Finding a Career You Can Be Happy In If you don’t love what you do to some extent, you will be miserable in your work for a lifetime. For example, say Joe Shmoe hates sales. He wouldn’t do well in an insurance career in Colorado. Insurance careers all require some element of sales, even if Joe decided to pursue a secretarial position at the front desk. Most of that job description includes talking to a lot of new people and converting every individual into a potential customer or client. Joe might not be able to find happiness in an insurance career in Colorado. What should he do though? It can be very difficult to find a career that truly makes him happy.
What Makes You Happy? There is so much doubt and uncertainty so as to make the decision nearly impossible to make. For that reason, you should learn to focus on just one simple concept to figure out if you could be happy in a career you are thinking about. If you have not done so already, discover what it is that makes you happy. That said, you likely already know what makes you happy, but doubt its applicability to the real world. Don’t worry about how the thing that makes you happy applies to a job setting. Identify instead the things that have made you the happiest throughout your life. Look for projects, topics of discussion, or hobbies that stir up your imagination. Do you dream of changing the world by helping people? Do you have to know how everything works? Do you just like building relationships with new people?
Or do you love all of these things equally? It doesn’t matter what makes you happy, just think back to the moments that have brought you the most joy and write down those experiences.
What Sparks Your Excitement? Once you’ve identified these experiences, look for the underlying element within each experience to help you find out what it was that sparked your imagination. Is it the fame of changing the world that gets you excited or is it the smile you see on other people’s faces. Is it a yearning for control that pushes you to learn how everything works? Do you love hearing the stories of new people or do you just need to be talking to someone all the time? In this way, not only do you discover what it is that makes you happy, but you also learn what it is about those activities that make you happy. These are the underlying characteristics that, if found in a career, could make a job completely doable for you, even if it was in an insurance career in Colorado. The best thing is that those characteristics can be found in a whole host of careers. The world finally opens up to you an incredible realm of possibilities.
Identify Your Options Understanding what sparks your excitement gives you power. That power helps you to identify options that could work for you and eliminate possibilities that would make you absolutely miserable. From there you can begin looking into a career that does something you believe in. Working for a cause that you can get behind will help you get out of bed with a smile every morning. Combine that motivation with the knowledge that the type of work will make you happy and you have found yourself a dream career. The secret is to first find out what it is that makes you tick with glee, and then apply that to a business that feel comfortable supporting. It is quite possible to find happiness in your career. It just takes a bit of self-exploration to make that possible. Photo Credit: mobil'homme, ARACELOTA, Eric Esquivel via Photo Pin cc