Follow your passion and get what you want

Choose a job you love and you will never work a day in your life. “Confucius”

It’s everyone’s dream to have a “dream” job. A job that’s enjoyable, fulfilling and fruitful. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get up in the morning and actually look forward to going to the office? An office where colleagues are cheerful and friendly, where the boss is kind and understanding, where the job is so enjoyable that the chores seem more like fun than work.

Unfortunately most people’s jobs are not dreamy but nightmarish. The environment is unpleasant, the boss is nasty, the colleagues are mean and the work itself is unsatisfactory. This kind of situation causes stress, which in turn causes physical and mental problems. No wonder so many people take medication.

Medication though, doesn’t solve the problem. It only helps temporarily. If you have a headache you take an aspirin and you feel better. If you’re anxious or have stress-related panic attacks, all you need to do is take a tranquilizer and you feel calmer. For a while only. If you don’t cure the root of the problem, you can be sure that once you stop taking the medicine you’ll be back to square one. Non only that, but you might have side effects from the medicine and now you need to take other medication to treat the side effects of the previous medication.

The cure is to leave the stressful and unfulfilling job which is causing you a lot of anxiety. But in this day and age, with so much unemployment and so few jobs, who will have the courage to leave one’s job, no matter how dreadful it is? Here you need to ask yourself: what is more important, money or your mental well-being? If you have a family, kids to put through college, a mortgage to pay off or whatever other financial obligation, then use your common sense and stay in the job. If, on the other hand, you have a bit of money saved up and can afford to leave your stressful job, then by all means do so. Be sure though, to have a plan B. You might be without a salary for a long time.

Once you are rid of the cause of your stress, you can start to think clearly and calmly. What do you like to do? What talent do you have? What makes you happy? Be careful though. Often the thing that makes you happy can make you miserable once it turns into a job. If you like to write, for example, and love posting on your blog, writing about whatever comes to your mind, you might think that a writing career would suit you. Not necessarily. It’s one thing writing once in a while, whenever you feel like, and it’s another thing when you have to write with deadlines hanging over you and on assigned topics. It’s no fun anymore. It’s simple pressure.

If you really can’t figure out what career you should embark on, then go to one of those “career-change” seminars, or workshops on “changing jobs” or “change your life”, and so on. There are so many to choose from, both online and off. Find a good motivator, coach or speaker and learn from them.