‘You will find happiness when you are on the right path’ Kathryn Ryan
I have been searching for jobs recently after 5 months of travel and need to remind myself of what I originally wrote down a few months ago! ‘Jobs are like buses ultimately, there is always another one coming’. Yes because after 5 years of working in London, I decide to pursue a Hong Kong adventure, and it really feels like starting from scratch again.
Years ago, when I first got going in the job hunt I felt like I should say yes to everything (including working for boilers, chillers and pumps company doing marketing – god help me?!) in theory it is good to say yes to more things at the beginning of your career then less and more specific as you get older.
However….. it pays to clock in with the little thing called your gut when making decisions about accepting offers. I will tell you my case in example; I had been applying for jobs 4 months when I just started out, things hadn’t moved on the job front. I could literally hear the crickets in my bank account. Something had to change. I started to get panicky after Christmas, interview after interview in London (or greater London should I say!) for an interview. When I got offered this role right away in the interview my gut reaction was a big fat no…however then I proceeded to reasoned with myself and said I had to think about it. After deliberating and encouraged by my mum saying I should take it, I made a decision that would really affect my happiness for the next 3 months – saying YES.
And so continued a rather terrible 3-month period, I was in the wrong environment I knew right away. Why had I acceptable, this job was awful – researching other boiler and chiller companies, writing tweets, looking at god awful leaflets. It took an hour there and back to get to work. One day I cracked up and felt to ill to go in. After a call with my uncle he said don’t do it anymore if your not enjoying it? It was simple as that I wrote an email whislt in bed handing in my notice.
Had I not said yes, perhaps I would have struggled on to find a job.. perhaps I would have got a great opportunity straight after you could argue. It was difficult to tell, but what wasn’t was the fact I was miserable and not producing results.
If you have to go through it in a methodical way, you could make a checklist on whether the opportunity is really checklist for whether it is right for you.
- Write down your dream job before in a bit of paper/online. Check in again when you receive the offer – will it help you get there?
- Location – how long are you willing to travel for your dream role, for me this is a big decider.
- Pay – are you happy to work for this figure for the next year? There is no point going into it feeling unpaid from the get go without some other reward whether it be experience, title etc.
- 5 years time – what will the picture look like if I did or didn’t stay there? It is leading you to the right path or down the wrong one. Better not to get involved if it isn’t I say.
My feeling is that if it isn’t touching most of the above, or at least 3 it most likely isn’t the right opportunity for you. It needs to on some level sing to you internally and excite you! I think gut feeling rules all that feeling defies any kind of written logic sometimes and I do think there is an undiscovered science behind it.
Annabel May Lamb 