Monday, March 22, 2010

Lost heart with your current job? Don’t rush to escape

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I‘ve read recently that as many as 60% of workers intend to leave their jobs this year. Assuming that there’s some economic upturn to enable it, that’s going to be one heck of a lot of people circling the job market. At least the recruiters will be happy!

It’s no wonder things are this way. In my client work I’m hearing some real horror stories of how people are being managed at the moment. And as you’ll recall from my last post, research is only affirming that people’s satisfaction with work is on the skids.

So I can quite understand why you’re burning the midnight oil blogging, revamping your LinkedIn profile, getting onto Brazen Careerist, getting your CV out there, or all of the above. It’s soul-destroying to feel overworked on the one hand, undervalued on the other. It’d be great to land a brilliant new gig so that you could give the middle finger to the bosses that are treating you so badly.

But is a quick exit the most you-loving strategy?

Pain of any kind is distressing. Our natural reaction is to escape it. If we have a headache we take aspirin; if we burn ourselves, we pull away from the flame. Emotional pain is particularly insidious. We try to fix it as best we can. Sometimes we medicate ourselves with food, alcohol or drugs. Or by taking action that feels like it puts us back in control. If a job consistently makes us feel bad, the default remedy is to quit.

The danger with escaping, however, is that it doesn’t always help you deal with the real cause of your work upset. And you can end up carrying that with you, unconsciously of course, into your next scenario, where the chances are you’ll reinvent it in one way or another.

Lost heart with your current job? Don’t rush to escape

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