My friend,
Imagine:
You wake up in the morning, no alarm clock required. As you go about your usual morning routine, you get mentally prepared for your workday. You realize you’re excited to see your colleagues, and to try out some creative new ideas for the project you’re working on.
As you head out your door (or sit down in your home office), you feel energized and excited to start your day. You get to work.
Around noon, your stomach growls. You look at the time, and are surprised to see that it’s lunch time! You’ve been so in-the-flow, working on your project, that you didn’t realize the morning had already flown by.
You stretch and look around. The pictures on the walls and the little trinkets you’ve gathered on your desk make you smile. Your workspace is infused with your personal style, and you love the ergonomic chair that your company had purchased for you.
You leave your cozy workspace to go on a lunch date with your coworker. You and your coworker have several belly laughs over the next half hour, and spend most of the time catching up about your lives outside of work. As you go your separate ways after lunch, your coworker gives you kudos for the solution you proposed last week during a team meeting.
That reminds you to check in with your supervisor about it. Your supervisor thanks you for taking the initiative to reach out to them, and informs you that your solution had worked. They say they can always count on you to figure out a solution to that kind of problem, and they ask if you’d feel comfortable presenting a solution for another problem that popped up this week - but this time, in front of a bigger audience.
This request makes you a bit nervous, and you open up to your supervisor about your worries. Your supervisor kindly offers you additional support, which you happily accept.
After you end the conversation with your supervisor, you check your to-do list and schedule. You get back to work. There’s a couple moments when you have to push through tedious tasks, but for the most part, the time flies by. You take occasional breaks to get a glass of water, stretch, or exchange funny memes with your colleagues.
When it’s time to end your workday, you find yourself stuck in the middle of a particularly challenging task, but you find fun in the challenge. You look forward to unpacking it further tomorrow.
As you prepare dinner in your kitchen, you catch up with a loved one. While your loved one vents and complains about their workday, you find that you mostly have funny, creative, or interesting stories to tell about yours.
“Sounds like your job is going well for you,” your loved one says.
“It is,” you respond, with a smile.
***
What if you didn’t have to imagine the scenario above?
What if you could have that level of camaraderie, engagement, and contentment in real life?
What the scenario depicts is someone who isn’t just a good fit for their job - but their job is also a good fit for them.
There’s three main factors that you must look at to see if a job is a good fit for you:
Yourself
What are your personal strengths, interests, values, and traits?
We all evolve and change here and there over our lifetime, but there’s certain enduring parts of us that make up the core of our personality and way of moving through the world.
For instance, I’m a visual learner and I only stay interested in work that is creative and promotes social good - and that ain’t ever gonna change!
If a job demands that I learn and process new information through listening to someone jabbering away, or it only requires that I follow instructions without coming up with my own ideas, I already know right off the bat that that job won’t cut it for me.
2. Environment
What are the social and physical aspects of the workplace?
Your social and physical environment can either support your well-being or hinder it. And if you’ve stuck with me for a while, you know that this is especially true for empaths, highly sensitive people, and intuitives.
We feel our surroundings - whether that’s the energy of the person we’re talking to or the vibe of our physical space - more intensely than the average person.
Most of us know that this sensitivity can hurt us profoundly, if we’re in a toxic work environment 40 hours a week. But if we’re in a safe, supportive, and physically comfortable environment, our ability to soak up all the yummy benefits of our surroundings can help us to thrive!
3. Tasks
Are your work tasks depleting or energizing, and to what extent do they match with your skillset or natural talents?
In order to figure out whether your job is a good fit for you, it’s important to assess how much time you spend doing tasks that get you “in the flow” vs. tasks that feel like a slog, and tasks that you can do vs. tasks that you want to do.
There’s a difference between being qualified for a job and having a job be emotionally and energetically sustainable for you. The latter is what I focus on with my clients, because no matter how skilled you are in performing a certain job, that won’t matter if you burn out or lose interest in doing it less than a year later!
Finding the kind of work that works for you is definitely possible, but it does take conscious choice and effort. Finding that “good fit” rarely (if ever) happens by chance.
For me, finding work that works for me was only made possible once I owned up to who I am and how I function. I’m a highly sensitive introvert who loves playing with big ideas, wants to feel emotionally and physically safe at work, and works best when I’m creating or learning something new.
What do you need in order to function at your best?
And does your job allow you space to do so?
If you’ve operated under the habit of making yourself a good fit for your job - like so many of us have - your answer is probably “no”.
Forcing yourself into a box so you can make yourself into what you think a current or future employer wants will get you stuck in an unsustainable cycle of burnout or inauthentic living.
Now, don’t get me wrong: there are times when we do need to suck it up and do a work task we’d rather not do. But if you find yourself sucking it up most of the time or actively hiding what comes most naturally to you on a daily basis, chances are good that your job is seriously misaligned with who you are.
Honoring your authentic talents, passions, and idiosyncrasies is the key to your success.
That’s why I created Get Aligned At Work - so you can thrive (professionally, spiritually, and emotionally) by finding work that honors who you are at your core.
No more forcing yourself into boxes.
No more hiding who you are.
Stop going against your nature in favor of “better” ways of being that you think all employers want.
If you see yourself as the kind of human who’s committed to spreading love and compassion in the world, you must first start with yourself.
You deserve it,
Diana
P.S. If you’re ready to start your journey towards a work-life that supports and celebrates your true self, you might be interested in Get Aligned at Work, a 7-week curriculum + coaching program created by and for heart-centered introverts who want to thrive at work by being themselves.