It’s important to balance your time and energy spent on different tasks in your day-to-day activities. Your approach to how you spend your days can help reinforce your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. One of the areas that is important not to overlook in this regard, is your
choice of career.
When you think about it, so much of your time is spent dedicated to what you do for work. The average American is expected to spend 90,000 hours — that’s around a third of a lifetime — at work. Now consider the effect of spending all that time engaged in tasks that don’t nourish you spiritually, or fail to align with your values, beliefs, and talents. It amounts to a significant disservice to yourself, not to mention to your community and the world at large.
So how do you go about rectifying this? What considerations, actions, and strategies should you employ when seeking out a job that aligns with your energy? We’re going to take a closer look at some points of focus that can get you on the path for a career that best serves your holistic wellbeing, and utilizes the full power of your talents.
Environmental Aspects
Your surroundings can have a significant impact on your energy. Your thoughts and emotions can be stimulated or dampened by the people, objects, and atmosphere that you inhabit. Therefore it’s important to carefully consider what type of environmental aspects at work empower you to nourish your energy and give the best of yourself in return.
Take stock of all the environmental elements that have positive and negative effects on your wellbeing, productivity, emotions, and even your creativity. Does being indoors, without natural light, leave you feeling depressed and uninspired? Perhaps, circumspectly, the buzz and mayhem of city offices energizes and drives you? Alongside the basic environments, consider also that your needs and moods will fluctuate occasionally, so look into job locations and structures that may allow you to carefully control and adjust your surroundings as your energy changes dictate.
Identifying potential career paths or industries that match your environmental preferences is just the start, though. You also need to demonstrate to the gatekeepers of those environments that your energies align best with their approach. Adjust your applications to lean into how your experiences resonate well with jobs in those targeted environments. Remember that
your resume should eschew any unnecessary detail — instead use this tool to highlight your skills that best match the challenges and requirements for working within the surroundings, teams, and communities that these careers present. You can improve your chances of engaging with a job that connects with your energies if you take care to illustrate how and why there are mutual benefits to be had from your presence and talents.
Cultural Elements
An important aspect of discovering jobs that align with your energy is understanding what drives the businesses you may wish to work for. Yes, on the surface they may appear to have the environmental or philosophical elements that you believe will mesh well with your priorities. However, these things can be irrelevant if the culture of the business or the industry introduces elements that are toxic to your sensibilities, beliefs, or values.
Particularly in the last decade or so, businesses themselves have made efforts to put their values front and center in their marketing. As such, there will often be details about what is important to them on their websites and social media channels. It can be wise to look into what their efforts in terms of environmental, social, and economic sustainability in both the local community and on a global level are. This kind of research can give you insights into whether there are compatible priorities, values, and energy between you and the business.
However, perhaps the most effective way of better understanding the culture of the business is through its employees. If possible, visit or reach out to them via email to ask about whether the public announcements about values extend to how it operates on a day-to-day basis and how it treats its employees. Is there a culture of undue pressure that
can cause long-term stress that can, in turn, lead to physical illness and emotional turbulence? Online tools such as Glassdoor can also give you insights as to whether employees feel as though the businesses they work for offer the kind of supportive, encouraging, empowering energy that you deserve.
Personal Growth
This is probably the toughest aspect of finding a job that aligns with your energy. You need to be able to gain a keen sense of yourself, the state of your inner energy, and understand what kind of job will contribute most effectively to
your personal growth. This starts with being honest with yourself not just about what kind of labor you want to engage with, but what is most important to you in your life.
Shake off the facade that you might put on to interact with people in your normal work life, and gain an understanding of the true being that lies beneath. Who do you find there? Is it someone that feels a pull toward helping others? It may be the case that
you should explore the range of opportunities social work can offer. You may find that your energy is best directed toward helping others cope with trauma, or most appropriately applied to assisting students to overcome the destructive effects of cyberbullying in schools.
It’s all about paying close attention. When you gain ideas for career areas you’d like to explore, make connections with people in those fields. Spend time with them talking about how they’ve developed as people, and where possible reach out and get a sense of their own energy. Do their values, their strength, their positivity reflect the directions you are keen to grow toward? When you combine research with intuition, you can start to understand what these potential careers can do for you now and in the future.
Conclusion
When you spend so much of your life working, you must approach that time in ways that positively align with your energy. Exploring the environmental and cultural elements of careers can give you insights into how they can affect your wellbeing. Be sure to examine the potential for your personal growth, so that you can engage fully, safe in the knowledge that there will be immense benefits to you, the business, and the wider community.