[00:00]

A career is kind of like this giant iceberg. What makes a good career is this huge iceberg. The things on the surface is things we can see. Our title, salary that I just mentioned, but there’s a lot of things underneath the surface that have a huge impact on what or we’re happy at work or not.

[Intro]

Hello, and welcome to The Career Shake Up Podcast. I’m your host, Kristin Szalajko. I’m a certified professional career coach who specializes in career exploration. I believe everyone deserves a meaningful career they love. I know it can be hard to find that career and that’s why I’m here. I’ve developed an easy formula to help you identify the right career path for you. Let’s shake up the way you view your career. I’m going to challenge you to look at careers in a brand-new way. Whether you’re stuck in a job you don’t like or just starting out on your path, my goal is to empower you to take control of your career.

[00:56]

Hello. Welcome back. I hope you’re having a fabulous week. It’s Thursday, so we’re close to the weekend. That’s pretty exciting. Alright, today we are going to talk about the key elements to a great career. There are some specific things that you need to have a good career and so we’re going to talk about those.

You know, one thing to keep in mind before we sort of start into these key elements is that finding the right career is more like a marathon than it is a sprint. This is an important decision, and it affects a huge part of your life and it’s going to take time, it’s going to take thought, and it’s going to take effort. I don’t believe in career quizzes to finding your path. I’m guilty as anybody else. I take them. They’re fun, they’re interesting, but they’re useless. There’s actually been studies that show they really are not helpful. Like personality tests, as fun as they are, they’re not very helpful. The reason is you have to own it.

So, let’s say you came to me as a career coach. We chatted for 20-30 minutes, you told me everything you’re looking for and I said, okay, well it looks like IT is the right place for you and I just sent you off. There’s no way you would walk out of my office going, oh yeah, for sure, IT okay. She says, it’s IT is IT. I’m going for it. You would have to sit, ponder, think about it, dwell with it. Do I believe or do I trust her? Do I think this really is a good fit for me? You would come out and have a lot of questions, right, and a lot of soul searching to do to validate what I’ve told you is right for you or not.

And so that’s one of the reasons that these career quizzes are so unhelpful. That’s why you can’t just Google, what should I do for a career? And find your answer and be done. These things take time. They take thought, they take effort. And a marathon takes a lot of training, right, a lot of work. And so my goal is to just give you all the right things, all the right keys that you need, and then allow you time to work through each step so that you can come out on the other side with a great career. So it’s sort of a slow process just to give you options and you can help ponder and process the things that you’re learning.

My goal is just to give you the tools to help you make informed decisions and have a positive impact on the rest of your life. Your life is going to change. Options are going to come to you you haven’t expected before. And I just want to give you the tools that you can use over and over and over again. So, these key elements are part of that toolkit that I’m going to give you. There are six key elements to a great career.

The way I found these… I promise we’ll dive in. I’m not trying to leave you hanging forever, but I think I mentioned in a prior episode that I’m a paralegal and I work from home now, but at some point, I didn’t and I wanted to, and my company said no.

I felt really lost. If I can’t be a paralegal, what would I do? So, I went on this long journey of reading a ton of books on passion and purpose and doing a lot of Internet research. And honestly, I just really delved in. It was kind of this black hole that I couldn’t pull myself out of.

But upon that, I found this organization called 80,000 Hours. 80,000 hours is roughly the average amount of time you spend in a career. Like 40 years. It’s equivalent of 40 years. And so anyway, these guys, they focus on altruistic jobs. They help people. It’s a nonprofit. They help people find jobs that make an impact, an actual impact on the world. And a part of that is they had a little thing, a little article, or I forget if it was an article. I think it was actually like, kind of a mini email course on what you need for a good career. It was all based on research, and it was so beautiful. I was like, everyone needs to know this.

When I read that, that was the first exposure I’d had to these key elements. I started seeing it everywhere. I started seeing other people validating this particular information. Right? I’d read a book on careers that really had nothing to do with passion, but I’m hearing the same elements come up again and again and again, and so I think they’re just critical, and so that’s why I want to teach them to you.

We’re trying to choose a career. We tend to look at the surface elements, right? We look at like the job title, what’s my salary going to be? Those are kind of the only two things we tend to focus on. But it’s sort of like our career is kind of like this giant iceberg. What makes a good career is this huge iceberg. The things on the surface is things we can see our title, salary that I just mentioned. But there’s a lot of things underneath the surface that have a huge impact on whether we’re happy at work or not.

Say for example, you’re an accountant and you have a good salary. So, on the surface you should be happy, right? Your accountant, you make good money. But…underneath the surface your job is taking 60 hours a week – easy. Tax season comes around, you’re putting in 80 hours weeks. I don’t know if it’s true I’m just making this up…but that’s taking away from your family. Your family is really suffering because of all the hours you’re putting in.

So that’s just an example of like there’s something below the surface that’s really having a greater impact on your happiness than the actual title and salary, right? And so, I want you to look at your career holistically. I want you to be aware that there’s an entire iceberg there of things you need to consider. It’s like a puzzle. And you know, when one piece is missing, it’s not complete.

Or it’s like a recipe, if you will. You need all of these ingredients, and you can leave an ingredient out, and the whole recipe just falls flat, right? And so, you need each key element. You need each part, and some bigger than others, just like a recipe, right? Like, you just need a dash of salt. You don’t need a whole cup worth. That would be terrible if you’re like making a cookie, right? But nonetheless, you still need it. And so that’s what this idea is.

[07:19]

These elements actually come from two major theories. One is the Perma theory, and that was done by Professor Seligman. He wrote a book called Flourish in 2011. And P.E.R.M.A. actually is an acronym that stands for positive emotions, engagement, Positive relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. And what this theory does, it outlines characteristics of flourishing people. I think he went and studied all these people that seemed to have this great, happy, flourishing life and wanted to know what they have. What are the elements of their life that other people also need? A quote from him was:

 “Positive psychology takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the highest, a country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment, meaning and purpose.”

So that’s what this whole theory is about, just really deepening our purpose in life, right? So, it wasn’t necessarily related to a career – but to a life. And so, another one that I pulled some of these key elements from was this Self-Determination Theory of Motivation and Personality. It started in the seventies. It’s not really attributed to one specific person, but it’s all about what makes a person happy again and what does one need to thrive.             

So, while both these theories are related to just life and happiness in general, I’ve taken those and translated them into what does that mean for a career? So, the six things you need for a career are: engagement, skill, good company, making a difference, meeting your basic needs, and fitting with the rest of your life.

So, I’m going to take each week, coming forward, we’re going to break down one of these elements and really talk about what it means. Because on the surface, it’s like, I understand what engagement means, but there’s a lot of mini elements, if you will, within engagement that can make a huge difference.

Like I said, all of this is just like a big puzzle piece. And if one piece is missing…let’s say you have a job that’s engaging, you’re really good at it, you feel like you’re making a difference in the world, the company is pretty okay, and it fits with the rest of your life, except that it doesn’t meet your basic needs. You don’t have enough money to pay the rent. You are stressed out of your mind each month when rent comes due because you don’t know how you’re going to pay it. All of those other elements, as good as they are, don’t seem to matter when you’re missing the one really important one, right?

Or on the contrary, you like your job well enough. You’re really good at it, the company’s okay, you meet your basic needs, you can pay the rent and bills, you even got some extra play money, but it’s not fitting with the rest of your life. It’s taking a lot of hours. And you fill in your personal life suffer because of your job. In addition to that, you just don’t feel like you make a difference at all. And that kind of weighs on you sometimes. You’re like, I don’t know why I’m doing this. What’s the purpose of all this? There’s no drive. There’s no motivation. There because something’s missing.

[10:2]

So, you can see why each of these elements work together; why they’re so important. And you may not love the job that you’re in currently, or maybe you do, but you’re just curious if you could ever do something else. And you may not need a whole 180° change. You may not need to completely change directions. Maybe all you need is a small tweak.

Eric Cuentas, who we will actually be interviewing next week. He is an engineer, and he shares a great example. I’m going to take his story. He didn’t feel like he was necessarily making a difference at his job. His job didn’t feel like it didn’t have a huge impact on the world, right? But he found a way to add this making a difference into his career by focusing on his colleagues.

He was like, you know what? I work with a lot of people. I interact with a lot of people. I want to make a difference for them. So, he started asking people, how can I help you? He became a mentor in this Lean Six Sigma program that they do at work. It’s a fairly popular program, especially in warehousing, if any of you have heard of that. But he became a mentor in that so that he can help others at work. And so that was in his control. All he needed was a small tweak to make him feel like he was making a difference at work. And suddenly his job is far more fulfilling, right?

Maybe that’s all you need. Maybe you don’t need an entirely different job. You just need to figure out how you can tweak one of these key elements. But the truth is, maybe too many are off, and a little tweaking is just not going to fix it. Maybe you do need to completely change, maybe you are in the right field, but you’re just the wrong company. You just need to find the right company.

I’m actually going to talk about that in a future episode when we break down what working for a good company looks like. I’m going to give you some questions you can ask in an interview to spot good versus bad companies. Kind of catch those red flags beforehand.

Now, even with these key elements when they’re all in place, let’s not forget that life is not perfect. And nor is your job going to be. Every job, even if it’s the perfect job for you, has its crappy parts, right? It has its things that are a little bit tedious that we don’t love doing, but we put off to last minute because we just hate it. But for the most part, we love our job, and that’s just how it’s going to be. I don’t want you to fool yourself into thinking, well, it’s not completely perfect. Not every single aspect of this job is wonderful and beautiful, therefore it’s not the right job for me. It’s just not how it works. Right?

I have four children and I love them, but that doesn’t mean that every day is roses, right? I mean, life is just not designed to be that way. It’s not designed to be perfect at all times. We need challenges, we need struggles. That’s how we grow. That’s how we find happiness. Equal and opposite, right? We need a little of the bad to kind of even out and make the good even sweeter.

[13:21]

Another thing I want you to keep in mind as we move forward is that you are not stuck.

Sometimes we just somehow, in our mind, have created this idea that we are so deep in the mud that there’s no way we could get out of it, right? My first professional job, I did not love. I had a fairly verbally abusive boss who was mad and angry all the time, and I was so stressed at work, and really, I was like, throwing up at night. I was so stressed because he was so mean. But I felt stuck.

I just had my first baby, and my office was only 7 minutes from home. I’m in Chicago, and most well-paying jobs in Chicago, you got to go downtown. We were like, an hour commute to downtown by train, right? I’m like, I can’t do that. If I do that, that’s an extra 2 hours to my day. Plus, I can’t come home for lunch and see my baby. And in my mind, I’d created a million and one excuses of why I couldn’t leave this job. And I got paid what I thought was higher than what I deserved. As a brand-new paralegal, this is my entry level job. And so, I just created this image that I just couldn’t leave. There’s no way I’m stuck here. So, no matter how much I hated it, I was stuck.

But then my husband decided he wanted to go back to school and picked a school in Florida. And so all of a sudden, in an instant, because my husband made that decision, all these excuses I had made up for not leaving suddenly didn’t matter. And they weren’t there anymore, and they were all just in my head. I could have gotten out long, long ago. But because you just create this thing in your mind.

And it’s funny when you’re forced to change, suddenly you can find answers and solutions, but you don’t have to be forced. We can convince ourselves we’re stuck. Sometimes another reason we feel like we’re stuck is what they call this sunk cost fallacy. What that means is we put the money in –  now we have to stay. We put the time in to get a degree and I put in all the time and effort and I have student loans or my parents sacrificed a lot for me to get this degree and now I have to be stuck.

Well, the truth is that money, that time, it’s gone. It can’t ever be recovered. So, if you went to school for engineering, now you’re an engineer, but you are miserable – staying in there is not going to get any of that time or money back that you’ve already spent. It’s gone. And so doing something continually, even though it’s no longer beneficial, just because we invest in money in there is silly, really.

We could cut our losses and move on. And as you move jobs, you still have the time and money you spent on engineering, but now you can move on to something you love. It doesn’t mean that you can’t ever get that stuff back. And so don’t feel stuck. At some point, something is serving us and then suddenly it’s not. Imagine like a house, right? You buy your starter home. It’s only got two bedrooms, but it’s perfect for you and a spouse. Then you have a baby that comes along while you’re going to be okay because there’s two of you. But now you have you’re having more kids. Like if you’re crazy like me and you end up with four kids, a two bedroom house is not going to cut it. But it’d be silly to stay in that house. To say, but we slaved and worked so hard to earn up the money to buy this house, so now we have to stay forever.

No! It may have worked at some point in your life, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work forever in your life. And so give yourself permission to move on if it’s time to move on, if it makes sense to move on, move on, right? All the time and the money you spend on whatever currently are doing – it’s gone. And take what you’ve learned from it and move forward, right?

It’s possible. I think for me, that’s freeing to know you are not stuck. You don’t have to be here. There’s plenty of options available to you. All you have to do is find ones that have those key elements and you’re going to be happy.

[17:27]

So, all right, as we move forward, we’re going to just start diving into each of these key elements and what they mean and what they look like in your life so you can start identifying what’s missing and what you need to add in.

So, join me as we go on this journey. I’ve created a little freebie, if you will, a PDF that breaks down each of these key elements. It kind of helps you walk through each of them and find what they mean for you. So, I would encourage you to download that, but then also listen to each podcast in relation to each of those key elements so that you can understand what it really means. And then the two together hopefully should really get you in the right direction for finding a good job.

So, thanks for joining me today. That’s all I have for you and until we meet again next week.

[Outro]

Thank you for joining me today. I hope you found value as you listened. If there’s anyone you feel can use this episode, please go ahead and share it with them. Also, you’re likely listening to this on the go. When you find a quiet moment, could you be so kind as to leave me a review that will help others find me as well? Be sure to come back next week for our next episode. Same time, same place. Have a great week. Bye.