Choice should not distract career aspirations Career frustration is not fun for anybody and seems to be all too common. Yet so many procrastinate while finding ways through it, weighing up the alternatives, considering them from all angles, picking them up and turning them inside out and upside down. These alternatives provide so many choices that the essential energy needed to move beyond career frustration towards career fulfillment is all but spent on the decision-making. With choice comes burden, the burden of concern about ‘is this the best solution’, ‘will this get me what I want’ along with many other worries choice can produce.
possibility of jumping into those cars kept invading my determination to break through the pain point, and my focus on reaching my goal became encumbered with the choice of ‘how best to’. When frustration exists at work, there will be a multitude of ways to move through the frustration, with choice existing in resignation, in re-designing responsibilities, in forging new communication lines across departments, along with many others. Your ultimate outcome for is to dissipate the workplace frustration and remove its effect from your daily life. Yet, the more options we have and the more exploration we invest in those options, the more the options mask or worse still take us away from our ultimate outcome we hope to gain and into the realm of detail.
Isn’t choice supposed to be a great thing to have in all aspects of life? The answer is a resounding yes, if you are one who is completely capable to efficiently sift through the myriad of options and make sense of it all, or if you have time on your hands to ponder and create. Given that many of us do not fit those criteria, choice can become our greatest enemy, stealing our focus while leading us down a rabbit hole of detail. Here’s a great ‘life’ example of that I’ve personally experienced. I was recently trekking across the desert for 5 days from Abu Dhabi to Dubai in the Women’s Heritage Walk. The organization of the walk was second to none with backups at every stage of the walk. We were constantly supported by a support team of 4WD vehicles that you could choose to call for a one-hour respite for the feet, or a drive direct to camp if you felt you couldn’t make it. Here’s my issue with that. When there’s no choice, you find the way to keep going, for the very fact that there is no choice; you simply have to keep focused on getting to the goal you set out for. For me however, the essential support cars became a distraction to my focus of the experience of walking to camp. The
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Take Farzaneh for example! She needed to remove herself from the negative impact her work situation was having on her home life, yet was aware of the positive impact her monthly salary was bringing. Rather than focusing on what life will feel like once out of the frustration, she intensely sought out others who have made the break, listening to every detail of their
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