10 Signs You Need a New Job

Self Awareness

12/15/16

Whoever tells you they’ve never cried in the bathroom stall at work is lying. We’ve all been there. Fortunately, you don’t have to stay there forever. Here are some signs that often lead up to that breakdown and signal it may be time to walk away and find a new job: When someone’s phone ring is the same as your alarm clock sound and you irrationally want to break their phone. Ok, so most people aren’t really in love with having to get out of bed in the morning. But your degree of detest for your alarm can tell you a lot about your degree of detest for your job. When our alarm clock goes off because we need to get up for things we actually enjoy (like brunch or vacation or a job we’re excited about). Even though we might not be dancing out of bed, we are typically happy to wake up. If you literally have anxiety at night about the idea of work the next day, that’s a pretty clear sign that it’s time for a new job. When you become the worst version of yourself. A buildup of work-related stress over time can often lead to you lashing out on those around you. You may find yourself acting in ways that are completely out of character, shocking and embarrassing. Don’t continue to disappoint yourself or end up in a damaging situation. Identify this behavior early on and take action to find a job that empowers you to be the you you know. When you really just DGAF. If you feel completely apathetic about your job, you’re likely not doing something you’re passionate about. When we do something we’re passionate about we feel energized and alive. If you just don’t care and you’d rather spend your day doing anything else, it’s time for a change. Take note of what you do while you’re procrastinating from your work work. What we do when we procrastinate is often a good indication of what we’re truly passionate about. When your life feels like a scene from Groundhog Day. It can be incredibly demoralizing when you’re craving more, but you’re stuck doing the same thing over and over again. Sometimes you just grow out of a job. Ensure you’ve learned all there is to be learned and you’ve connected with the folks you want to remain a part of your network while you work to find the next growth opportunity for you. When you’re secretly jealous of the homeless guy on your way to work because he doesn’t have to go to your job. And if you’re jealous of him, you’ll definitely be jealous of your friends who actually enjoy their careers. Don’t hate them. Be them. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by jealousy when you see friends who are fulfilled by their jobs, it should be a kick in the pants to find a career equally meaningful to you. When you feel like you’re on an island. And not the kind with palm trees and mai tais. If you’re feeling completely alone and unsupported by those around you or by your organization, it could be time for a change. While your career path is yours to own, you need the support of others for guidance, personal growth and to achieve your potential. You may be able to actively seek out support, but if you’re feeling deserted you may want to look elsewhere. When your significant other hates your job more than you do. Most people don’t realize that they carry their jobs home with them. When you carry the stress of work home with you, it’s taxing on you and those around you. If you’re constantly checking your email, talking about the things that went wrong at work or complaining about your boss or coworkers, it could be a sign that this job isn’t right for you. Finding balance in our lives and knowing when to turn off work mode is important to both recharge and maintain healthy relationships. Sometimes we can put strategies in place to provide boundaries, and sometimes we need a new position all together. When you feel icky about it. Our values are a key component of who we are as people. When our job forces us to compromise our values, it often leaves us feeling unsettled or frustrated. Maybe you don’t agree with how your company treats its customers or maybe your job forces you to prioritize work over family. If those things conflict with your core values, the emotional and physical strain is sure to surface. When you feel like what you do all day is pointless. Cool, you just skipped happy hour with your friends to stay and crank on a PowerPoint presentation that NO ONE WILL EVER LOOK AT AGAIN. That sucks. Now we’re not all going to be a bunch of Mother Theresa’s, but we all want to feel that how we spend our time 40+ hours per week serves a purpose. We want to feel like our hard work has made an important contribution to someone or something. If you’re feeling like what you do doesn’t matter to anyone, it’s likely not aligned with your personal purpose. When you can feel the stress wrinkles as they form. Botox ain’t cheap my friend. But vanity aside, stress and anxiety caused by your job can have a true impact on your physical health. Poor eating habits, lack of sleep, weakened immune system are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of stress’s impact on the body. If you’re wide awake in bed at night, over-analyzing what your boss will yell at you for tomorrow, or panicking over a potential mistake you made in a spreadsheet, please consider is if it’s worth it. Don’t forget – most of the time people quit bosses, not jobs. Do not underestimate the impact one negative person can have on your perception and your wellbeing. When our clients come to us looking to make a career

Be All of You

Career Discovery

11/28/16

Foram Sheth

I’m happy and I’m sad. I like being with people and I like to be alone. I like risks and I am cautious. Do I sound like a confused teen who doesn’t know who she is? Perhaps. But I think I don’t have to be one thing or the other. I can be both and so can you. We don’t have to be boxed into thinking that we have to be this or that. No. Life isn’t that simple and shit is complicated. People are complicated. I recently read a great book called Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Heath and Heath and they talk about this concept of widening your options. To get away from using the word OR and replace that with AND. This can be applied to work – you’re being presented some options and they say you can go with option A or option B. Well if we reframe the way we think, then we can ask why not both or why not an alternate option – like option C? The same goes with people. You can feel and be multiple things at any given time and that’s okay. Just because you’re a happy person and you like to be with people doesn’t mean you also don’t have days where you don’t care about anything and you want to be alone. That’s not an “off” day – that’s just you being you. People and society like labels. They like perfect words and descriptions of who people are so that they can predict how they’ll act. If I said I was an extrovert, what comes to mind? I enjoy being with people, I like to talk out loud, I like to try new things. Now what if I liked being alone after a long day at work? What if I needed time to process things? Are you going to call me an introvert? You’ve labeled me to fit me into one box because that’s your schema of how things work and who people are. We can’t approach life with labeling people with one descriptor and we also don’t have to label ourselves that way. You have unlimited words to define yourself and the more context you can provide as to who you are and what you like and don’t like, the better people can understand you and not make assumptions. If there is anything you should take away from this, it is not to be limited by the OR options and the OR people of the world. You can be it all. You do not fit into a simple term – you are not introverted or extroverted. You are not type A or type B. You are not a hippie or a cowboy. You can be introverted and extroverted – it’s your preference who to be when. When you label as one or the other, you play into that role and you start seeing things the way you are asked to see it. That’s not you. You are complicated and you are unique and you are you. As Heath and Heath say, widen your options. Because if you don’t, I guarantee you’ll miss an opportunity. You gotta do you. All of you. Want more from Ama La Vida? Sign up for our newsletter 🙂

The Domain Dance

09/02/16

Nicole Wood

Back when I was in college and deciding on my profession, I thought management consulting was a perfect fit. I thought I might enjoy it enough to be a lifer, but even if I didn’t, I thought it would jumpstart my career into whatever profession I may one day want. All I had to do was bust my ass in my 20s. “Who cares?” I thought. I’m young, I don’t have kids or any real responsibility. Might as well put in my hard working hours now. Shortly after becoming a consultant, however, probably while I was sitting alone in some shitty hotel outside of Cincinnati or in bumblefuck Pennsylvania or wherever I was at the time I thought, “this is stupid.” I’m young. I don’t have any kids or any real responsibility. Why am I spending my evenings working alone in this shitty hotel? Why am I not part of a kickball league or playing bar trivia or doing some other activity coupled with drinking as is customary for 20 somethings in Chicago? Why had I been so quick to completely discount all the other aspects of my life besides work? These are valuable years I will never get back, and I’m spending them working and often alone. So I was and still am not ready for the parenthood domain of my life to come into play. But how could I neglect friendship, love, community, adventure? All things incredibly important to me that I was willing to completely set aside until some unknown future date. All critical components of who I am as a person that I indirectly said to myself “these are not a priority right now.” Why was I so okay with being an incomplete version of myself? Why had I even convinced myself that this was the “right” and “responsible” thing to do? I will always have an internal struggle between wanting to be financially responsible (or just to have money in general) and wanting to be a carefree adventurer. I want to travel the Earth and learn all about people, but I also want a fatty 401k and a respectable home. I want to enjoy a nice long breakfast every morning instead of hustling to an office, but I also want some expensive ass boots. There are a million and one events I want to take part in with my friends, but I also want to be a top performer at work and climb the ranks. Life is full of struggles like this, and so compromise will always need to exist. You as a person are always evolving and so emphasis on a certain domain of your life over another is natural, and those shifts must occur based on what is most important to you at that time. But shifting all of your being into one domain is never the answer. Have you ever been in one of those relationships where you completely lose yourself in it or know someone who has? Like that person becomes your world, and you find yourself caring about what they care about more than what you care about. You sacrifice your friendships, you put your work and even your family second to that person. When you look back on that time in your life you realize how blind you were and how unhealthy it was to shit all over the other domains in your life besides “love”. Anyone can identify this as unhealthy behavior, so we need to stop applauding it when the dominant domain is work. Life is about balance. Life is about you being greater than the sum of all your parts. When you are in a great relationship, you are more empowered at work. When you are in a job you love, you are able to provide your best self to your partner. We have created an expectation for ourselves and what we must achieve that makes this balance nearly unattainable. So we need to say fuck it to those expectations. We need to sit back and set our own expectations based on the critical domains in our own life and find a way to sit squarely in the middle of them. We need to be self-aware enough to realize when we are letting one domain cannibalize the others. And we need to be conscious of the fact that there is no “right”. Each person is free to determine the domains they care about and the healthy size of each at any given point in their life. Once this is achieved, the internal struggle will not be so much of a struggle anymore. Instead you will happily give and take time and attention among your chosen domains because you are in control of them, and it is the combination of all of them that makes you you.

Live Outside the Box

08/31/16

Nimisha Trivedi

The fear of change is something we can all relate to. The unknown: What is to come? How can I be sure of this? Is this the right path? These are common thoughts that stem from our fears. “It will all work out”, “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be”, “There’s a reason this is happening.” These are common phrases to ameliorate our fears. As someone who has gone through a significant amount of changes in half a decade, I have reflected on how I cope quite a bit. I realized coping can be summed up with one word: box. Whenever I have a major change approaching, the number one thing I know I’m about to do is check off a box. Now to backtrack a bit, we spend our whole lives in a box concept, physically and metaphorically. We live our lives in a little box that we’ve planned out. We check off a box for our race, our highest level of education, our tax bracket. We make lists with check boxes on them. “College – check.” “Live abroad – check.” “Go skydiving – check.” “Get married – check.” We have grown accustomed to believing that this box is what makes society either accept or reject us. When things change, we think of how that affects our box. A new job – we call this diversifying our resume. “Check.” Time to move – acclimating to a new environment. “Check.” Taking a class – enhancing our skill set. “Check.” Now, the box concept isn’t a bad thing. It is how we have been molded as people as a whole. Whenever we are about to alter the box’s homeostasis, we panic. It’s human nature. In my opinion, however, there are two ways to look at change. Run like hell from it or embrace it. Running is certainly a possibility but change will always find its way towards you. Boxing in emotions and not acknowledging change will only prolong the fear and make it harder to deal with. Embracing change can help you adjust to it. People use the expression “dive in” for good reason. If you dip your feet into a pool, the water will consistently be cool compared to your overall body temperature. If you dive in, your whole body adjusts at the same time and the water won’t feel so cold. I’ve come face to face with some big changes in the past five years or so. I volunteered abroad. I went back for my graduate degree during the recession. I made a cross-country move to a place I’d never even been for a brand new job. I got married. I started my own side business while maintaining a full-time job. I helped my parents downsize their house thus saying goodbye to a home I’d lived in for 15 years. So, how did I cope with all this? It’s been a whirlwind for sure. Here are some tips I’ve picked up along my journey: Surround yourself with people that have made similar leaps of faith for inspiration. Hearing their stories will help you know you’re not the only one with a dream in your heart and a head full of fears. It will also give you someone to admire on the tough days and appreciate on the great days. Find a hobby you can do anywhere and continue to do that. You’ll remember why you love it and enjoy trying it in a new place. Don’t hold onto every memento. I used to scrapbook and keep every card, gift, photo, etc. that my friends gave me. As you move onto each new phase of your life, those memories will still be with you but you won’t look back on those items as often as you might think. Save yourself some time and start to purge now rather than 20 years down the line. Bring your favorite candle with you when you stay somewhere new. This is something one of my close girlfriends has done for years and still does. She says that it brings a consistency to her life and helps her stay calm in a new setting. Start a new bucket list. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how much we’ve actually done and accomplished. Everyone has a Pin board of place they want to visit. Well, what about all the cool places you’ve already been? I like having two boards because it’s like a visual “check” box on my list that makes me feel proud of the things I’ve done. Stay active! It’s so easy to get bogged down on how much we can’t control around us. We can, however, control our minds and our bodies. Exercise sends endorphins or “feel good neurotransmitters” to our brains. We feel more satisfied, in control and thus more level-headed. It doesn’t hurt to burn some calories along the way either! Believe me, change isn’t easy for anyone. But these tips have helped me conquer the fear of change the past few years. Once I realized that my major check boxes (see section 2) were complete, I felt confident to complete any task at hand. Yes, the fear of failing will be there with any endeavor. But we are always our own worst critics. And if things don’t work out, there will always be more opportunities. This is America where an education and a positive attitude can get you anything you want. Don’t box yourself into just one way of living your life. If you can try something new without breaking the bank, then go for it. If you have at least one person to lean on for advice and support, go for it. If you want to do something that doesn’t fit inside your box but will exhilarate you, GO for it. Life is short and I don’t believe in regrets. Each experience adds a colorful piece to my life story. Take a leap of faith. You just might surprise yourself! And always remember to stay positive,

Life is like a Tree

08/28/16

Nicole Wood

Life is like a tree. Everyone starts out on the same path, rising together as one tree trunk. Doing all the “right” things. You go through each grade together. Then high school. Then college. Then get a job. That’s when life starts to branch out. Most people still continue with a similar but different path for some time. All separate branches but growing up toward what society believes to be the sun. What it tells you success looks like. But the longer the tree grows, the further the space between the branches. You realize there is no more normal, and all are free to chart their own path. In fact, you have no choice but to. The trunk is long gone, and there is no right thing to do anymore. But being the first one to branch out from the trunk is terrifying. The rest of the tree does not understand what you’re doing and warns you’re losing your chance at sunlight. Take a different approach to growth, and you will be judged. You will be criticized. You will be faced with attempts to talk you out of it by people who truly believe they are doing you a favor. But don’t accept their ignorance as gospel. Take the feedback courteously. Gently place it in a garbage bag. And throw it the hell out. Your purpose is clear to you and only you. And when they eventually see you living it, they will understand why you dismissed their advice. It most definitely won’t be easy to branch out first or grow sideways when everyone else is growing up. It will be tough. But it will feel amazing. You may not get the most sunlight, but you just may be the one to get the most rain. When you branch out sideways because you crave water over light, you will grow so much quicker. When you discover and answer the path that calls to you, you will grow stronger and faster each day. You will soak up more and more water, and it will only fuel you to keep going. You will be scared, and you may feel lost at times. But your thirst will keep propelling you in the right direction. Guiding you toward what you need to feel satiated. Though you’re in uncharted territory, you already know the way to go. When your heart is thirsty, it doesn’t know the path to warmth. Franky, it doesn’t give a shit. So why stay with the trunk so long? I challenge you to forget the tree. Don’t be a tree. Be a bush. Be a shrub. Be a goddamn pumpkin patch. Don’t wait to do you. Chart your own path much sooner, right from the start. And do it unapologetically. Often by the time life separates into branches and we realize we are free to pursue our own passions, there are so many things that make it much more challenging. Mortgage. Children. Insurance. Retirement. The risk is often so much greater. By the time the branch breaks free from the trunk, it is already so far away from the ground. If you start now, start today, you will undoubtedly reach what fuels your soul. The water is there waiting for the first to yearn for it. The first to be brave enough to grow toward it. Let that be you. Don’t let life be a tree. Don’t spend your days fighting to be the tallest branch only to realize you don’t even like the sun. Have courage. Grow sideways. Get drenched.