Fight Or Flight: More Thoughts
11.11.2005 | Chris Bailey | Focused on Career
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post called Fight or Flight about A.G. Lafley’s experience with trying to figure out when to leave a company. In a recent post called How To Know When To Change Jobs, Steven Kempton offers a complementary point of focus:
Quite often a change does help but it can be temporary. They change
jobs and feel happy for a little while and then use the same underlying
excuse to start looking again. However I do think there is one way to
cut out this nonsense. BE CLEAR ON YOUR PURPOSE
He follows with six questions to help us determine if it’s the right time to fly toward greener pastures. They’re particularly good because they take into account that truly soulful work has meaning. And the current challenges we might experience could be formative to our character rather than degenerative.
If you’re thinking that it’s time to leave your job, step back and get tough on yourself. Ask some hard questions. The answers might not always be pretty, but they could actually lead to a more transformative future.
2 Responses to “Fight Or Flight: More Thoughts”
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This is a good point, Chris … it’s easy to think thst challenges are a reason to move along, and hard to remember that challenges are the way we get better. Telling the difference between a job filled with healthy challenges and a job filled with unhealthy insanity is the key. (And wouldn’t life be boring if we walked in every day to a job where everything was always easy?)
Right. And what complicates it further is that something might be considered an “unhealthy insanity” by one person, but a healthy challenge by another. Maybe the organizational culture needs an overhaul: one person may want to work on this as way to expand their experience and skills; another may not have an interest or be equipped to do anything about it.
Another question to ask: is this work soul-sucking or soul-building?