MaXIMIze - Career - Find Your Next Mountain

Wow! I look over my posts from last year on the topic of careers and I don't know how I can top those!

Sort of fits the theme of this post - Find Your Next Mountain.

I think we've all been there (and if you haven't, you will)…that time and space where you feel you've hit the pinnacle of the job you're currently in. For me, that was in the months following my last performance appraisal, when I got the highest rating we can get in our appraisal system - a 1 - out of a scale of 5, with 3 being fully successful. When we did our mid-year reviews a month or so ago, I realized that I had hit a pinnacle and the saying followed soon after that - Find Your Next Mountain.

I spoke with a co-worker in the the elevator this morning - he hasn't got to the summit of his mountain yet. How could I tell? Because his job hasn't settled into a flow yet. Yes, when you hit that Zen flow in your current position, where everything just comes together and feels easy or right, it's time to find your next mountain.

At least, that is one time - one good time - to find your next mountain.

A not-so-good time is when you are going through the opposite - trying to support something you feel you truly cannot support anymore. When the other players are just too frustrating, and management may or may not be waking up to this not being a good thing, and/or it just compromises your value system to the breaking point - and, burn out is setting in.

This is a time to do two things - take a serious sabbatical and find your next mountain.

It's easier to find your next mountain when your job has become flow.

It is much harder when you feel like you are continually fighting the current and get to a point where you wonder if it's anything really worth fighting for anymore.

When you are exhausted from fighting the current in this way, you really need to find a way to pull back and reconnect with what makes you feel alive again. You need to find your passion, your purpose in life again.

Our careers take so much of our lives and are our physical - monetarily - support for our lives, and we need to be fulfilled in them, otherwise we live a half-life instead of a full one.

The best job is the one that doesn't feel like work. It feels like purpose. It feels like focus. It feels like, well, passion. And it gives us bliss.

If our jobs, our careers aren't doing that, it's time to find a new one.

Question to ponder for the week - if you could do any job in the world, what would you do and why?

Until next time, Namaste!