Is your job draining the colour out of you?

Did you return to work this week, are you due back soon? If so, you may be one of these people who had thoughts about their return to work as follows:

1. I was dreading it but it’s just ok now…sort of.
2. I was dreading it and it was worse than I expected…much worse.
3. I was looking forward to it, I missed my work family and boy am I glad to be back doing something I LOVE!

If you fall into the C category of thinking about your job, then chances are you probably don’t need to read any further – congratulations and may 2020 bring you even more fulfilling work happiness.  Mind you, that said, I was once starting a supply teaching contract with an Academy School, where a Head of Department  ‘Welcomed me to the family’ on my first morning there (in my head it sounded like a mafia boss from the films)  needless to say, I did not stay for very long – I remain highly suspicious to this day of any company who calls itself a ‘family’ unless of course, they’re a family business, but even then…well, you get the point.

Anyway, it’s really you I want to talk to, yes you, the A and B people. If you were dreading going back but ‘its ok’ then I am sorry to say that is a form of ‘beige’.

If you are in the B category then it’s the worst ‘beige’ possible. You see beige is a ‘non- colour’, the sort of colour my hairdresser pulls a face at and tells me it’s probably not a great colour on women over 40…yup, I get it now.  Beige kind of just hangs around because it does not know what colour it works best with or how to draw attention to the fact that it could be quite interesting and exciting in the right context, if only it could make up its mind where it needed to be.

If you were thinking along the lines of A or B in terms of your response to your current job, the chances are the colour has faded and it is time for a revamp. I work with clients who want change in their lives, usually with regard to their careers, often they have anxieties around change and what that means for them: new people, new routine, new office/classroom etc. However, change is inevitable isn’t it? Moreover, it is vital that we are to grow as humans. If we feel confined in one job role this can contribute to raised stress and anxiety.

When I was younger, in the 1970s, there used to be jobs for lifers: in my family, there were people who worked for the chemical works on Teesside, for years and years, certainly until they retired. The beauty of this was you always knew where you were and what job you were doing; you could forget about threat of redundancy, you were good for about 30 years if you started in the late 60s or early 70s. Similarly, British Steel was a ‘safe’ job back then but for most people it was just that, a ‘job’.

Ask yourself a question, are you are lifer? Are you likely to stay where you are until you retire?

Many people are scared to leave because they worry about their pension. Pensions are useful of course but are you really staying in your job just because of a pension? In my case, I would have had to work as a full-time teacher in a classroom until I was 68 years old in order to get my pension! That’s a hell of a lot of years feeling miserable in a job just to get a measly pension if indeed I lived that long; some of my hard-working colleagues sadly did not live beyond their pension. I decided that I wanted to live my life NOW! Not just exist in a job where I felt restricted in personal growth and development, there were skills I wanted to develop and master: NLP for a start.  However, the teaching and management job I was in wanted me to do just that, teach and manage. Hardly the fault of my employer, after all, that is what I signed up for in the colourful beginning. Then, as is normal, I changed, the colour faded and I knew that in order to get the personal and professional development I was looking for, I needed to create my own colour; I needed to leave my job in order to change.

Three years on and I have met so many wonderful clients, trainers, entrepreneurs, read some many new philosophies and studied way beyond my initial beliefs,  I can honestly say the colour is consistently replenished – in truth life can be far from beige.

If this is you, then you may need to get in touch, please email us via our contact page or please give me a call anytime, and we will get right back to you.