an inside job. So to go back to what I said earlier, a lot of us are trying to get our career into sort of this picture perfect place based on what it looks like on the outside. Based on external factors like where we work, how much money we're making, how many hours we work, how flexible our schedule is, what kind of work we're doing.
And all of those are super important, and if you have preferences I want to help you create those in the real world. Because we each have really specific things we want, and I think creating something externally that matches what you want internally is a beautiful thing. But no specific set of circumstances in your career is going to create satisfaction for you because satisfaction doesn't come from external things.
Satisfaction comes from the way we think about things. It's an internal, inside job. And so many of us are trying to create satisfaction by setting our lives up in a certain way, maybe in a way that matches our actual personal preferences.
Although a lot of times I see people try to create satisfaction by setting their lives and careers up in a way that matches societal expectations, which is definitely not a recipe for delight. And they're looking to these external factors to either create the satisfaction or not. And if they don't feel satisfied, then they often want to start changing these external factors. They're like, “Oh, I thought this would make me happy. But I did it, I still don't feel satisfied. So I'm just going to do something else.”
That's why I think it's super important to know that not only is career satisfaction a habit, and a practice, and something that even if we cultivate, we're probably not going to feel 100% of the time. It's also an inside job and no set of external things is going to create it for us.
Now, that might sound like bad news. But I think it's actually really, really wonderful news. Because it means you can practice satisfaction no matter where you're working. You can practice looking for what is working. You can practice evaluating, how did I create this thing is working? And how do I create more of it? Or how do I create it in this adjacent area? Or rather, how do I create something that is working in this adjacent area where it feels less awesome?
And when we create career satisfaction and celebrate what's working in the career we already have, it doesn't make us less likely to make those other changes. It actually gives us more energy to make those other changes.
When we realize that career satisfaction is an inside job, when we realize that we may have a lot more satisfaction in our current career than we think we do because our brains don't normally look for it and sort of hide it from us and we can go find it and revel in it and delight in it, a few things happen.
One thing that happens is our career feels a lot better and we experience more of those emotions we want right away, even before anything in the outside world changes. But the other thing that happens is, we do start changing other factors that we want to have changed.
And this is a really cool thing because if we realize that satisfaction is an inside job, then we start to solve that inside job ahead of time. But then we do work in the real world to make the career be what we want it to be also in those little circumstance details like what kind of work we're doing, what kind of pay we're getting, et cetera.
When we think that the career is going to give it to us, we change those factors but we're changing those factors to try to get something. And it can be very frustrating because we're like, “Okay, I think maybe if I change this thing,” and then we go to all this effort to change that thing and it doesn't feel good, because we haven't cultivated the satisfaction ahead of time. And then if we change that thing, and then satisfaction doesn't happen on the other side, it can be very hard to stay upbeat.
And in fact, it can feel like really upsetting. And it can wind up with us going into what I've been calling the pit of despair, the fuck it effect where we're like, “Oh, I worked so hard to change this thing. And then the career satisfaction didn't magically arrive. So changing things in my career isn't working, but the career I have isn't working. And fuck it, I'm just going to shut my computer, I just don't care. I'm just going to like hmm.”
And then we wind up staying in this experience of our careers that doesn't feel good to us. But we also don't believe that we can make it feel better or we're like, "Maybe I can make it feel better, but it seems like a lot of work.” And then we wind up staying in these unhappy situations for a really long time and thinking that the situation is the reason we’re unhappy.
So basically, my point here is that I think taking a look at your career and looking at what already feels really satisfying and really celebrating and delighting in that. And this is going to maybe sound silly, but spending time sitting with that emotion of satisfaction and just feeling it and allowing it and enjoying it. And then looking at the things you want to change in your career and letting that emotion of satisfaction be fuel for you to do that.
First of all, it's going to give you so much more resilience and ability to keep changing little things and keep tinkering and tweaking and testing and learning. But second of all, it's going to make all of that also feel much more enjoyable. And it's going to give you, again, so much more resilience for the short term and the long haul of having a career that feels really amazing to you.
All right y'all, that's what I have for you this week. Happy New Year again. I hope you're having a lovely January so far and I will talk to you next week.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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