There comes a time in your career where you experience boredom, lack of motivation, and begin to question if you are in the right job. If this is you, then do not despair.
This feeling could stem from 3 key areas:
- The organisation you work for or the role itself may not be in line with your values. Values are the things you stand for and believe in. As our values are our key motivator, they must align.
- If your values align, you may have outgrown your role. To maintain interest and motivation we need learning and growth.
- In some cases, direction and focus are lacking. When you do not know what you aim for each day it can be a challenge to get out of bed.
Whether there are one, two or three reasons for your current feelings, there is hope for career improvement.
Here are some practical steps you can take away.
Recognise your feelings. Do not fight them, accept them as being valid. All negative emotions are signals. They suggest we need to do something differently, so congratulate yourself for being able to recognise the message.
Reframe the emotion. Your feelings of boredom and lack of motivation can be reframed as a challenge statement such as “I am unfulfilled in my job and something needs to change”. This effectively gives you the clarity to enable you to move forward.
Review the cause. What it is about your current role that makes you feel unfulfilled? Some thoughts to consider are; it’s too easy and I don’t need to think, no-one listens to me, I do the same thing day in day out, no-one values my effort, I don’t know where I’m going with my career, I just don’t like going to work. This will help narrow down the scale of the challenge. There may be an element you can change immediately. For example, if the work is too easy, you could ask for more challenging work.
Reconnect with yourself. Get to know who you are. What are your values and what you stand for? One way to do this is to consider what you would like people to say about how you have lived your life. Write down the words that come to mind and assess how you feel when you apply them to yourself.
Revive your strengths. Throughout our careers, we grow and change, however, our natural abilities or strengths stay with us. They may be dormant at present; however, they can be awoken. There are online tools you can use to identify them. Try this free survey https://www.viacharacter.org/ You can also attempt to do this through self-reflection.
Reach out for support. Whether you engage the help of a professional coach or a colleague it is worth doing. They will view your situation objectively without judgement. In many cases, they provide an extra motivation boost to get things done as you have someone to be accountable to.
These steps will help you to set the foundations ready to uncover the next stage of your career. This might seem daunting. Anything worth doing makes us feel afraid, however, it is good to feel this way. It demonstrates how important it is to you.
The key is to recognise you want to change, that you can make changes and to ignite courage to do something about it.
Main Image by Hatice EROL from Pixabay