Finding a Career You Love and Where You Excel

Are you searching for a career that you love and that lights you up inside? I’m going to walk you through how to shift your mindset and look for passion-filled opportunities. This post is all about finding a career you love and where you excel.

When many of us think of our careers, we might have days where we feel little down… Or we feel a little tired and drained. It’s completely normal, but none of us enjoy feeling drained when we should be feeling inspired.

Maybe you wake up contemplating if you want to quit or be sick. You really try to find excuses to do the bare minimum. Why? It’s probably that you’re not excited about your career, and that’s a problem.

How do you actually fix that?

The Excitement Principle

Many of us find conditions that were unhappy with, and we hold on to those which prevent you from finding a career you love. We keep pointing at the reasons we should be unhappy. It could be something in our roles, a bad boss, or a lack of resources.

All of the conditions that surround your unhappiness are things that might be true in your work environment… but they don’t help you to be happier and more excited about your career.

Maya Angelou once said, “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” That’s the shift we need to make.

When we’re shifting our mindset, we aim to be optimistic-that no matter what’s happening it can always be better.

While shifting your attitude, look at your career in two ways. What is wanted and what is unwanted. For every item that is unwanted, you immediately know what you want as a result. Have a bad boss? You want a better one. Hate your mundane projects? You want more diversity.

There are plenty of things that are unwanted in any work environment, and then that translates immediately into things that you want.

The more that you focus on the unwanted, the more drained or the more unhappy that you become with your career. The shift that we have to make is trying to change it into a positive or into a wanted. Then look for those opportunities as you progress to help in finding a career you love.

How It Works

Let’s take an example of what it looks like to focus on the things that you want in your career and how that leads to more excitement.

You might be really into innovation. You might have a project that you’re working on that’s super innovative and the more that you focus on that the more excited you get.

When you start thinking about all the things that make you excited, you begin to notice more of that. So, you’re working on innovative projects, and you’re passionate about innovation. More of those projects will find their way to you.

Reversely, you might have a boss who is very inconsistent. You might focus on the lack of direction or sporadic support. As you focus on those unwanted aspects, you start to feel drained. Then, as you perform your job from a place of “drained”, you make careless mistakes… which make you feel even worse. And the downward cycle continues.

Make the Change

The more that you focus on those wanted aspects, the more that you will start to see opportunities. Whether you decide to stay at your company or not, you’ll be able to clearly define the projects that excite you. The more energy and focus that you put into wanted aspects, the less time that you’re spending on the things that are unwanted.

You’re swinging the pendulum from unwanted to wanted because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. The more airtime that positive and exciting stuff gets, the more of that you’ll start to see more of that.

You have to shift your mindset before you can be excited about your career. You need to feel around for what’s exciting before you can live it.

Originally published at https://benjaminpreston.com