Hello Friends,
What an intriguing week! One of my friends gave his permission to share his story with our community. The name has been changed per his request.
We talked about the co-relation of job and happiness in the last post. Life goes on before and after work AS WELL AS during the work hours. A job can be a necessity to earn money to pay bills whereas a career can be work, in the field of your choice or that just happened, for a considerable segment of your life. The career is usually accompanied by personal and professional development.
A job can be your career too!
Andante is happily engaged in a job that allows him to time to think, learn and grow. This is what Gean desires and has it. The job pays enough money to pay his bills – yet it is not enough by his parents’ standards. The parents hired a professional career counselor cum head hunter to find him a well paying job. Andante kept an open mind and explored different opportunities. He used strategic decision making and has decided to stay with his current job/career.
A job can be limiting
Alto is close to changing her career, not only the job. Alto was stuck for some time. She was not able to take any action. . There might be some fears about the financial insecurity, some underlying beliefs about a downgrade in significance and about taking risks, but also great motivation from balancing life and growing his contribution to the community.
Basically, she clarified her “picture” by having straight discussions with her boss and with her husband, about the main concerns related to her (too) high responsibilities- with the boss- and about the potential financial insecurity- with the husband. The boss hasn’t offered any viable solution to easy her burden, and the husband agreed full financial support for at least one year, to stay home and to be free to look around and find a desirable job.
Interesting issue for me was to help both spouses, separatelly, to put themselves on the “same page”: While she saw herself living more in the future, the husband believed she always lives in the past. In fact, he was the one seeing her always in the past: as a supportive husband, I’ve heard him always recalling how “fragile” she was in the past, how difficult for her was to change her mind or to take decisions, and so on.. which I felt it clearly as an anchor of the past which he might put very often around her neck. Funny thing was to discover that he wasn’t able to project her in the future when we’ve tried this simple exercise. He didn’t know anything about the real potential of his wife (which should be her “engine” to move her towards any goal). After this kind of insights for husband, a simple discussion betwen them, aligned them and touched the solution. All the rest were just important details of her action plan.:-)