The Career Happiness Formula

This week on the Higher Purpose Podcast, I had the opportunity to speak with Chief Career Happiness Officer Julie Bauke.Julie is the author of Stop Peeing On Your Shoes: Avoiding the 7 Mistakes that Screw Up Your Job Search, and the owner of The Bauke Group, where she offers career and transitional coaching.You can listen to the full interview here, but I want to explore one of the ideas we talked about in a little more detail today.In the interview, Julie said something that kind of stopped me in my tracks.“You’re a grown-up now, the career fairy isn’t coming.”The context for this rather fabulous statement is a common refrain heard from her many clients “I don’t know what I want to BE when I grow up. It should be pointed out that Julie’s clients tend to be senior level executives, and her response, that the career fairy isn’t coming, speaks to something very, very important.We have to be the driving force of action in our own lives. If we’re unhappy, it is our responsibility to DO something about that.It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that happiness, fulfillment, purpose or success are just around the corner, if we work a little harder or achieve a little more we’ll suddenly get there, and things will become clear.That isn’t the case. We need to decide what we want in our lives and go after it. That isn’t the same thing as knowing what you want the next ten, fifteen or twenty years are going to look like – none of us can tell the future, but it does mean understanding what it is that you want in your life, and making changes that bring you closer and closer towards more and more of it.Like most truisms, that is much easier said than done, but Julie has a few questions that can guide that decision-making process, and help you get over the paralysis of not really knowing what you want.Here are those three questions:

• What do I want more of in my life?
• What do I want less of in my life?
• What do I never want in my life again?

How might that look? If you are unhappy in your job, or with the work that occupies most of your time right now and knowing that you want to make a change, you could ask yourself these questions and find out:I want more time to spend with my friends and family.I want less of a commute – just driving back and forth every day.I never want to work in an environment where I’m going to be belittled for my suggestions again.This gives you some important information. You’re coming to a point in your life where you are prioritizing personal time, and a long commute gets in the way of that. It might mean that you’re ready to move jobs to something closer to home or cut back the amount you’re working. Knowing that you’re unwilling to ever have that kind of toxic environment again means that you’re also prioritizing your own self-esteem and insisting that you be valued for what you contribute.This means that you have the information about the overall direction you want your life to take that you can make a smart, informed decision about what to do next. A far cry from feeling lost and paralyzed, isn’t it?Now, our conversation focused mainly on happiness and purpose at work – but those questions are transferable to any major decision you need to make in your life – especially those around making changes or going in new directions.In the interview we also talked about:

• The formula for Career Happiness – and how to look through the lens of the 4 variables to help identify what you need to change if you aren’t happy.
• The correlation between happiness and purpose – and how that can and should be different for every person.
• How saying no to projects, jobs or opportunities that don’t serve us, or that we can’t serve to our highest ability is a mark of career maturity.

I hope you listen to the full interview, and I hope you join us in the Higher Purpose Community this Thursday, where we’re going to be talking about these three questions, and how we can apply them to the decisions we make about work and the direction we want to go in.I'd like to hear from you! Are you happy in your work?Do you have all of the necessary elements as Julie describes them? Is there one you need to work on or change? If you want to explore these ideas an more - you can take the Purpose at Work 5-Day email challenge to help find more fulfillment and happiness in what you do every day!