A fulfilling career is one that makes you feel satisfied and happy and allows your character or abilities to develop fully. However, a fulfilling career does not happen by accident. It occurs with intentional strategy and career moves.
There are ways to evaluate your current or future career to determine if it is or will be fulfilling for you. In this blog post, I will be sharing the five major keys for a fulfilling career.
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5 Major Keys For A Fulfilling Career
Major Key #1: A Fulfilling Career Involves Meaningful Work
First, one of our primary career needs as people is the desire to make an impact on others. Most of us need to see the difference that we are making in the world.
Research has constantly shown that people often leave high-paying jobs for the work that they find meaningful. This is because meaningful work drives many of us. Making an impact and seeing how you are making a difference in the world is crucial.
It is essential to know what makes you feel like you are contributing to the world. Share on XMajor Key #2: A Fulfilling Career is Engaging
If your current career path does not enable you to formulate a concrete connection between your work and the benefit to people, you will feel unmotivated and disengaged in your work.
Over time, lack of motivation and disengagement will leave you feeling unfulfilled. So how does engagement occur? Being engaged in the work you do occurs when there is a genuine alignment between your interests, skills, values, and your role/organization.
When you are interested and curious about your job, engagement happens.
Additionally, engagement allows you to experience moments of flowing your work.
Flow referes to the instances when you lose track of time while you’re working.
When you’re truly engaged in and enthralled with the work you’re doing, flow sets in. While we don’t experience flow 100% of the time, if you never experienced flow in your career, that might be a sign that you are missing something significant.
Actions to Take.
- When do you get lost in the work you’re doing? Reflect on that question to identify your areas of interest.
Major Key #3: A Fulfilling Career Allows You to Avoid Your Diminishers
First, let’s start by defining diminishers.
Diminishers are those things that lessen our love for the work we do. They decrease the joy that we get from work.
For instance, a diminisher can be the long commute, salary, working hours, the environment, or the impact on the environment. No matter what it is, each of us has a certain thing that makes us appreciate our career less because nothing is perfect.
The key to having a fulfilling career is knowing what your diminishers are and limiting how often they occur. You should do this while actively prioritizing the activities that bring you more happiness at work.
You become unfulfilled in your career when diminishers occur often and are left unchecked; that is why it is important to identify your diminisher.
Actions to Take.
- Reflect on the things that make your work feel a bit less enjoyable.
Major Key #4: A Fulfilling Career Aligns with Your Values
Your values are what you stand for. These are the beliefs that are important to you– beliefs that guide you, your thoughts, actions, and decisions.
You’ll begin to resent your career if you’re missing out on things that are important to you. We all have multiple values that should be aligned with our career and personal lives, this is the reason why you must be clear about your non-negotiable values.
The values that absolutely cannot be violated by your career. Otherwise, you will be unfulfilled.
We spend most of our waking hours at work and it makes zero sense to be miserable for that much time. When you’re spending that much time at work, and you’re working in a role that goes against your values, you’re going to be unfulfilled at work.
Actions to Take.
- Contemplate your values because you will begin to resent your career if it does align with your job’s nature.
- Ensure that most of your company or your organization’s values need to line up with yours to be fulfilled in your career
Major Key #5: A Fulfilling Career Aligns with Your Skills and Interests
It is important to consider both your skills and interests when trying to find a fulfilling career as you could potentially find yourself interested in a specific job, but not be good at it. When that happens, you will be working in a career that does not align with your skills. Over time this can negatively impact your confidence.
Working in a career that aligns with your skills and interests will help you find your “zone of genius”, as author and psychologist Gay Hendricks says.
Hendricks believes that if you are in a job that is not in alignment with your skills, you will always be doing tasks that you are not good at. You will never feel accomplished or good about yourself– and that refers to “the zone of incompetence”.
The goal is to find your “zone of genius” – work that allows you to leverage those interests that lead to a state of flow and skills that you genuinely enjoy using and feel good about.
It is important to acknowledge that a fulfilling career should allow you to leverage your skills and interests.
Actions to Take.
- Take some time to reflect on what skills you enjoy using. it can be challenging for you to comprehend why you are unfulfilled at work if you have not reflected on them yet.
Did any of those resonate with you? If they did, take some time to audit your current job and to see if you are missing one or more of those major keys.
