Nine Indicators of Career Contentment
ningcontentLet’s begin with contentment. It’s defined as a peaceful state of mind, and it’s peaceful because it can exist independently of any good or bad circumstances. This explains why you can be content even if you’re not happy or entirely satisfied. You do this by avoiding either-or reasoning and learning to recognize the agreeable middle ground. A contented mind enhances your ability to think clearly, make better choices, and tolerate things that are normally upsetting. Contentment leads to resiliency.
Now, imagine this same peaceful state of mind on the job. The strength derived from a contented mind increases your effectiveness to perform and also your ability to endure frustrating job dissatisfactions such as a bad boss, crummy working conditions, a difficult coworker, and less-than-ideal benefits. Contentment is not conditional or dependent upon anything except you. You control this state of mind. Career contentment is a liberating and empowering state of mind that is completely within an employee’s ability to achieve and control.
What can you do with career contentment?
With the clarity, strength, and independence derived from a contented mind, you can do whatever your talents and interests enable you to do, and this involves wanting to fulfill your callings and purpose. In fact, fulfilling your purpose is more important to you than fulfilling the employer’s purpose. It’s the pursuit of contentment that explains why some people stay in jobs that are not entirely satisfying, and why others may leave wonderful jobs for something seemingly less attractive.
So essentially, career contentment is a resource that enables you to have and enjoy the career you desire, with or without job satisfaction.
Now that you know what it is, here are nine indicators of career contentment:
- Not only are you doing what you love, you actually demonstrate just how much you love what you do. You’re content to be doing your thing despite not having everything you want right now.
- You accept that nothing and no one is absolutely perfect, but you can always recognize an agreeable middle ground. You build on this vantage point to become your very best in the situation.
- Rather than expect employers to help make you satisfied, you choose to rely on your own career contentment, because doing so affords you the independence to take your contentment elsewhere when you believe it will help you fulfill your callings and purposes.
- You’ve learned how to more thoroughly enjoy your work and get more out of it in any situation. You can also discern more easily when it’s time to leave because your decision is not confused by transient satisfactions, but whether your work is meaningful.
- You’ve learned how easy it is to need, want, and complain, but you recognize that doing so contributes to a mindset that is confused, dependent, and rarely satisfied. Instead, you gain strength by imagining already having, and this inspires the contented emotions that cause you to do what you need to do to get what you desire.
- You realize that no matter how great the job satisfactions are, they have to be earned and wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for something the employer owned and offered to attract, motivate, and keep you from leaving.
- You’ve learned that employer motives are necessarily linked with the business rather than you personally. Keep your motives linked with your career and contentment. If they want you, they’ll just have to offer more satisfactions such as a promotion or better pay. Even then, your career is not dependent upon them but whether you’re engaged in work that is sufficiently meaningful.
- You understand how to open doors with a grateful and contented mind. Rather than working for what you think you deserve, you see the value of working in gratitude for what you don’t deserve. Working in gratitude for what you don’t deserve opens the door to receive more than you deserve.
- Even in really bad situations where it is not feasible to leave right away, you realize your best option, rather than complaining or creating problems for yourself, is to reason and recognize some form of contentment. This justifies your staying until you can finally manage to leave.
You can live without job satisfaction, but you would be miserable without contentment to fall back on when things don’t go your way at work. Your career contentment is more valuable to you than any job satisfactions, which can be reduced, taken away, stolen, downsized, restructured, or affected by management decisions, poor supervision, long hours, the economy, natural disasters, war, or terrorism. Despite these things, when you have career contentment you still have the ability to reason and recognize your contentment, and leverage it to hang in there, make due, bounce back, and see the silver lining.
Article by Jeff Garton, founder of Career Contentment, Inc. (www.careercontentment.com), an executive search and career-coaching firm, and host of “Career Contentment Radio,” broadcast on VoiceAmerica.com Business Radio Network. His new book is Career Contentment: Don’t Settle for Anything Less (ASTD Press, 2008).
